C-Sections Aren’t Causing Autism
Why you shouldn’t worry too much about the scary headlines
This week must have been a terrifying one for anyone who is pregnant or thinking about having kids. Not just because pregnancy sometimes seems to be one long list of things that can go wrong, no; this week we’ve added yet another fear to the agenda.
According to news sources around the world, Caesarean sections — or C-sections — are not just serious surgical procedures designed to safely deliver babies, they are causing autism as well.
It’s a pretty scary thing to hear, especially when you consider that many people have C-sections because they have to — either their own life is at risk, or the baby is in trouble. It’s also just another thing to add to the already-lengthy list of issues that mums are expected to feel guilty about — don’t eat soft cheese, don’t drink, and heaven forfend you choose to have pain relief during one of the most physically traumatic experiences of your life lest your baby be forever scarred.
Fortunately for expecting mums everywhere, the headlines were wrong.
C-sections probably aren’t causing autism after all.
The Science
The new study that has everyone up in arms was what’s known as a meta-analysis, which is a kind of large meta study that looks for every study that has ever been done on a topic in order to put all of their results together in a big statistical model. The basic idea is that instead of just doing more big studies, you can pool the results from lots of smaller ones to answer the same question.
In this case, the scientists took over 60 individual studies and combined their results to look at the mental health conditions in kids that are associated with a C-section birth. Altogether, they compared over 20 million records, with tens of thousands of cases of autism and mental health problems such as ADHD and eating…
