Staring at screens all days can hurt your eyes; cell phone use still not linked to brain cancer. Just saying.

The recent media coverage suggesting a link between cell phone use and brain cancer is so far a bit histrionic and less than nuanced.

So far, numerous studies have (happily) failed to demonstrate a link between cell phone use and brain cancer.  The recent media coverage involves an unpublished interval report on a long and unfinished study on such risk. 

Long story short, to suggest that this report proves that cell phone use can cause people to get brain cancer would assume:

• risk of brain cancer due to cell phone exposure in rats equates to risk in humans (the study is using mice as test animals)
• female brains are protected from cell phone exposure (no cancers occurred in the female rats)
• controls are cured of cancer (the control population had lower rates of cancer than the experimentals)

This does not invalidate this ongoing study; it simply points out that the study is unfinished, the interim report unpublished and it contains a number of findings raising reasonable concerns of its scientific validity to date.  Vox and NYT did a good job of critiquing this study and its media coverage.

On the other hand, it does seem likely that staring at screens all day can make your eyes feel itchy, dry and uncomfortable. (Which makes it harder to read the screen...)  Jane Brody covers some studies on this well, and also offers some useful solutions.