COSMOS: Cohort Study of mobile phone use and health

Data-sharing agreement from NHS England Data Uses Register. Evidence status: source reported.

Organisation: IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON
Published: 2026-09-15
Source reference: DARS-NIC-370843-R6V8T-v8.2
Jurisdiction: England
Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0, subject to NHS England terms and exclusions

Register reference: DARS-NIC-370843-R6V8T-v8.2
Applicant type: Academic
Data controllers: IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON
Agreement period: 2026-09-15 to 2029-09-14
For commercial purposes (as marked in the register): No
Release files listed by NHS England: 0

Data approved

Cancer Registration Data
Civil Registrations of Death
Demographics
Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS)
Hospital Episode Statistics Accident and Emergency (HES A and E)
Hospital Episode Statistics Admitted Patient Care (HES APC)
Hospital Episode Statistics Critical Care (HES Critical Care)
Hospital Episode Statistics Outpatients (HES OP)
MRIS - Cause of Death Report
MRIS - Cohort Event Notification Report
MRIS - Flagging Current Status Report
MRIS - List Cleaning Report

Objective, as published

The Data will be used for the purpose of: COSMOS: Cohort Study of mobile phone use and health COSMOS is a longitudinal research study of adult mobile phone users across Europe. The UK arm of the COSMOS study (“UK COSMOS study”) is run by Imperial College London (ICL). The COSMOS International Research Consortium was established to use specific scientific expertise of each partner in different areas of health research and environmental exposure science. The COSMOS International Research Consortium comprises the following partners: • Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, UK • Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, Danish Cancer Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark • Institute of Environmental Medicine (IMM), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden • Tampere School of Public Health, University of Tampere, Finland • Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS), University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands • Section of Environment and Radiation, International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Lyon, France Each partner institution in the consortium are sole Controllers for the data they collect, apply for, and hold within their countries. The decisions and processes for acquiring and holding these Data in the UK are solely the responsibility of Imperial College London; other partner institutions do not share this responsibility for UK Data. Decisions about join…

Expected benefits, as published

The outputs of the COSMOS research project are expected to benefit health protection and promotion as follows: 1. Safety of mobile phones: The primary objective of the COSMOS study is to ascertain whether there is any link between long-term use of mobile phones and the long-term health of users. Where such a link is identified, it would be relevant and important to mobile phone users, health professionals, and the mobile phone industry to understand in what circumstances risks might be increased. This could help to identify specific ways (e.g. technological and/or behavioural) to reduce radiofrequency exposure levels. Alternatively, a finding of no demonstrable effect would be reassuring to the mobile phone user community and would place any current and future concerns about possible heal…

Benefits reported by the applicant

Findings from 264,574 COSMOS participants suggest that the cumulative amount of mobile phone use is not associated with the risk of developing glioma, meningioma, or acoustic neuroma as per “Feychting et al (2024) Mobile phone use and brain tumour risk - COSMOS, a prospective cohort study. Environ Int. 185:108552 Further findings and updates are expected to be published in the following years. As it is integral to the design of a long-term cohort study, such as COSMOS, to start with a ‘healthy’ population. Imperial College London have to wait for sufficient cases of incident disease to accrue in the cohort before they can conduct health analyses that are sufficiently statistically powered. It is crucial that analyses are sufficiently statistically powered, to ensure that this produces rel…

This is the applicant's own account; OpenHDI has not verified it.

Source: https://digital.nhs.uk/services/data-access-request-service-dars/data-uses-register. Captured 2026-11-05.

Limitations: Data-sharing agreement as published in NHS England's Data Uses Register. An agreement permits access; actual data releases are listed separately. Expected and yielded benefits are as reported by the applicant and have not been independently verified. Long text fields can be cut off in NHS England's spreadsheet export at Excel's 32,767-character cell limit.