The radio radiation like the kind emitted by cellular phones can damage DNA, at least under laboratory conditions, a group of European researchers announced Monday.
Over a 24 hour period, cells exposed to such radiation in patterns of five minutes on, ten minutes off had about double the frequency of DNA damage of a control group.
That would be a LOT of cell phone use, 8 hours a day to be exact. Even the most hardcore cell users I know only use their cell about 90 minutes a day. But still…
And “there was remaining damage for future generation of cells,” project leader Franz Adlkofer was quoted by the Reuters news service as saying. That means broken DNA strands could be passed down the line into mutated cells which could become cancerous.
The research also found that older cells were more likely to show a higher increase in DNA breaks.