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)

Table 3 Associations between maternal cell phone use in early pregnancy and child’s low communication skills at 3 and 5 years

	Risk for low communication skills
	At 3 years			At 5 years
	N total/N with low skills (%)	OR	95% CI	N total/N with low skills (%)	OR	95% CI
Maternal cell phone use in early pregnancy
Crude model
No use	4428/60 (1.4%)	Ref.		1177/10 (0.9%)	Ref.
Any use	40,961/464 (1.1%)	0.83	0.64, 1.09	16,133/85 (0.5%)	0.62	0.32, 1.19
Low use	17,690/215 (1.2%)	0.90	0.67, 1.19	6817/37 (0.5%)	0.64	0.32. 1.28
Medium use	21,292/237 (1.1%)	0.82	0.62, 1.09	8527/45 (0.5%)	0.62	0.31, 1.23
High use	1979/12 (0.6%)	0.44	0.24, 0.83	789/3 (0.4%)	0.45	0.12, 1.62
p- for trend		*0.018*			0.234
Adjusted model 1
No use	4428/60 (1.4%)	Ref.		1177/10 (0.9%)	Ref.
Any use	40,961/464 (1.1%)	1.04	0.78, 1.38	16,133/85 (0.5%)	0.69	0.35, 1.36
Low use	17,690/215 (1.2%)	1.03	0.77, 1.39	6817/37 (0.5%)	0.69	0.34, 1.41
Medium use	21,292/237 (1.1%)	1.07	0.78, 1.45	8527/45 (0.5%)	0.70	0.34, 1.43
High use	1979/12 (0.6%)	0.62	0.33, 1.17	789/3 (0.4%)	0.56	0.15, 2.09
p- for trend		0.724			0.438
Adjusted model 2
No use	375/4 (1.1%)	Ref.		311/4 (1.3%)	Ref.
Any use	10,510/86 (0.8%)	0.93	0.33, 2.59	8642/45 (0.5%)	0.65	0.22, 1.87
Low use	3688/29 (0.8%)	0.85	0.29, 2.45	3010/18 (0.6%)	0.65	0.21, 1.96
Medium use	6220/54 (0.9%)	1.02	0.36, 2.88	5131/26 (0.5%)	0.67	0.22, 2.00
High use	602/3 (0.5%)	0.65	0.14, 2.98	501/1 (0.2%)	0.33	0.04, 3.10
p- for trend		0.847			0.506

Bold fonts indicate statistical significant results, that are either confidence intervals that do not include 1 or p-for trend<0.05
N (%) represent the number (and percentages) of children with low communication skills (score < 40 at 3 years and score ≤ 30 at 5 years) in each category of cell phone use. Total number of included mother-child pairs at 3 years are: n = 45,389 in crude and adjusted model 1 and n = 10,885 in adjusted model 2. Total number of included mother-child pairs at 5 years are: n = 17,310 in crude and adjusted model 1and n = 8953 in adjusted model 2
Adjusted model 1 includes parity, maternal age and education and year of delivery
Adjusted model 2 includes the variables of adjusted model 1 and maternal extrovert personality score in tertiles (low/average/high)

ISSN: 1471-2458