I've got a PhD position!

[Lilandra]

Yayz!

*Mental note: Cut back on cell phone use.

I haven't posted frequently here lately because I had a lot of other things on my mind. One of which was securing a PhD-position somewhere. And now that worked out! So because people here are interested in science, I thought I'd celebrate here.

I'm going to do research on the health effects of electromagnetic fields. More specifically, I'm going to research whether electromagnetic fields cause an increase in mortality, cancer or neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson. There has already been some research on this, latest a large international effort. Problem with these is that the studies first sought out people that had cancer and subsequently asked them about there mobile phone use (amongst other things). Than they analyzed whether people with cancer were more likely to use a mobile phone for longer periods of time. This is called a case-control study. Problem with those studies is that you need to ask people to remember their (mobile) phone use for a period of 10 years back or more. This makes the results hard to interpret, because if you find that people with cancer had a higher phone use, this might just mean that people who have cancer tend to overestimate their phone use and people who do not have cancer tend to underestimate it. This is called reporting bias.

I'm going to be involved in what is called a cohort study. Here, we first select a group of people, who we ask about their phone use, electric appliances etc, anything that causes electromagnetic fields. Subsequently we start following them for a period of time (8 years to start with). During that time we keep monitoring their use of mobile phones etc and monitor whether they get cancer or other diseases, or die. We can then analyse the effect of electromagnetic fields on the occurrence of diseases, without having to fear for reporting bias. The design is called a prospective cohort study, because we get a group of people and follow them in time.

Meanwhile, we are also going to make use of some already finished cohort studies. We cannot ask these people about mobile phones anymore, but what we can do is determine whether they lived near power lines or base stations for mobile phones. We will then again determine the effect of the electromagnetic fields from these sources on outcomes like diseases or death. This design is called a retrospective or historical cohort, because we again have a group of people, only now we make the connection between the exposure and the disease historically.

So in about 4 years time, I'll be able to tell you all about electromagnetic fields and their health effects.