Sprague Dawley ratFLICKR, JEAN-ETIENNE MINH-DUY POIRRIERPartial results from a large-scale, peer-reviewed study conducted by scientists at the US National Toxicology Program (NTP) on the effects of cell phone-frequency radiation on rats and mice were released yesterday (May 26) on the preprint server bioRxiv. The NTP team found a 2.2 percent to 3.3 percent higher incidence of malignant gliomas in the brains and schwannomas in the hearts of male rats exposed to the radiation. But reviewers of the study and other scientists raised a number of important caveats.
“This is a controlled study and seems to have a solid study design,” Jill Barnholtz-Sloan of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email to The Scientist. However, “there is not a clear dose response relationship from these data,” Barnholtz-Sloan said. “I also question the statistical power that they had to see these very small differences in incidence based on their sample size.”
NTP researchers exposed Sprague Dawley rats to 900 Megahertz GSM or CDMA radiofrequency radiation for nine hours a day throughout their lives, beginning in utero, at doses of 1.5, 3, or 6 Watts per kilogram (W/kg). (The US Federal Communications Commission limit for cellphone exposure in humans is 1.6 W/kg.) Each group ...
