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• Posted September 23, 2024

No Higher Autism Risk Seen in Babies Born During Pandemic

Kids born during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have no higher risk of autism, even if they were exposed to COVID in the womb, a new study finds.

The study offers reassurance to doctors and parents who’ve been worried about the developmental health of children born during the pandemic, said senior researcher Dr. Dani Dumitriu, an associate professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City.

“Autism risk is known to increase with virtually any kind of insult to mom during pregnancy, including infection and stress,” Dumitriu explained in a university news release. “The scale of the COVID pandemic had pediatricians, researchers and developmental scientists worried that we would see an uptick in autism rates.”

“But, reassuringly, we didn’t find any indication of such an increase in our study,” Dumitriu added.

For the study, researchers tracked the health of nearly 2,000 children born at two NewYork-Presbyterian hospitals, Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and Allen Hospital, between January 2018 and September 2021.

Parents filled out screening questionnaires designed to help pediatricians assess a toddler’s behavior and development.

Researchers found no difference in autism screenings between children born before and after the onset of the pandemic.

“COVID is still quite prevalent, so this is comforting news for pregnant individuals who are worried about getting sick and the potential impact on autism risk,” Dumitriu noted.

Based on these results, Dumitriu thinks it’s unlikely an uptick in autism related to COVID will occur.

“Children who were in the womb early in the pandemic are now reaching the age when early indicators of autism would emerge, and we’re not seeing them in this study,” Dumitriu said. “And because it’s well-known that autism is influenced by the prenatal environment, this is highly reassuring.”

It is important to note that the study didn’t look directly at diagnoses of autism, only at the risk of autism assessed by the screening questionnaires, Dumitriu added.

“It’s too early to have definitive diagnostic numbers,” she said. “But this screener is predictive, and it’s not showing that prenatal exposure to COVID or the pandemic increases the likelihood of autism.”

Previous studies of babies born in the wake of other pandemics, natural disasters, famines and wars have shown that developmental conditions like autism can be potentially triggered by a mom’s exposure to stress, researchers noted.

Those conditions often don’t emerge until the teen years or even young adulthood.

“We need to acknowledge the unique experience and environment of children who were born during the pandemic -- including parental stress and social isolation -- and continue to monitor them for potential developmental or psychiatric differences,” said lead investigator Morgan Firestein, an associate research scientist in psychiatry at Columbia.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the pandemic and autism diagnosis.

SOURCE: Columbia University, news release, Sept. 23, 2024