Autism May Be Linked to Mom's Autoimmune Disease

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The researchers found that children whose mothers had autoimmune disease were at a higher risk of developing autism spectrum disorder than children of mothers who did not have these conditions. In addition, the risk of infantile autism was increased in children with a family history of type 1 diabetes.

The increased risk that autoimmune diseases contribute to autism is not huge, Eaton said.

"The increased risk for type 1 diabetes is a little less than two times, for rheumatoid arthritis it's about 1.5 times and for celiac disease it's more than three times," Eaton said. "That's enough to impress an epidemiologist, but not enough to make anybody in the general population start changing their behavior."

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Dr. Hjordis O. Atladottir, from the Institute of Public Health at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and the study's lead researcher, said that the findings are important because they support the theory that autism is somehow associated with disturbances in the immune system.

"It is important to emphasize that these results should not cause worry or be unsettling for parents or future parents with any of the above-mentioned diseases," Atladottir said. "The large majority of people affected by an autoimmune disease do not have children with autism."

Autism expert Dr. Jeffrey Brosco, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said the study reinforces the association between autism and a mother's autoimmune disease or, in the cases of type 1 diabetes, a mother's or father's condition.

"This study confirms that we still don't know what's going on in autism but suggests there is something interesting about autoimmune diseases in parents of children with autism," Brosco said.

Though there seems to be a connection between autism and some parental autoimmune diseases, he said, the mechanism of that interaction is not known. It could be associated with the diseases themselves, it could be that the genes associated with autoimmune diseases and autism are located near each other or it could be that an autoimmune disease changes the quality of a pregnancy, which results in circumstances that increase the risk for autism, Brosco explained.

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