Brain Tumors And Mobile Phone Use: A Systematic Review

ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to evaluate the association between brain tumor risk and mobilephone use,and then use meta-analysis method to analyze the case-control studies on associationbetween brain tumor and mobile phone use,so as to publicize the crowd health education andthe prevention of brain tumor.MethodsThe key words were as follows: mobile phone, cellular phone, handheld cellular telephone,cordless phone, brain tumor, brain cancer, intracranial tumour, case-control study, systematicreview, meta-analysis.The electronic databases including EBSCO, medline, ScienceDirect,Web of Science,EMBASE,Cochrance Library,WanFang Data, CNKI, manual retrieval andretrospective retrieval were searched from on January1,2000to on December31,2011tocollect the case-control studies on association between brain tumor and use of mobile phone,and then relative information were pooled with RevMan5.1software.ResultsThe total of168articles were collected from the retrieval databases. A total of13case-control studies were included. The results of meta-analysis were as follows: there was anno increase brain tumor risk was observed with regular use of mobile phone, OR=0.85(95%CI=0.78～0.93); a somewhat increased brain tumor risk was found for long-term(morethan ten years) mobile phone, OR=1.11(95%CI=1.01～1.22); risk of brain tumor was notincreased in relation to ipsilateral phone use, OR=0.95(95%CI=0.83～1.10);there weresuggestions of an increased risk of brain tumor for ipsilateral exposures in ten years ormore,OR=1.32(95%CI=1.14～1.54);the brain tumor risk was not increased in relation tocontralateral mobile phone use, OR=0.75(95%CI=0.67～0.84); a somewhat increased braintumor risk was found for long-term contralateral mobile phone use, OR=0.91(95%CI=0.66～1.24); the results were observed in subgroup analyses by different time level (less than fiveyears, five to nine years and ten years or more), the odds ratio and95%confidence intervalswere OR=0.86(95%CI=0.82～0.90), OR=0.94(95%CI=0.88～0.99) and OR=1.11(95%CI=1.01～1.22). ConclusionAccording to the current findings, there is an no increase in risk of brain tumor wasobserved with regular use of mobile phone. There were suggestions of an increased risk of braintumor with long-term heavy(more than ten years) use of mobile phone. Based on subgroupanalyses, there have a potential dose response association between brain tumor risk and mobilephone use.Sensitivity analysis show the study is reliable,funnel plot display symmetry.Howeverresearch conclusion can be misrepresented by confounding factors, such as selective biases,misclassifications and meta-analysis itself has a certain limitation. And then biology mechanismno simple conclusions can be drawn. So far, There is not enough evidence to prove that the useof mobile phones is an independent risk factor for brain tumor development.