While many studies have reported a link between a mother’s health condition during pregnancy and her child’s risk of autism, a new study shows that nearly all of these “associations” can otherwise be explained by factors such as genetics, exposure to pollution, and access to healthcare.
Led by researchers at NYU Langone Health, the study revealed that, of the few conditions truly associated with autism, all were actually complications with the fetus — leading the authors to believe that those symptoms were early signs of autism in the child and not the cause of it.
“Our study shows that there is no convincing evidence that any of these other diagnoses in the mother can cause autism,” said study senior author Magdalena Janecka, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and in the Department of Population Health, at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Publishing in the journal Nature Medicine online Jan. 31, the new study included an analysis of the medical histories of more than 1.1 million pregnancies (among 600,000 mothers) from a national registry in Denmark. Unlike medical records in the United States, which are often scattered among many different medical providers an individual sees during their lifetime, in Denmark all of an individual’s health records are consolidated under a single government-issued number, which enabled researchers to check each woman for more than 1,700 distinct diagnoses as defined by international standards, known as ICD-10 codes. From these, researchers focused their analysis on those diagnosed in at least 0.1% of pregnancies (236 diagnoses).
Sunday, February 2, 2025
Study Raises Doubt About Maternal Health as a Cause of Autism
In The Politics of Autism, I discuss various ideas about what causes the condition.
Citation:
Khachadourian, V., Arildskov, E.S., Grove, J. et al. Familial confounding in the associations between maternal health and autism. Nat Med (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-03479-5
