Papadopoulou, Eleni, 1985-Haugen, MargarethaSchjølberg, SynnveMagnus, PerBrunborg, GunnarVrijheid, MartineAlexander, Jan2024-05-282024-05-282017Papadopoulou E, Haugen M, Schjølberg S, Magnus P, Brunborg G, Vrijheid M, et al. 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. 2017 Dec;17(1):685. DOI: 10.1186/s12889-017-4672-21471-2458http://hdl.handle.net/10230/60264Background. 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.application/pdfengThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4672-2Cell phone usersMother-child pairsMotor skill scoresIncomplete grammarPregnancy-related characteristicsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess