Maternal cell phone use in early pregnancy and child's language, communication and motor skills at 3 and 5 years: the Norwegian mother and child cohort study (MoBa).
BMC Public Health
; 17(1): 685, 2017 09 05.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-28870201
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND:
Cell phone use during pregnancy is a public health concern. We investigated the association between maternal cell phone use in pregnancy and child's language, communication and motor skills at 3 and 5 years.METHODS:
This prospective study includes 45,389 mother-child pairs, participants of the MoBa, recruited at mid-pregnancy from 1999 to 2008. Maternal frequency of cell phone use in early pregnancy and child language, communication and motor skills at 3 and 5 years, were assessed by questionnaires. Logistic regression was used to estimate the associations.RESULTS:
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. 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. The risk was 13%, 22% and 29% lower by low, medium and high maternal cell phone use. Additionally, 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. We found no association between maternal cell phone use and low communication skills.CONCLUSIONS:
We reported a decreased risk of low language and motor skills at three years in relation to prenatal cell phone use, which might be explained by enhanced maternal-child interaction among cell phone users. No evidence of adverse neurodevelopmental effects of prenatal cell phone use was reported.
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Pregnancy Trimester, First
/
Child Development
/
Communication
/
Cell Phone Use
/
Language Development
/
Mothers
/
Motor Skills
Type of study:
Etiology_studies
/
Observational_studies
/
Qualitative_research
/
Risk_factors_studies
Limits:
Adult
/
Child, preschool
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
/
Pregnancy
Country/Region as subject:
Europa
Language:
En
Journal:
BMC Public Health
Journal subject:
SAUDE PUBLICA
Year:
2017
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Norway