Note: This study found no significant biological effects under its experimental conditions. We include all studies for scientific completeness.
Prenatal cell phone use and developmental milestone delays among infants
Divan HA, Kheifets L, Olsen J · 2011
View Original AbstractLarge Danish study found no developmental delays in babies whose mothers used basic cell phones during pregnancy in the 1990s-2000s.
Plain English Summary
Danish researchers followed over 41,000 children from birth to 18 months to see if mothers' cell phone use during pregnancy affected their babies' developmental milestones. They found no connection between prenatal cell phone exposure and delays in cognitive, language, or motor development at either 6 or 18 months of age. This large-scale study suggests that cell phone use during pregnancy doesn't appear to harm early childhood development.
Why This Matters
This Danish National Birth Cohort study represents one of the largest investigations into prenatal EMF exposure and early childhood development, following over 41,000 children. The null findings provide some reassurance for pregnant women concerned about cell phone use, though the study has important limitations. The exposure assessment relied on maternal recall of phone use patterns from years earlier, and the study period (1996-2002) predates smartphones and today's much higher RF exposure levels. What this means for you: while this research suggests no immediate developmental harm from basic cell phone use during pregnancy, it doesn't address the significantly higher exposures from modern devices. The science demonstrates that pregnant women today face EMF levels potentially orders of magnitude higher than those studied here, making current relevance uncertain.
Exposure Information
Specific exposure levels were not quantified in this study. The study examined exposure from: Cell Phones
Study Details
The aim of this study was to examine if prenatal use of cell phones by pregnant mothers is associated with developmental milestones delays among offspring up to 18 months of age.
Our work is based upon the Danish National Birth Cohort (DNBC), which recruited pregnant mothers fro...
A logistic regression model estimated the odds ratios (OR) for developmental milestone delays, adjus...
No evidence of an association between prenatal cell phone use and motor or cognitive/language developmental delays among infants at 6 and 18 months of age was observed. Even when considering dose-response associations for cell phone, associations were null
Show BibTeX
@article{ha_2011_prenatal_cell_phone_use_2748,
author = {Divan HA and Kheifets L and Olsen J},
title = {Prenatal cell phone use and developmental milestone delays among infants},
year = {2011},
url = {https://www.jstor.org/stable/23064863?seq=1},
}