Personal radio use and risk of cancers among police officers in Great Britain: Results from the airwave health monitoring study

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.