Induced labour not linked to higher autism risk

Inducing labour does not appear to increase the baby's odds of autism, a study suggests. Researchers examined data on more than 1.3 million births in Sweden and found about 3.5 per cent of babies born after induction were diagnosed with autism by age 20, compared with 2.5 per cent of other infants. This translates into a roughly 19 per cent greater risk of autism with induced labour, which is statistically significant. But when researchers took a closer look just at sibling pairs with one baby that arrived after induction and another that did not, they no longer found any link between induced labour and autism risk. The results from nearly 700,000 siblings suggest that any elevated autism risk associated with labour induction is actually due to other factors such as genetics or medical issues experienced by individual women, said lead study author Anna Sara Oberg of Harvard University in Boston. "The association observed between unrelated individuals may be a result of confounding factors, and not a causal effect of labour induction on the risk of autism spectrum disorder." Oberg and colleagues reviewed data on all live births in Sweden from 1992 to 2015. Overall, about 11 per...

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