Published on 12, July, 2020
I diddnt know till this evening that this epeleptic drug can cause autism, now though i did not take this when pregnant,do you think this could stay in your system or do something that causes it? i started taking this medication when i was around 15 to the age of 18 and wondering if this possibley could be the cause? however it should have well dissapeared out my system????/
I should add that the background frequency of autism births runs at about 1.13%. At first that might look like more than doubling the incidence.
However the Danish Study was from 1996 to 2006, a twenty year span. They were claiming five times the risk, but had a much lower background incidence figure, possibly averaged over the last thirty years. The Liverpool University study showed a higher risk, but for a much smaller sample, about a twelfth the size.
Had these figures had that impact we ought to have seen significantly higher incidence over the Danish timescale back to 1996. It might be though that this figures in the increase towards the current 1.13% in that timescale, but really a great deal more research would be needed.
The drug has been taken by large numbers of women at pregnancy for more than thirty years. What may be important is the proportion of pregnant women taking it, which I couldn't readily find. If it was an issue I would have thought we would have heard a lot more about it.
NAS at least should have made an issue of it.