When girls go out in dresses and skirts and don’t take a purse with them they more than likely put their cell phone in their bra. With putting our phones in an area other than a pocket or a purse are we somehow exposing ourselves to the risk of breast cancer?       

             According to The American Cancer Society cell phones do not cause cancerous tumors to form within the body. Cell phones give off radiofrequency (RF) waves, this is what has raised issues about cell phone safety. Phones work by sending and receiving signals from nearby cell towers using RF waves, which is a form of electromagnetic energy between FM radio waves and microwaves. RF waves are a form of non-ionizing radiation which means they don’t have enough energy to cause cancer by directly damaging human DNA. At high levels, RF waves are able to heat up body tissue however; the RF waves found in cell phones are not that high.  RF waves come from the antenna in cell phones, which is where the waves are strongest, when speaking on the phone the antenna is usually close to the head and when this happens the person using the phone is greatly exposed to RF energy, the body tissue closest to the phone is where more energy is absorbed. There are several factors linked to the amount of RF energy exposure which includes: the amount of time spent on the phone, using the speaker function or not, distance from the nearest cell tower, the amount of cell phone traffic in the area, and the model of the phone being used.

            There are two ways in which researches have studied to determine if cell phones might cause cancer. The first way is with lab studies in which they expose animals to something like RF energy to see if it may cause tumors or health problems. This method produces results that are not always clear and researches wonder if the study applies to humans as well.  The second way is with looking at cancer rates in different groups of people. This study compares the cancer rate in a group exposed to something like cell phone use and a group that is not exposed to it. However, this study is hard to interpret as well since there may be other factors affecting the results. Since both ways are hard to tell, researchers look at both.

            Studies have looked at possible links between cell phone use and tumors, with a focus on the brain. Many studies were case-controlled with people who had brain tumors compared to people without in terms of past cell phone use. In this study, patients with brain tumors did not have more cell phone use than those without, there was no “dose-response relationship”, the risk of brain tumors to be higher with more cell phone use (this would be expected if cell phone usage did cause brain tumors), and most of the study did not show that brain tumors occur on the side of the head where people hold their cell phones. However, a few studies did find a possible link, a research group in Sweden found that tumors on the side of the brain where the cell phone is held, tumors were formed over 10 years but due to no other research with the same results there is no way to tell how they found these results.