Hyperactive kids had mothers on cell

Children whose mothers were frequent cellphone users during pregnancy were more likely than those of less frequent users to be hyperactive, a new study finds.But lead author Laura Birks is not advising expectant mothers to hang up their cellphones.

She cautioned that she could not say if electromagnetic radiation from cellphones or any number of other factors, such as parenting styles, might explain the link between maternal cellphone use during pregnancy and childhood behavioral problems. “I would say interpret these results with caution, and everything in moderation,” she said in a Skype interview.

Birks and her colleagues analysed data on more than 80,000 mother-child pairs in Denmark, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands and Korea. They found consistent evidence of increasing risk of behavioural problems — particularly, hyperactivity — in 5 to 7-year-old children the more their mothers talked on cell phones during pregnancy.

Given that there is no known biological mechanism that could lead prenatally emitted cellphone radiation to promote hyperactivity in offspring, the results were surprising, said Birks, who is a doctoral student in biomedicine at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health in Spain.

The association held firm across five countries and time periods. Offspring of mothers who reported being on at least four cellphone calls a day, or in one cohort speaking on a cellphone for more than an hour a day, were 28 per cent more likely to be hyperactive than offspring of mothers who reported being on one or fewer calls a day, researchers found after accounting for a variety of confounding variables, such as maternal age, marital status and education.