Mobile phone during pregnancy may not harm your baby's brain: Study

Good news, would-be-mothers! Now using mobile phones during pregnancy is unlikely to have any adverse effects on your child neurodevelopment, finds a study.

A study has found that children born to mobile phone users had a 27 per cent lower risk of having lower sentence complexity, 14 per cent lower risk of incomplete grammar and 31 per cent lower risk of having moderate language delay at age three, compared to children of mothers who reported no mobile phone use.

According to researchers, exposure to radio frequency electromagnetic fields associated with the maternal use of mobile phones during pregnancy is not linked to neurodevelopment in children.

Lead study author Dr. Eleni Papadopoulou from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health said, "The concern for harm to the foetus 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."

"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," Papadopoulou added.

The study analysed 45,389 mother-child pairs and the data was collected from mothers and children during and after pregnancy.

The follow-ups were later assessed at ages three and five.

Senior author Professor Jan Alexander from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health said, "Our investigation revealed for the first time that maternal mobile phone use may actually have a positive impact. More specifically, mobile phone use in pregnancy was associated with lower risk of the child having low language and motor skills at 3 years of age."

They also found that children born to mobile phone users had an 18 per cent lower risk of low motor skills at age three, compared to children born to non-users of mobile phones.

The beneficial effects remained even after adjusting for relevant confounders and were also relative to the level of reported mobile phone use by the mother.

The study appears in the open access journal, BMC Public Health.