You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

PostScript
Letters
Author’s response: Re ‘Mobile phone use and brain tumours in the CERENAT case–control study’
Free
  1. Gaëlle Coureau1,2,3,
  2. Karen Leffondre2,
  3. Anne Gruber1,
  4. Ghislaine Bouvier1,2,
  5. Isabelle Baldi1,2,4
  1. 1 Laboratoire Santé Travail Environnement, Univ Bordeaux, ISPED, Bordeaux, France
  2. 2 INSERM, ISPED, Centre INSERM U897-Epidémiologie-Biostatistique, Bordeaux, France
  3. 3 Service d'information médicale, CHU de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
  4. 4 Service de Médecine du Travail, CHU de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
  1. Correspondence to Dr Gaëlle Coureau, Université de Bordeaux, ISPED, Laboratoire Santé Travail Environnement, 146 rue Léo Saignat, Bordeaux Cedex 33076, France; gaelle.coureau{at}isped.u-bordeaux2.fr

https://doi.org/10.1136/oemed-2014-102649

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    We thank Dr Hardell for his comment1 on our article concerning analyses regarding head position of mobile phone use.2

    In our analysis on ipsilateral use, we included cases who used their mobile phone on the same side as the tumour or on both sides of the head, cases who were not regular users (the reference category) and all their matched controls. In our analysis on contralateral use, we used cases who used their mobile phone on the opposite side as the tumour, cases who were not regular users (the reference category), and all their matched controls. The reference category was thus made by the same participants in the two separate analyses. These two separate analyses are thus not really ‘stratified’ analyses since the two subsamples are not disjoint.

    We chose this strategy because it seemed to us more natural and appropriate to keep matched sets to compare cases to their controls rather than to artificially assign a ‘tumour side’ to the controls as in Interphone3 and Hardell et al’s studies,4 ,5 which leads to the exclusion of a large number of participants.

    However, as requested by Dr Hardell, table 1 presents results of the laterality analysis using Interphone’s method,3 for the main indicator (cumulative duration of use). As with our method, the results give higher OR for ipsilateral use (OR=4.21, 95% CI 0.70 to 25.52 for gliomas) compared with contralateral use (OR=1.61, 95% CI 0.36 to 7.14), without significant association. Moreover, as with our method, the two estimates of the ‘stratified’ OR are not grouped around the ‘total’ estimated OR for meningiomas. Such a result was also observed in a recent publication by Hardell et al 5 (in table 4). All these results suggest higher ORs for heavy ipsilateral use than for heavy contralateral use, however, they are not all statistically significant. Furthermore, when using cases only as in Inskip et al’s6 study, we found a significant association between the side of phone use and the side of the tumour for glioma (OR=2.40, 95% CI 1.002 to 5.73) but not for meningiomas (OR=0.77, 95% CI 0.26 to 2.22).

    View this table:
    Table 1

    Adjusted conditional logistic regression by side of use of mobile phone using two methods

    References

    1. ↵
      1. Hardell L,
      2. Carlberg M
      . Re: Mobile phone use and brain tumours in the CERENAT case–control study. Occup Environ Med 2015;72:79.
      OpenUrlFREE Full Text
    2. ↵
      1. Coureau G,
      2. Bouvier G,
      3. Lebailly P,
      4. et al
      . Mobile phone use and brain tumours in the CERENAT case-control study. Occup Environ Med 2014;71:514–22.
      OpenUrlAbstract/FREE Full Text
    3. ↵
      Interphone. Brain tumour risk in relation to mobile telephone use: results of the INTERPHONE international case-control study. Int J Epidemiol 2010;39:675–94.
      OpenUrlAbstract/FREE Full Text
    4. ↵
      1. Hardell L,
      2. Carlberg M,
      3. Mild KH
      . Pooled analysis of two case-control studies on use of cellular and cordless telephones and the risk for malignant brain tumours diagnosed in 1997–2003. Int Arch Occup Environ Health 2006;79:630–9.
      OpenUrlCrossRefPubMedWeb of Science
    5. ↵
      1. Carlberg M,
      2. Soderqvist F,
      3. Hansson Mild K,
      4. et al
      . Meningioma patients diagnosed 2007–2009 and the association with use of mobile and cordless phones: a case–control study. Environ Health 2013;12:60.
      OpenUrlCrossRefPubMed
    6. ↵
      1. Inskip PD,
      2. Tarone RE,
      3. Hatch EE,
      4. et al
      . Cellular-telephone use and brain tumors. N Engl J Med 2001;344:79–86.
      OpenUrlCrossRefPubMedWeb of Science

    Footnotes

    • Funding The study was supported by grants from the Fondation de France, the Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire de l’Environnement et du Travail, the Association pour la Recherche contre le Cancer, the Ligue contre le Cancer, the Institut National de la Santé Et de la Recherche Médicale—ATC Environnement et Santé.

    • Competing interests None.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Ethics approval CCTIRS, CNIL.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

    Linked Articles