Child Spacing Linked to Autism

Now that we have debunked good old Wakefield's old study linking the MMR Vaccine and Autism, we hear that the media is now reporting on a new study that proposes that having children back to back may put the younger child at a risk for autism.

Unlike Wakefield's fraudulent study, this one was based on a group of more than 500,000 children in California; "(t)he researchers looked at births from 1992 through 2002 in California. They analyzed data on second-born children born to the same parents whose older siblings didn't have autism. The information on autism diagnoses came from the state's Department of Developmental Services.

The overall prevalence of autism was less than 1 percent in the study. Of all the 662,730 second-born children in the analysis, 3,137 had an autism diagnosis. Of the 156,034 children conceived less than a year after the birth of their older siblings, 1,188 had an autism diagnosis - a higher rate, but still less than 1 percent.

Children with Asperger's syndrome and pervasive developmental disorders, milder forms of autism, weren't included. Government studies indicate about 1 in 100 children have autism disorders, including the milder forms."

What does this mean for us? Well, in basic terms it means NOTHING. Seriously, the study isn't saying that closely spaced children causes autism, it states that there is a potential correlation, that is all.

The researchers are saying that even after they had manipulated the data to account for maternal age and a host of other variables that the one observation that seemed to crop up was the spacing between siblings. From here, they will need to do further research and study and see where this idea takes them.

Unfortunately, most of what we hear from the media are headlines like the one I used to get your attention. Seldom do the writers go on to explain the significance of the study, they just leave people to draw their own conclusions.

So what will you do with this information? Does it affect your family planning decisions at all?