Technocrat

Another Cellphone Radiation Study

zogger
Wed Feb 13 19:18:44 -0800 2008
Health+and+Medicine
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Finnish researchers have expanded on earlier in vitro skin cell studies and this time used human volunteers who were exposed to a computer controlled GSM phone at 900 MHz on an area on their arms, then a biopsy taken. The control was a similar area on their other arm with no exposure, and again, a biopsy of the area was taken. The results they obtained show alterations to some of the skin cell proteins on the exposed side, very similar to their earlier studies. They say that this indicates more human testing should be undertaken.

You can read the abstract here: "Mobile phone radiation might alter protein expression in human skin". The full provisional article is linked there in PDF, open access

Another Cellphone Radiation Study
Harry Tuttle
Thu Feb 14 02:19:05 -0800 2008
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At first glance, this looks like extremely poor research.

It is not 'blinded', and the description of the methodology does not give us sufficient information on how the volunteers arms were handled to tbe able to determine if the experiment is not susceptible to confounding factors.

The volunteers should not know whether or not their arms were irradiated, and neither should the researchers evaluating the results.

If the arm being irradiated had equipment strapped to it, and the other arm remained free, then differences in protein expression could be due to causes as simple as:

(i) extended prssure on the skin (a period of 1 hour is mentioned)

(ii) local difference in temperature of the sking between the arm irradiated and the arm not irradiated. Strapping something to the arm will tend to warm it up!

(iii) If the device were actually mechanically strapped to the arm, differences in blood flow between the strapped and unstrapped arms can casue physiological differences

(iv) if the two skin areas are differently illuminated, that can cause differences in protein expression: the skin darkens in response to UV exposure,as we all know.

The paper, as published, gives no clear method by which possible confounding factors were eliminated.

Tarco
Another Cellphone Radiation Study
Mathinker
Thu Feb 14 06:32:32 -0800 2008
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Actually what really jumped out for me was:

> The number of differentially expressed protein spots in both studies
> is below the number of expected false positives. However, as we have
> demonstrated experimentally [6] and discussed previously [11] it is
> likely that some of the proteins will be indeed, real positives.

Can someone explain this to me?
Another Cellphone Radiation Study
Harry Tuttle
Thu Feb 14 07:18:30 -0800 2008
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A clear example of muddy thinking on the part of the researchers.  I'm assuming you know perfectly well what the words mean, but fail to understand how anyone who claims to be a scientist can write such tosh. I fail to understand it as well.

The amazing thing is, someone is actually paying for this 'research'.

Tarco
Another Cellphone Radiation Study
haeger
Thu Feb 14 06:40:57 -0800 2008
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A (distant) friend of mine did some paid research for a large cellphone company so the findings were never released. The guy is a doctor specializing in brain"-someting" that I'm not really clear over and the research had to do about how brain-cells reacted to cellphone radiation.

As I said the studies were never released to the public but I have _never_ seen that guy answer his phone without a hands-free after that.

It doesn't mean anything, I know, but if he's doing it then I think I will too. I haven't asked about it and I know he can't tell even if I ask, but he did research it, and after the study he changed his behavior. Perhaps he found out nothing but then decided that he'd rather be safe than sorry, I don't know.

Another Cellphone Radiation Study
Harry Tuttle
Thu Feb 14 10:03:49 -0800 2008
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I can recommend Ben Goldacre's blog and associated forums if you are interested in use and abuse of statistics in pseudo-scientific research.  Ben is a practising MD who also writes a column for the British newspaper, 'The Guardian'.

His blog is here:

www.badscience.net/

Tarco
 

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