A comparison of obstetrical records of autistic and nonautistic referrals for psychoeducational evaluations.

The team pulled obstetrical charts for two groups of children sent for psycho-educational testing.

One group had autism. The other group had other delays but not autism.

They matched every child for IQ so the groups started on equal footing.

Then they counted birth complications in both sets of records.

Autistic children did not have more birth problems overall.

The only difference was abnormal birth presentation, such as breech.

Non-autistic children actually showed slightly worse obstetrical scores.

Once IQ was held constant, birth events did not separate the groups.

Gillberg et al. (1983) looked earlier and saw more prenatal problems in autism.

The key gap is IQ matching. Their controls had higher IQs, so complications may have tracked with delay, not autism.

Dall et al. (1997) later used brothers and sisters as controls and also found no obstetric difference, backing the IQ-match view.

Boudreau et al. (2015) went further, splitting kids into ASD-only, ID-only, and ASD-plus-ID. They showed that perinatal risks stick mostly to intellectual disability, whether autism is present or not.

When you read a medical history full of birth complications, do not assume autism is more likely.

Complications point to broader developmental risk, not a red flag for ASD alone.

Spend your assessment time on behavioral and learning data instead of hunting birth events that do not change the picture.