Conceiving less than a year after giving birth - or more than five years later - may increase the child's risk of autism
Conceiving a baby less than a year
after a previous child, or five years after may increase the risk of
autism. The researchers found the safest time to conceive was between
two to five years after the previous child
- Risk increases by 150% if baby is conceived under a year after last child
- Risk increased by 30% if parents wait five years to have another baby
- After gaps of ten years, the risk of autism was more than 40% higher
Babies
conceived less than a year after the birth of their sibling are more
likely to be diagnosed with autism, according to new research.
The
risk of being diagnosed with autism was one and a half times higher if
parents conceived a baby within one year of their last baby, than if
they conceived a child later, a study found.
The best period to conceive was between two to five years after the previous child, in which there was no extra risk.
Researchers found children conceived after a gap of five years were 30 per cent more likely to be diagnosed with autism.
For gaps of more than ten years, the risk of autism was more than 40 per cent higher.
The
study backs up previous research which found a link between conceiving a
child closely after having a baby and an autism diagnosis.
Previous studies have shown that women with two closely spaced pregnancies are at risk of premature births and low birth weight.
The
study analysed the records of 7371 children born between 1987 and 2005
in Finland, using data from the Finnish Prenatal Study of Autism.
Around a third of the children had been diagnosed with autism.
Researchers
used information from national registries to compare the spacing of
pregnancies between the children who had been diagnosed with autism and
those who had not.
The
analysis took into account factors that might explain the link, such as
parents' age, prior number of children, and the parent' history of
psychiatric disorders like autism.
Dr
Alan Brown, of Columbia University in the U.S., said, 'This study
provides further evidence that environmental factors occurring during or
near the prenatal period play a role in autism, a serious and disabling
condition that afflicts millions of individuals and that is increasing
in prevalence.'
Conceiving a child five years after
the previous one increased the risk of autism by 30 per cent, and this
risk increased to 40 per cent for parents who wait ten years
Dr
Cheslack-Postava, of Columbia University, warned the results did not
prove that the spacing of pregnancies directly causes autism.
She
said: 'It was intriguing to see that the risk of autism diagnosis was
higher in both closely and distantly spaced pregnancies.
'It is important to realise that we can't say from this study that spacing of pregnancies per se is a cause of autism.
'This is most likely a proxy of other factors that are more directly related to the chance of the child's developing autism.
'In
other words, the importance of this finding lies in the clues that it
can provide in terms of understanding how the prenatal environment is
related to outcomes after birth.'
The study was published in the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry journal.
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