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Maternal cell phone use does not impact child development

Mobile phone use in the first trimester of pregnancy is not likely to cause adverse effects on a child’s neurodevelopment, and may even have a positive impact, according to findings recently published in BMC Public Health.

“[Cell phone use] has been shown to be also a relatively effective tool of public health promotion, especially in developing countries,” Eleni Papadopoulou, of the department of environmental exposures and epidemiology at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, and colleagues wrote. “However, the other side of the coin is that is important to investigate if there are any health effects related to exposure to electromagnetic fields during critical developmental periods, such as the intrauterine life and early childhood.”

Researchers studied a cohort of 45,389 mother-child pairs in Norway identified within an existing study. Papadopoulou and colleagues looked for associations between maternal phone use during mother’s first trimester and the child’s communication; gross and fine motor skills between 3 and 5 years of age; and the child’s language skills at 3 years. They used a logistic regression model to calculate the associations.

Researchers found no link between maternal cell phone use and low communication skills and also found that children of cell phone users had lower risk for low motor skills score at 3 years, compared with the offspring of nonusers, but this association was not found at 5 years.

In addition, the offspring of cell phone users had 17% (OR = 0.83; 95% CI, 0.77-0.89) lower adjusted risk for low sentence complexity at 3 years, compared with children of nonusers. Specifically, this risk was lower by 13% among low cell phone users (defined as a few times a week), 22% among medium cell phone users (defined as a daily) and 29% among high cell phone users (defined as more than an hour per day).

“The concern for harm to the fetus caused by radio frequency electromagnetic fields, such as those emitted by mobile phones, is mainly driven by reports from experimental animal studies with inconsistent results,” Papdopoulou said in a press release. “Even though this is an observational study, our findings do not support the hypothesis of adverse effects on child’s language, communication and motor skills due to the use of mobile phone during pregnancy.”

“Our investigation revealed for the first time that maternal mobile phone use may actually have a positive impact,” Jan Alexander, MD, PhD, division of health data and digitalization, Norwegian Institute of Public Health and study co-author, said in the release. “Although we adjusted for important sociodemographic characteristics as well as maternal personality and psychological factors, we think this protective effect is more likely to be explained by factors not measured in this study having an impact on the mobile phone use and child’s neurodevelopment, rather than the maternal mobile phone use in itself.” – by Janel Miller