United States: According to the researchers, children born during the first year of the pandemic do not have a higher risk of autism if they have ever been infected with COVID while still in their mother’s womb.
Doctors and parents who have been anxious about the developmental well-being of the kid born during the pandemic will find relief from this study, noted Dumitriu with Columbia.
As reported by HealthDay,“Autism risk is known to increase with virtually any kind of insult to mom during pregnancy, including infection and stress,” Dumitriu said in a university news release. “When the size of the COVID pandemic grew, pediatricians, researchers, and developmental scientists felt that we would observe a rise in the autism rates.”
“However, comforting us on this point, we did not identify such an increase in our study,” Dumitriu also said.
To conduct the study, researchers followed the health records of nearly 2,000 children born in two NewYork-Presbyterian hospitals that include Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital and Allen Hospital between January 2018 and September 2021.
The parents completed paper-and-pencil screening forms targeting the aspects that a pediatrician might consider in diagnosing a toddler.
A study by researchers did not discover any changes in autism screenings with children born before and after the start of the pandemic.
“COVID is still very much around, so this is good news to those pregnant individuals who are concerned about catching the virus as well as its effects to development of autism,” Dumitriu added.
However, Dumitriu believes that based on these findings the risk for an increase in autism associated with COVID will not happen.
Earlier in the pandemic, children were conceived and now at the age where first signs of autism, which are impaired social interaction, are observable, they are missing in this study, Dumitriu said. “And since it is already an open secret that autism is the result of the prenatal environment, this is, one might say, very soothing It is really very important to note that the study didn’t look directly at the treatment of autism only at the risk of autism assessed by the screening questionnaires, Dumitriu added.
“It’s only early to have definitive diagnostic numbers,” she said but this screener is the predictive, and it’s not showing that prenatal exposure to the COVID or the pandemic increases the likelihood of autism.”
Also, the previous studies of the babies who are born in the wake of other pandemics, the natural disasters, famines and warns have shown that developmental conditions like autism can be potentially triggered by a mom’s exposure to the stress, researchers noted.
Actually, those conditions who often don’t emerge until the teen years or even young adulthood.