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Brain & Nervous System

Prenatal cell phone use and developmental milestone delays among infants.

No Effects Found

Divan HA, Kheifets L, Olsen J. · 2011

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Prenatal cell phone use from 1996-2002 showed no developmental delays, but today's exposure levels are dramatically higher.

Plain English Summary

Summary written for general audiences

Researchers tracked over 41,000 Danish mothers and their children to see if cell phone use during pregnancy affected early childhood development milestones. They found no connection between prenatal cell phone exposure and delays in cognitive, language, or motor development at 6 and 18 months of age. This large study suggests that typical cell phone use during pregnancy doesn't appear to harm early brain development in infants.

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.

Cite This Study
Divan HA, Kheifets L, Olsen J. (2011). Prenatal cell phone use and developmental milestone delays among infants. Scand J Work Environ Health.37(4):341-348, 2011.
Show BibTeX
@article{ha_2011_prenatal_cell_phone_use_3004,
  author = {Divan HA and Kheifets L and Olsen J.},
  title = {Prenatal cell phone use and developmental milestone delays among infants.},
  year = {2011},
  
  url = {https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21403981/},
}
PubMed: 21403981

Cited By (33 papers)

View all 33 citing papers on Semantic Scholar

Quick Questions About This Study

No, a large Danish study of over 41,000 mothers found no connection between cell phone use during pregnancy and developmental delays. Infants reached cognitive, language, and motor milestones normally at 6 and 18 months regardless of prenatal phone exposure.
Less than 5% of children at both 6 and 18 months showed cognitive, language, or motor developmental delays in this study. The low delay rates were consistent whether mothers used cell phones during pregnancy or not.
Researchers tracked cognitive, language, and motor development milestones at 6 and 18 months of age. They found no significant differences in when children reached these developmental markers based on maternal cell phone use during pregnancy.
No, even when researchers looked for dose-response relationships (more phone use causing greater effects), they found no associations. Higher levels of prenatal cell phone exposure did not increase developmental delay risks in infants.
The study reported odds ratios between 0.8-1.1 for developmental delays, with confidence intervals crossing 1.0. These results indicate no statistically significant increased risk of delays from prenatal cell phone exposure in this population.