Papadopoulou E, et al. - This study assessed the impact of maternal cell phone use in pregnancy on child’s language, communication and motor skills at 3 and 5 years. At three years, the risk of low language and motor skills was found to be decreased in association with prenatal cell phone use, which might be explained by enhanced maternal-child interaction among cell phone users. There was no evidence that prenatal cell phone use has adverse neurodevelopmental impacts.

Methods

• Researchers performed a prospective study including 45,389 mother-child pairs, participants of the MoBa, recruited at mid-pregnancy from 1999 to 2008.
• Using questionnaires, they assessed the maternal frequency of cell phone use in early pregnancy and child language, communication and motor skills at 3 and 5 years.
• They also used logistic regression to estimate the links.

Results

• Findings demonstrated that no cell phone use in early pregnancy was reported by 9.8% of women, while 39%, 46.9% and 4.3% of the women were categorized as low, medium and high cell phone users.
• Researchers observed that children of cell phone user mothers had 17% (OR = 0.83, 95% CI: 0.77, 0.89) lower adjusted risk of having low sentence complexity at 3 years, compared to children of non-users.
• They noted that the risk was 13%, 22% and 29% lower by low, medium and high maternal cell phone use.
• Additionally, data revealed that children of cell phone users had lower risk of low motor skills score at 3 years, compared to children of non-users, but this association was not found at 5 years.
• Researchers found no association between maternal cell phone use and low communication skills.