Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
New researchAssociation Between Abnormal Fetal Head Growth and Autism Spectrum Disorder
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Section snippets
Study Sample
The participants in this case/control study were singletons whose families were members of Clalit Health Services (CHS), Israel’s largest health maintenance organization, serving about 75% of the approximately 700,000 residents of southern Israel, composed of Jews and Bedouins, 2 ethnic groups that differ in their genetic background and environmental exposures. Members of CHS in this region receive most of their hospital-related services (including ASD diagnosis) at the Soroka University
Sociodemographic and Clinical Characteristics
Clinical and sociodemographic characteristics of the study sample are shown in Table 1. As expected, the sex ratio for the TDS group was significantly different from that for the ASD group, close to 1:1 versus 4:1 male/female, respectively (p < .001). In addition, for the TDP group, US scans were performed earlier in the second trimester compared to those for cases (21.4 ± 2.8 versus 22.3 ± 1.8 weeks, respectively; p = .006). No other statistically significant differences were seen between
Discussion
This is the largest and most comprehensive study to date to examine the association between fetal growth parameters and ASD. Three main findings (discussed in detail below) emerged from this study. First, fetuses later diagnosed with ASD and their TDS have narrower heads during mid-gestation compared to TDP, thus suggesting that such fetal head growth abnormality is a familial trait of ASD. Second, ASD-related head growth abnormalities are modulated by the sex of the fetus, with male and female
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This study was supported by an Israel Science Foundation grant, 527/15, to Prof. Idan Menashe. This study was conducted as part of the requirements to obtain a degree in medicine from the Joyce and Irving Goldman Medical School, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
This work has been previously posted on a preprint server: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.09.20170811.
Prof. Menashe and Prof. Norm O'Rourke, PhD, of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, served as the statistical experts for this research.
Author Contributions
Conceptualization: Menashe
Data curation: Regev, Cohen, Schuster
Formal analysis: Regev, Cohen, Flusser, Michaelovski, Meiri
Funding acquisition: Meiri, Menashe
Investigation: Regev, Cohen, Hadar, Menashe
Methodology: Regev, Hershkovitch, Menashe
Project administration: Hadar, Hershkovitch, Menashe
Resources: Hadar, Schuster, Flusser, Michaelovski, Meiri, Dinstein
Supervision: Flusser, Michaelovski, Meiri, Dinstein, Hershkovitch, Menashe
Validation: Regev, Hadar, Flusser, Michaelovski, Meiri, Dinstein, Hershkovitch, Menashe
Visualization: Regev, Cohen, Hadar, Schuster, Dinstein
Writing – original draft: Regev
Writing – review and editing: Menashe
The authors thank Inez Mureinik, BSc, and Prof. O'Rourke, of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, for critical reviewing and editing of the manuscript.
Disclosure: Drs. Hadar, Flusser, Michaelovski, Meiri, Profs. Dinstein, Hershkovitch, and Menashe, Mr. Regev, and Mss. Cohen and Schuster have reported no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.