Study Links Diabetes And Obesity During Pregnancy To Autism

A new study has used birth information and electronic medical records to analyze the already suspected link between pregnant mother with diabetes and obesity and autistic children.

Nowadays, in the United States an estimated one out of 45 children suffers from autism disorders. The medical community suspects the cause consists in both environment and genetics. The new research has found an increased prevalence of autism spectrum disorders in children of mothers who suffer of diabetes and obesity during the pregnancy.

The study has been performed by researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the findings are published online in the journal Autism Research. According to the study senior author and a member of the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Cincinnati Children's, Katherine Bowers, PhD, MPH, previous studies already pointed out a link between diabetes during pregnancy and maternal obesity and autism.

The new study comes with the novelty that it demonstrates this link based electronic medical data. This way, it can be estimated the extent of this connection across large populations. By using electronic, medical records are avoided the costs of developing an epidemiological study from scratch and the burden is not placed on study participants. Electronic medical data consists in vast amounts of information already collected for clinical purposes.

Among study participants, 35,734 mothers of children without autism were included for control. Other 1,495 mothers participants in the study had a child with another type of developmental disorder and a number of 487 mothers had a child with autism spectrum disorders.

According to Science Daily, the findings of this new research suggest that pregnant mothers with gestational diabetes or obesity are 1.5 times more likely to give birth to a child with autism. Bowers and her collaborators in the Division of Biomedical Informatics at Cincinnati Children's used a variety of birth data and medical record to identify risk factors. Unlike prior studies, the researchers were able to analyze free text medical notes with novel language processing techniques and confirm autism diagnoses expressed as a numerical code.