Being abused as a child may increase a mother's chance of having
a child with autism, according to a new study, but researchers
aren't sure why. Investigators at The Harvard School of Public
Health looked at more than 50,000 women in the Nurses' Health
Study II group, and found that those who reported the highest
levels of abuse as children themselves were 60 percent more
likely to have children with some type of autism-spectrum
disorder. The reasons for the apparent connection, reported
Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, remain murky. "We know
that women who experience abuse in childhood are more likely to
have (certain pregnancy-related) risk factors, like smoking
during pregnancy, gestational diabetes or pre-eclampsia," said
Andrea L. Roberts, a research associate at Harvard and lead
author of the paper. "We also know that a lot of pregnancy
complications and pregnancy-related risk factors have been
associated with autism." It would stand to reason, then, she
says, that the increase in pregnancy com