The study is the first to look at the health effects of large mobile phone base stations in Great Britain as a whole.
Use of mobile phones has increased markedly in recent years and questions have been raised about possible health effects, including brain and other cancers, especially after prolonged use.
Surveys given to local families have shown that many are concerned with the potential risks of living near mobile phone base stations.
For this study, researchers from Imperial College London looked at almost 7,000 children and explored whether there was any correlation between a mother living near a mobile phone base station during her pregnancy and that child's risk of developing cancer.
The researchers identified 1,397 British children aged 0-4 years, who were registered with leukaemia or a tumour in the brain or central nervous system between 1999 and 2001. They then compared how close the children lived to a mobile phone base station, with the same data on children selected as controls. For each child with cancer, four healthy children who shared the same gender and birth date were chosen at random to act as controls.
The researchers analysed the distance between the birth address and the nearest mobile phone base station, the total power output for base stations within 700m of the birth address, and the power density for base stations within 1400m of the birth address.
They used this information to compare estimates of the mothers' radio frequency exposures from mobile phone base stations over nine months of pregnancy.
The patterns that they identified revealed that the children with cancer are no more likely to have a birth address near a base station than those who do not have cancer. The estimated radio frequency exposures to mobile phone base stations were similar for the mothers of children with cancer and the children acting as controls.
The researchers point out that there are a number of aspects of childhood cancer and exposure to mobile phone base stations that this study was not able to investigate. They would like to analyse whether there is any association between children's own exposure to mobile phone base stations and their risk of developing cancer - for today's study, complete data were only available on the children's birth addresses and not the addresses where they might subsequently have moved to. Also, the mothers' and children's details were identified from national registers and the researchers did not have individual contact with them.
This study was funded by the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research (MTHR) Programme.
