MOBI-Kids: assessing childhood and adolescent exposure to communication technologies and risk of brain tumours
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Rapidly increasing mobile phone use in young people has generated concern about possible health effects of exposure to radiofrequency (RF) fields. Aims: MOBI-Kids, a multinational case-control project, studies potential effects of childhood and adolescent exposure to electromagnetic fields from mobile communications technology on brain tumour risk. Methods: Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and Taiwan follow a common protocol, and aim to recruit about 2,000 brain tumour cases and 4,000 controls aged 10 to 24 years. Controls are hospital-based to reduce potential selection bias related to low participation among population-based controls. Detailed information is collected on potential risk factors, including: mobile phone use; residential, occupational, and medical history; exposure to environmental agents; and parental occupations and maternal exposures in utero and early childhood. To increase the validity of mobile phone exposure estimates and to characterise possible recall errors to be accounted for in the main analyses, self-reported phone use is compared to operator records and to a smartphone application recording use. Developing indices of exposure to RF and extremely low frequency fields from mobile phones and environmental and occupational sources is underway. Biological samples are collected to contribute to future international consortia to study the genetics in the aetiology of this rare disease. Results: By the end of 2012, 357 brain tumour cases and 583 controls had been interviewed. Approximately 83% and 60% of identified cases and controls, respectively, agreed to participate. The average age was 18.8 years and 57% were male. 85% of controls reported making, on average, one voice call per week for at least three months. Conclusions: Though setting up MOBI-Kids has been logistically challenging, preliminary results indicate it is a feasible and relevant study for this age group, particularly when considering the high reported mobile phone use.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".