Comment by nis0s
2 days ago
There seems to be a relationship here, as shown in this paper, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5837358/
I am skeptical of the idea that a CS itself produces any conditions for ASD. But it would make sense that those who would have otherwise died during child birth and survive are now likely to change present health demographics.
Honestly, a lot of autistic people are doing well in life, and in fact many are doing better than their neurotypical peers. Autistic traits need to be understood better because they provide better understanding of human cognition and its functionality.
In my case, I came out 2 weeks late and was little over 12lbs (~5.5kg) when I did. Apparently birth weight over 9.5 lbs is also correlated with higher rates of ASD. That would be my guess as to why c-sections show a correlation.
My First and Fifth are autistic. All births were full term.
1st 8lb. 2nd 8lb, 3rd 10.5lb, 4th and 5th 6.5lb ea (twins). None were c-section.
First 3 were home or birth center, last had to be hospital. My wife had good BMI for the start of each pregnancy.
I do not really understand what conclusion to draw from this.
A friend of mine has 8 childen and none are autistic. All were born at the hospital (this is where you give birth in France), all were notmal weight and so was the mom (and dad)
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it's not that a CS causes ASD but that children who have ASD are more likely to need a CS, and the availability of a CS allows more children with ASD to survive, and therefore an increase of CS births correlates with an increase of ASD