Mothers of Children with Autism have Different Rates of Cancer According to the Presence of Intellectual Disability in Their Child.
When autism appears without intellectual disability, moms show a small but real jump in cancer hospital visits.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bouck et al. (2016) looked at hospital records for mothers of children with autism.
They split the kids into two groups: ASD only, and ASD plus intellectual disability.
Then they counted how many of these moms had cancer-related hospital visits.
What they found
Moms of children with ASD but no ID had slightly more cancer admissions.
The same rise did not show up for moms of children who had both ASD and ID.
The signal was small, but it stayed after the team adjusted for age and income.
How this fits with other research
Tsakanikos et al. (2006) and Porter et al. (2008) looked at adults, not moms.
They found no extra psychiatric risk for people who had both ASD and ID.
At first this seems opposite, but they studied different outcomes in different age groups.
Boudreau et al. (2015) widens the picture: autistic adults carry higher rates of almost every major medical and psychiatric condition.
Gillberg et al. (2010) add that these adults also die younger, mostly from epilepsy or accidents.
Together the papers hint that when ASD travels without ID, both the person and the mother may face extra biological load.
Why it matters
During intake, ask if the child has ID in addition to ASD.
If the answer is no, note the mother’s cancer history and urge routine screenings.
One extra question can guide pediatricians and oncologists to watch earlier.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID) are neurodevelopmental disorders with strong genetic components. Increasingly, research attention has focused on whether genetic factors conveying susceptibility for these conditions, also influence the risk of other health conditions, such as cancer. We examined the occurrence of hospital admissions and treatment/services for cancer in mothers of children with ASD with or without ID compared with other mothers. After linking Western Australian administrative health databases, we used Cox regression to estimate the hazard ratios (HRs) of any hospitalisations and treatment/services for cancer in these groups of mothers. Mothers of children with ASD without ID had greater risk of admissions for cancer (HR 1.29 [95 % CI 1.1, 1.7]), and for treatment/services in particular (HR 1.41 [95 % CI 1.0, 2.0]), than mothers of children with no ASD/ID, while mothers of children with ASD with ID were no more likely to have a cancer-related hospital admission than other mothers. Mothers of children with autism without ID had increased risk of cancer, which may relate to common genetic pathways.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2016 · doi:10.1007/s10803-016-2847-9