Pregnant women should limit the use of cell phone: cautions results of largest study till date.

courtesy: research medical center 

Children born to mothers who frequently used cell phones prenatally were more likely to have hyperactivity/inattention problems as compared to those who used it less frequently.

The study was published online in Journal Environment International.

The lead author Laura Birks is not advising the mothers to stop using cell phones, but just be cautions and use it in moderation because the research has still not proved causation.

An earlier study published in Journal Epidemiology in 2008 also found that mothers who did use the handsets were 54 per cent more likely to have children with behavioral problems and that the likelihood increased with the amount of potential exposure to the radiation.

In the current study the researchers analyzed 83,884 mother-child pairs in five cohorts from Denmark, Korea, Netherlands, Norway and Spain during various time periods from 1996 to 2011.

The cell phone use was divided into none, low, medium, and high based on the usage reported by mother. 

The children were assessed for behavioral, hyperactivity/inattention or emotional problems between ages 5-7 years.

The earliest cohort from Denmark between 1996–2002 was the only cohort having enough women who did not use cell phones while pregnant.

Children born to mothers who were on cell phones for at least 4 calls/day or in another cohort for an hour/day were 28% more likely to be hyperactive as compared to children whose mothers made 1 or fewer call per day.

The association was found consistently across all cohorts, both for prospective and retrospective collected data.

Researchers are raising more questions after the results of study was published.

Dr. Robin Hansen, a pediatrician and professor at the University of California, Davis in Sacramento opines that the study does not answer the question whether it is the actual handset or your parenting behavior that causes the psychological problems.

She said in an interview with Medscape “Now we have to dig deeper and figure out why? Is it the electronic signals that go through your brain and your body, or how it changes your interactions with your child postnatally?”

She also said that we also need to look at the fact that those mothers who are busy on cellphones do not have enough time for their children, shaping their behavior differently. Children become hyperactive and through tantrum to get the parents away from the cell phone and before long it becomes a habit.

The Russian National Committee on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection advises to limit the use of phone in children too. It concludes that children who talk on the handsets are likely to suffer from "disruption of memory, decline of attention, diminishing learning and cognitive abilities, increased irritability" in the short term, and that longer-term hazards include "depressive syndrome" and "degeneration of the nervous structures of the brain".

On July 1,2015 more than one hundred medical doctors, scientists and public health experts from around the world have signed a Joint Statement advising pregnant women to take simple precautions to protect themselves and their babies from wireless radiation. The Statement is part of a national right-to-know campaign called the BabySafe Project created by two non-profit organizations to inform pregnant women about the issue.

"The wireless world may be convenient, but it's not without risks," says Patricia Wood, Executive Director of Grassroots Environmental Education and co-creator of the BabySafe Project. "When more than one hundred of the world's leading medical doctors and researchers on wireless radiation say we have enough evidence for women to take protective action, we think women should know about it."