Mar 23, 2008
Cellular Phone Use and Risk of Benign and Malignant Parotid Gland Tumors-A Nationwide Case-Control Study
Siegal Sadetzki, Angela Chetrit, Avital Jarus-Hakak, Elisabeth Cardis, Yonit Deutch, Shay Duvdevani, Ahuva Zultan, Ilya Novikov, Laurence Freedman and Michael Wolf, in American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 167, Issue 4, pp. 457–467, February 2008
The objective of this Israeli Interphone type study was to assess the association between cellular phone use and development of parotid gland tumors (PGTs). The study included 402 benign and 58 malignant incident cases of PGTs diagnosed in Israel at age 18 years or more, in 2001-2003, and 1, 266 population individually matched controls. For the entire group, no increased risk of PGTs was observed for ever having been a regular cellular phone user (odds ratio = 0.87; p = 0.3) or for any other measure of exposure investigated. However, analysis restricted to regular users or to conditions that may yield higher levels of exposure (e.g., heavy use in rural areas) showed consistently elevated risks. For ipsilateral use, the odds ratios in the highest category of cumulative number of calls and call time without use of hands-free devices were 1.58 (95% confidence interval: 1.11, 2.24) and 1.49 (95% confidence interval: 1.05, 2.13), respectively, while the risk for contralateral use was not significantly different from 1. A positive dose-response trend was found for these measurements. Thus the authors conclude that the results suggest an association between cellular phone use and PGTs.
