The effect of duration of mobile phone usage on blood pressure and heart rate: Evidence from a cohort study (Preprint)
BACKGROUND Despite being considered valuable information communication technology (ICT) tools, mobile phones can have some adverse health consequences. OBJECTIVE The present study was conducted to investigate the relationships of mobile phone usage with blood pressure and heart rate in the participants in the first phase of Ravansar Non-Communicable Diseases (RaNCD) cohort study. METHODS The present study used the data collected from the recruitment stage of a population-based investigation, RaNCD cohort study in western part of Iran. The participants with the mobile phone were divided into four equal quantiles using principal component analysis (PCA) to categorize the mean duration of mobile phone usage over the previous 12 months in min/day. RESULTS Among a total of 8801 participants 35-65 in RaNCD cohort, the duration of mobile phone use was 19.5 min/day, as 1515 (17.0%) of the participants in RaNCD cohort study did not use mobile phones. After controlling the confounding variables, the reduction in systolic blood pressure (SBP) was found to be higher than that in diastolic blood pressure (DBP) with an increase in the duration of mobile phone use. In fact, SBP -1.86(-2.83, -0.89) was less than DBP -1.86 (-2.83, -0.89) in the subjects who used their phones for 23.5-330 min/day compared to in those who never used a mobile phone. CONCLUSIONS The results of this study show that exposure to a cellular phone does not terribly effect on SBP, DBP and heart rate. We also found that cell-phone usage was inverse associated with hypertension in women than men; nevertheless, further studies are recommended that be conducted to confirm the significance of this relationship CLINICALTRIAL mobile phone, hypertension, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure