Cell phone used linked to thyroid cancer

According to ScienceDaily, The Yale School of Public Health conducted a new study recently in which they found that the radiation from cell phones and a specific gene mutation showed a higher rate for thyroid cancer.

These researchers observed 900 different people in the state of Connecticut and discovered that people were significantly more likely to develop thyroid cancer when they had a specific gene mutation within the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP’s).

This study showed that people with this specific gene mutation were twice as likely to develop cancer of the thyroid gland than those without the mutation.

The researchers were studying over 176 different genes and they noticed that there were 10 particular SNP’s that contributed to this elevated risk when correlated with cell phone use.

The Yale School of Medicine Doctor Yawei Zhang M.D. PhD reports that rates of thyroid cancer have been increasing steadily in the United States and across different parts of the world recently.

According to the American Cancer Society, there have been close to 53,000 new cases of thyroid gland cancer which resulted in over 2,180 recent deaths. Unfortunately, thyroid cancer is more commonly diagnosed in women than in men and is found at typically younger ages.

Doctor Zhang noted that the newly reported cases of cancer in their study was relying on the data that they found in a study from 2010 and 2011, when cell phones were first emerging into the mainstream market. Consumers began using them more often and this is when the increase in the cases was particularly noted.

The theory is that if cell phone use increases risks of thyroid cancer in these gene mutations, then it was likely marked by the increase in cell phone use after new generations for the consumer.