http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/ ... st_13.html
Boston Medical Center, Boston University
Premature babies more likely to score positive on autism checklist
Babies who are born more than three months early are up to three times more likely than other children to show symptoms of autism when screened using a standard checklist, Boston researchers report. The higher rate persisted even after excluding visual, motor, hearing, and cognitive impairments that are common in premature babies.
The 988 children in the study had not been diagnosed with autism, but they showed signs of the disorder according to a screening tool used by pediatricians for children who are 16 to 30 months old. The checklist asks whether a child points at an object to show interest, for example, or how good their hearing is.
Among children in the general population, the rate of positive scores is 5.7 percent. Among children in the study, who were born after less than 28 weeks of pregnancy, the rate was 21 percent. After children with disabilities were removed from the analysis, the rate was 16 percent.
"We're not implying that it's prematurity that causes autism," lead author Dr. Karl Kuban, chief of pediatric neurology at Boston Medical Center, emphasized in an interview. "They may hare a common risk that leads to both, but it's not that one causes the other."
Pediatricians should be aware that children who have handicaps may score positive on the autism checklist without having autism, he said. Autism is diagnosed after a more rigorous evaluation, but because early detection helps children get treatment that can help them, screenings are recommended.
In general, 0.6 percent of children are diagnosed with autism, about one-tenth of the number who score positive on the checklist.
The study appears in the Journal of Pediatrics . Follow-up studies of the children in the study are needed, Kuban said.
"If it turns out these children do go on to have autism much more often than we would expect, it does beg the question of why that should be and it offers us an avenue of study," he said.