Pesky British hacks. Let’s say you produce a scientific study with a conclusion like “exposure to cell phones prenatally-and, to a lesser degree, postnatally-was associated with behavioural difficulties such as emotional and hyperactivity problems around the age of school entry”.

Before you know it we’ll be putting out headlines such a ‘Warning: Using a mobile phone while pregnant can seriously damage your baby’ and ‘Mobile phone danger to unborn child: Use could cause behavioural problems’.

This has seriously annoyed the author of that study.

“That’s clearly not what we wanted to suggest, and we think that there is no reason that pregnant women should be very alarmed at the findings we have,” says Jorn Olsen, professor of epidemiology at UCLA (America’s ABC News).

“I think that a number of journalists broke the story on this and that they did not take all of the assumptions into consideration.”

The sentence in the study immediately following the one above notes, “These associations may be noncausal and may be due to unmeasured confounding.” However it does go on to say “If real, they would be of public health concern given the widespread use of this technology.”

So was the reporting of this study actually inaccurate?

Well, the opening sentences of the two newspaper articles mentioned above were:

Women who use mobile phones when pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with behavioural problems, according to authoritative research.

and

Pregnant women who use mobile phones are more likely to have children with behavioural problems, a shocking study has found.

Not a ‘might’, a ‘could’ or a ‘suggests’ anywhere to be seen.

As Discover magazine notes:

As with all studies, correlation does not equal causation, and the researchers themselves have cautioned that these results could be explained by a host of other factors unrelated to cell phone use—such as the fact that mothers who had access to cell phones before they were cheap and ubiquitous may also be more likely to be in a certain socioeconomic class, have certain attitudes towards child rearing, spend less time with their children, be less likely to breastfeed—the list goes on.

You can listen to Olsen discuss the study on this radio item. “For the time being it’s just a suspicion,” he says. But he also says it might be a good idea not to carry you cell phone close to your body when pregnant.

Those reports are quite sensationalist. I’m not sure they’re totally beyond the pale though…

Image: Punchstock