Mobile Phone Effects on Umbilical Artery Doppler and Heart Rate Tracing

The Effects of Mobile Phone on Umbilical Artery Doppler and Fetal Cardiotogogrphy in Normal and Gowth Restricted Fetuses

Women were instructed not to use the mobile phones for 24 hours before carrying out the initial CTG trace and Doppler ultrasound. For each patient, initial 15 minutes CTG trace recording was done followed by umbilical artery Doppler ultrasound using high resolution ultrasound unit with 3-5 MHz transabdominal transducers (General Electric logic a500, logic a200 City country). Thereafter, the mobile phone (type, in the dialing mode, was put on the mother's abdomen for 10 minutes, concurrently with repeating the 15 minutes CTG trace. The umbilical artery Doppler was repeated 5 minutes after hanging up to avoid the interference with the Doppler machine. The umbilical artery Doppler ultrasound and the recorded fetal heart rate (FHR) strips before and after the mobile phone use were blindly analyzed with respect to umbilical artery resistance indices (RI) and CTG parameters in terms of number of fetal kicks, absence of beat to beat variability, loss of accelerations and the appearance of spontaneous decelerations.

Inclusion Criteria:

• aged 18 to 40 years pregnant between
• singleton fetus
• 32-38 weeks' gestation . They were classified into two groups. Group (A) included 120 women with normally growing fetuses. Group (B) included 70 women with growth-restricted fetuses.

Exclusion Criteria:

• presence of medical disorders or obstetric complications (in group A), anomalous fetus and non-reactive fetal CTG in initial CTG trace severe oligohydramnios