A study done in California seems to reveal a correlation between the time of year that a baby was conceived and the risk of being born with autism. Add this to the growing list of things that researchers are pointing to as a cause of autism. Before you try and plan out your pregnancy to avoid having a child who is on the autism spectrum, there are some things that you need to understand.
This is the second study I have read about that makes a connection between when a child is conceived, or when a child is born, and the risk that a child has of developing a certain disorder or condition. Recently, researchers found that babies who were born in the Springtime had a higher risk of developing anorexia when they got older, (when compared to teenagers who were not born in a Spring month).
Now, researchers from the University of California have done a study that suggests that babies who were conceived during a month in Winter are at a higher risk of having autism. The researchers looked at data that came from 6.6 million children. The children were born in California sometime between January of 1990, and December of 2002. The data followed the children from when they were born, to when the child was about six years old.
The results showed that babies that were conceived in December, January, February, or March, (in other words, the months of Winter), had a higher risk of having a diagnosis on the autism spectrum disorder than the babies who were conceived during other months of the year. Babies conceived in December had an 8% higher risk. Those who were conceived in March had a risk that was 16% higher than babies who were conceived in July, (a Summer month).
This doesn’t mean that you should try and arrange your pregnancy in order to avoid increasing your child’s risk of autism. Researchers are not entirely sure about the reasons why the risk seems higher for babies conceived in certain months. Maybe it’s not due to the time of conception, after all. It could be due to exposure to an allergen, or a chemical, or something else during the third trimester, or the second trimester, or something like that.
Not everything is known about what causes autism. It would be impossible for a couple to attempt to avoid each and every potential cause that some study points to. If you somehow managed to do that, there could still be some unknown factor that could, theoretically, mean that your child will have autism. I think the best thing a parent can do is follow a doctor’s orders, and have as healthy a pregnancy as possible. Don’t stress out about the multitude of studies that each point to entirely different causes of autism.
Image by stashabella on Flickr