For years, studies have suggested a mother’s health during pregnancy could shape her child’s risk of autism. But a groundbreaking new study from NYU Langone Health is flipping that narrative on its head.
Researchers found that nearly all previously reported links between maternal health and autism can actually be traced back to genetics, environmental exposure, and healthcare access—not the mother’s condition itself. In a stunning revelation, the study pinpointed that the few true associations weren’t causes at all, but early warning signs of autism already present in the fetus. This game-changing discovery challenges long-held assumptions and rewrites the story of autism’s origins.
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“Our study shows that there is no convincing evidence that any of these other diagnoses in the mother can cause autism,” said study senior author Magdalena Janecka, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and in the Department of Population Health, at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Published in the journal Nature Medicine online, the new study included an analysis of the medical histories of more than 1.1 million pregnancies (among 600,000 mothers) from a national registry in Denmark. Unlike medical records in the United States, which are often scattered among many different medical providers an individual sees during their lifetime, in Denmark all of an individual’s health records are consolidated under a single government-issued number, which enabled researchers to check each woman for more than 1,700 distinct diagnoses as defined by international standards, known as ICD-10 codes. From these, researchers focused their analysis on those diagnosed in at least 0.1% of pregnancies (236 diagnoses).
“We believe our study is the first to comprehensively examine the entire medical history of the mother and explore a wide range of possible associations, controlling for multiple concurrent conditions and confounding factors,” said study lead author Vahe Khachadourian, MD, PhD, MPH, a research assistant professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
Researchers suggest that genetics, rather than maternal depression during pregnancy, may be a stronger explanation for autism. They point out that genes predisposing individuals to depression are also linked to autism. Therefore, if a pregnant woman experiences depression and her child is autistic, shared genes are a more likely cause than the direct impact of the mother’s depression on fetal development. This conclusion is further supported by their analysis of fathers’ medical histories.
Since a father’s direct influence on a fetus post-conception is limited, any link between paternal diagnoses and autism likely reflects shared familial (genetic) factors. The researchers found that paternal diagnoses were as strongly associated with autism in children as maternal diagnoses, reinforcing the genetic explanation.
