Research Prenatal and infant exposure to ambient pesticides and autism spectrum disorder in children: population based case-control study BMJ 2019; 36

https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj...b6oBDXmfVlpfSKBEPDJH2n2tBu7PaSzQMb-VUJSJrmhlc

Conclusion Findings suggest that an offspring’s risk of autism spectrum disorder increases following prenatal exposure to ambient pesticides within 2000 m of their mother’s residence during pregnancy, compared with offspring of women from the same agricultural region without such exposure. Infant exposure could further increase risks for autism spectrum disorder with comorbid intellectual disability.

 

I am glad to see more evidence mounting of the pernicious effects of pesticides.

One of the UK's premier ME/CFS researchers Prof Peter Behan tried to raise the alarm about the pesticide connection to ME/CFS back in the 1990s, and even went to court to support farmers who had developed ME/CFS after major organophosphate (OP) pesticide exposure from sheep dipping. Those significantly exposed to OPs through sheep dipping had 4 times the national rate of ME/CFS. Ref: here. But clever lawyers supporting the pesticide industry convinced the courts that pesticides were not responsible.

But a 2018 systematic review paper in PLOS Medicine has called for the banning of ALL organophosphate pesticides, due to their link to ME/CFS, Gulf War illness, Parkinson's, autoimmune conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD and autism in children.

 

This caught my attention simply because my mother had MS, and she always blamed it on pesticides, presumably spraying.

I have no idea what, if any, reason or evidence she had for thinking that. Maybe she just read that pesticides could be to blame for MS, she remembered pesticides, and put 2 and 2 together herself.

I remember the planes coming over and being told that's what the mist was from when I was about 3, I have no idea if that's what she was referring to, or if it was an earlier or later event, that's just the one that jumps out from my memory.

I have ASD.

 

It will be interesting to see what discussion this paper generates.

The odd thing to me is that the odds ratios are almost exactly the same for all the pesticides. That is very unlikely to be due to them all having the same quantitative effect. Just on the basis that some will be more soluble than others or more unstable than others one would expect the effects to perhaps be in the same direction but not matched quantitatively.

So that suggests that all these pesticides are correlated in distribution (seems likely anyway) and that the effect is not due to every pesticide but probably one main factor that happens to correlate with all of them. And of course there is no particular reason why that factor has tone a pesticide. It might be a diet more common in people who live near fields. It might be the genes of people who tend to live near fields.

No doubt there will be some heated responses.