A Report on Non-Ionizing Radiation

thyroid cancer: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

February 10, 2021

“Associations Between Artificial Light at Night and Risk for Thyroid Cancer: A Large U.S. Cohort Study,” Cancer, February 8, 2021. “We found that higher [light at night] levels were associated with higher thyroid cancer incidence in middle-aged to older adults in the U.S.”

December 7, 2020
February 17, 2020

Thyroid cancer among women is skyrocketing all over the world. Incidence is growing faster than for any other cancer. This has been going on for a long time, and the reasons why remain elusive.

The prevailing view is that there’s been an “epidemic of diagnosis” —that is, overdiagnosis— particularly following a screening program. The tumors have always been there, the argument goes, but new and better detection tools (ultrasound, for example) have made it easier to spot small ones, many of which would likely never present a real threat. In any case, thyroid cancer is not one of the bad ones; 98-99 percent of those diagnosed survive at least five years, the highest for all cancers. Watchful waiting is often the best prescription.

The only recognized cause for thyroid cancer is ionizing radiation.

January 21, 2020

Last January, a team led by Yawei Zhang of the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven published an epidemiological study on the possible link between thyroid cancer and cell phones. Though some “suggestive” associations were seen among long-term users, none was statistically significant. Still, the results “warrant further investigation,” they advised.

Zhang did follow up, and what she found could well change the way people think about cell phone cancer risks.

She discovered that some people have an innate susceptibility to thyroid cancer when exposed to cell phone radiation. These individuals have small variations in their DNA which affect the functioning of seven different genes.

All seven genes regulate DNA repair.

December 20, 2019

“Changes in Trends in Thyroid Cancer Incidence in the United States, 1992 to 2016,” Journal of the American Medical Association, December 24-31, 2019.

“Between 2009 and 2016, after 3 decades of rapid increase, the incidence of thyroid cancer incidence in the United States reached a plateau and possibly started to decline.”

November 13, 2018

“Cell Phone Use and Risk of Thyroid Cancer: A Population-Based Case-Control Study in Connecticut,” Annals of Epidemiology, posted online October 29, 2018.

“A suggestive increased risk associated with long-term and frequent uses were observed for thyroid microcarcinomas, but not larger tumors (>10mm).”

August 18, 2016

“Increasing Incidence of Thyroid Cancer in the Nordic Countries with Main Focus on Swedish Data,” BMC Cancer, July 7, 2016.

New from Lennart Hardell’s group in Sweden. “With the emergence of the smartphones in the mid and late 2000s, the internal antenna location started to shift from the top of the phone to the bottom of the phone.” This would entail greater RF exposure of the thyroid gland than earlier phones. (Open access) … In a report issued on August 18, IARC maintains that, “the growing epidemic of thyroid cancer reported in recent decades in several high-income countries is largely due to overdiagnosis.” Read the IARC press release here. We asked Hardell whether the IARC analysis changed his outlook on the possible role played by smart phones. “No,” he replied.

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