Personal radio use and risk of cancers among police officers in Great Britain: results from the airwave health monitoring study
Author(s)
Di Gravio, Chiara
Elliott, Paul
Muller, David C
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) from mobile phones and other wireless devices has been classified as possibly carcinogenic to humans. With data from 48,457 police officers and staff enrolled in the Airwave Health Monitoring Study, we investigated associations between personal radio use and the risk of developing cancer using Cox proportional hazard regressions. Personal radio use and duration of use were derived by combining objective data on call duration provided by the Home Office and participants' self-reported data via gradient boosting methods. Across a median follow-up time of 11 years, there were 1502 incident cancer cases of which 146 were cancers of the head, neck and central nervous system (CNS). There was no association between personal radio use, all cancers (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.96, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.79, 1.15) and head, neck, and CNS cancers (HR = 0.74, 95% CI: 0.39, 1.38). Doubling minutes of call duration via personal radio use was not associated with increased hazard of developing all cancers (HR = 1.00, 95% CI: 0.96, 1.04) or head, neck and CNS cancers (HR = 1.09, 95% CI: 0.97, 1.22). Results were similar when considering exposure to RF-EMF via mobile phone use as well as when restricting the analyses to police officers only.
Date Issued
2026-05-01
Date Acceptance
2025-11-07
Citation
International Journal of Cancer, 2026, 158 (9)
ISSN
0020-7136
Publisher
Wiley
Journal / Book Title
International Journal of Cancer
Volume
158
Issue
9
Copyright Statement
© 2025 The Author(s). International Journal of Cancer published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of UICC. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/41251127
Subjects
BRAIN-TUMOR RISK
cancer
epidemiology
EXPOSURE
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
MOBILE PHONE USE
occupational health
Oncology
radio-frequency exposure
Science & Technology
SIGNALS
TETRA
Publication Status
Published
Coverage Spatial
United States
Article Number
ijc.70255
Date Publish Online
2025-11-18