Close Birth Spacing Linked to Autism

[DynamicBalance]

This finding validates the wisdom of primitive cultures, which often had a cultural taboo against spacing children too close together. Women would generally wait at least three years between children to allow their bodies to recover. In addition, they practiced the feeding of special foods during pregnancy and often for months before conception. These foods would replenish the mother's body and ensure the health of her next child. For more information on special diets for pregnancy, click here.

Laurel Blair, NTP
www.dynamicbalancenutrition.com

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news...ked-to-autism/

Excerpt:

Close birth spacing may put a second-born child at higher risk for autism, suggests a preliminary study based on more than a half-million California children.

Children born less than two years after their siblings were considerably more likely to have an autism diagnosis compared to those born after at least three years.


The sooner the second child was conceived the greater the likelihood of that child later being diagnosed with autism. The effect was found for parents of all ages, decreasing the chance that it was older parents and not the birth spacing behind the higher risk.


“That was pretty shocking to us, to be honest,” said senior author Peter Bearman of Columbia University in New York. The researchers took into account other risk factors for autism and still saw the effect of birth spacing.

[marylou]

My experience is that my "neuto-typical" daughter was born four years before my son, who is autistic.

The realities of this disorder are much more complex than this birth order finding suggests.

Marylou Hillberg

This finding validates the wisdom of primitive cultures, which often had a cultural taboo against spacing children too close together. Women would generally wait at least three years between children to allow their bodies to recover. In addition, they practiced the feeding of special foods during pregnancy and often for months before conception. These foods would replenish the mother's body and ensure the health of her next child. For more information on special diets for pregnancy, click here....

[DynamicBalance]

My experience is that my "neuto-typical" daughter was born four years before my son, who is autistic.

The realities of this disorder are much more complex than this birth order finding suggests.

Marylou Hillberg

Hi Marylou,

I don't think this study is claiming that all autism is linked to close birth spacing, only that a strong association has been found. Clearly autism is a complex disorder, with many factors involved. Close birth spacing appears to be one factor that can contribute. While your experience is different, my experience is that my brother who is on the autism spectrum was born a little more than a year after I was born.

Like I mentioned before, I believe that the reason close birth spacing is linked with autism in subsequent children is that the mother's body has not had time to recover her stores of important nutrients. But there are many other situations that can lead to low nutrient status besides close birth spacing. Inadequate diets, illness, and prolonged stress are just a few things that can rapidly deplete nutrients in the body, and all of these things are quite common these days.

Incidentally, parents report that the best biomedical interventions for autism are supplementation with various nutrients and special diets. You can read more about that here.

Blessings to you and your children!

Laurel Blair, NTP
www.dynamicbalancenutrition.com

[Dixon]

My experience is that my "neuto-typical" daughter was born four years before my son, who is autistic.
The realities of this disorder are much more complex than this birth order finding suggests.

Anecdotal evidence like yours is entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether there's a correlation between autism and birth spacing. The fact that there's a correlation doesn't mean there won't be plenty of exceptions, like your example, and the existence of such exceptions doesn't falsify the correlation any more than saying "My grandpa smoked cigarettes for 90 years and never got cancer" falsifies the correlation between tobacco and cancer.