This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
High steroid levels in utero resulted in autism spectrum disorders
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Recent study findings published in Molecular Psychiatry demonstrated a direct link between raised steroid hormones in the womb — including testosterone, progesterone, and cortisol — and a later autism diagnosis in boys.
Researchers recorded levels of five key sex steroid hormones contained in the mothers’ amniotic fluid and saw that higher levels of any one hormone was correlated with higher levels of all sex steroid hormones; crucially, children diagnosed with autism showed higher levels of four hormones — progesterone, 17-alpha-hydroxy-progesterone, androstenedione and testosterone — and cortisol in gestational amniotic fluid samples.
“Our discovery here meshes nicely with other recent findings that highlight the prenatal period around 15 weeks gestation as a key period when important genetic risk mechanisms for autism are working together to be expressed in the developing brain,” Michael Lombardo, PhD, lecturer in the department of psychology at the University of Cyprus, said in a press release.
“This result potentially has very important implications about the early biological mechanisms that alter brain development in autism and also pinpoints an important window in fetal development when such mechanisms exert their effects,” Lombardo said.
In the study, data were extracted on individuals born from 1993 to 1999 (n=19,677). To quantify the number of study participants diagnosed with autism during childhood, the researchers identified children diagnosed with official ICD-10 diagnosis codes, including childhood autism, Asperger’s syndrome, atypical autism and other or unspecified autism spectrum disorders.
Early on in data analysis, the research team noted that girls diagnosed with autism (n=24) were far fewer than boys, and those girls tended to have older fathers at the time of birth (mean age of father in autism, 37.45 years vs. mean age of father in control, 34.5 years). Girls with autism also weighed less than controls, which led the researchers to eliminate the girls with autism from the study. Further analysis was conducted using data extracted from the boys in the study.
In amniotic fluid samples from the boys with autism, liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry was utilized to measure four-pathway sex steroids (progesterone, 17-alpha-hydroxy-progesterone, androstenedione and testosterone) and the related stress-triggered hormone cortisol.
Data demonstrated that boys with autism showed elevations across all four hormones (P=.0009). This elevation in sex steroid hormones was seen to be consistent across all ICD-10 diagnostic labels for disorders on the autism spectrum.
The study researchers wrote that these data are the first to demonstrate the elevated fetal steroidogenic activity in autism.
“For the first time, we have shown that these steroid hormones are elevated in children clinically diagnosed with autism. Because some of these hormones are produced in much higher quantities in males than in females, this may help us explain why autism is more common in males,” Simon Baron-Cohen, FBA, professor of developmental psychopathology, University of Cambridge, said in a press release.
Baron-Cohen cautioned against using the data to determine preventive care or treatment guidelines for pregnant women.
“These results should not be taken as a reason to jump to steroid hormone blockers as a treatment as this could have unwanted side effects and may have little to no effect in changing the potentially permanent effects that fetal steroid hormones exert during the early foundational stages of brain development,” Baron-Cohen said in the press release, “nor should these results be taken as a promising prenatal screening test.”
Baron-Cohen emphasized that the study results could play a valuable role in identifying the fetal biological mechanisms that may contribute to atypical brain development.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts