Posted March 23, 2013
Severely abused girls who go on to become mothers are three times more likely than their non-abused peers to have an autistic child, according to a first-of-its-kind study from the Harvard School of Public Health that some local moms found “frustrating.”
The study, released yesterday, also showed that mothers who suffered even moderate abuse as children were 60 percent more likely to have a child with autism, compared with participants who did not report abuse.
Lead researcher Andrea Roberts said the study “identifies a completely new risk factor for autism.”
HSPH associate professor Marc Weisskopf, who also took part in the research, explained: “Childhood abuse is associated with a wide array of health problems in the person who experiences it, including both mental health outcomes like depression and anxiety, and physical health outcomes like obesity and lung disease. Our research suggests that the effects of childhood abuse may also reach across generations.”
Gina McClellan of Scituate, whose 6-year-old son Drew has autism, said the research is “most likely valid,” but isn’t any more insightful than studies that have pointed to pollution and mother’s age as possible causes.
“What’s going to bother me now is that people are going to be looking at me rather than my son. It’s my son who needs the help,” said McClellan, adding she had a “typical wonderful childhood.”
Harvard researchers noted they still want to examine why the purported link exists. One preliminary theory is that abuse leads to weaker immune and stress-response systems, and mothers with those conditions are more likely to have a child with autism.
The research hit as the Centers for Disease Control reported yesterday that 1 in 50 U.S. school children has autism. An earlier government survey found that 1 in 88 U.S. children is autistic, but experts say that the changing numbers reflect a broader definition of the disorder, not an increase in prevalence.
The Harvard researchers reached their conclusions after reviewing data from the Nurses’ Health Study II, a 1989 initiative tracking the long-term health of 50,000 American women.
John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, called the study’s findings “remarkable.”
“Most of the efforts to identify environmental factors have not been well studied or mis-studied. Here’s one that seems to be well studied,” Gabrieli said, noting that the authors also examined other pregnancy-related risk factors but found they accounted for very little of the association between abuse and the risk of autism.
But another local mother of an autistic son, who did not want to give her name, slammed the study, saying it “absolutely makes no sense.”
“They’re suggesting that it’s something environmental when science generally points to genetic (causes),” she said. “They’ve created more questions than they’ve answered. The help we need is how to deal with life rather than another thing we did wrong or had happen to us.”
©2013 Boston Herald
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