Cellphones Won't Give Your Kid Brain Cancer: Study

Go ahead and get the family plan, because cell phones don’t increase the risk of brain tumors in kids or adolescents—the groups that should theoretically be most vulnerable—according to a new study. The European study, which involved nearly 1,000 participants, was prompted by fears that kids' developing nervous system could be harmed by cellphone emissions, the Wall Street Journal explains.

But the study concluded that “a large and immediate risk of cellphones causing brain tumors in children can be excluded,” according to its lead author. Public health data bears out that finding. Over the past 20 years, there’s been no increase in brain tumors in children in the US and parts of Europe, despite an explosion in cellphone use among them. But the Journal does note that most of the children studied had only been cellphone users for about four years and spent minimal time making voice calls (texting was more common by far), limiting factors that mean "we should still keep an eye" on the relationship between children's health and cellphones, says the study's lead author. (More cellphones stories.)