Prenatal Sonograms and Autism

An article in The Daily Beast wondered about a connection between the more frequently used prenatal ultrasound examinations and autism. Dr. Roy Benaroch's post in Dr. Kevin Pho's widely read medical blog tries to shine some light to an evironoment filled with entirely too much heat.

... This is what’s actually reported in the article, in order of appearance:

1. References to a study showing that among low-risk pregnancies, routine ultrasounds don’t improve outcomes. This is true. It’s irrelevant to the title or thesis of the article, but it’s true. Media lesson #1: if you don’t have a study to prove your point, talk about a different study that says something else entirely.
2. Ultrasounds drive up the cost of care. Again, correct. Again, irrelevant. See point #1.
3. Women who undergo frequent ultrasounds are more likely to have a pregnancy where the baby is found to have growth restriction. Well, this is true. It’s also true that if you look outside you’re more likely to know if it is raining. Fetal growth restriction is diagnosed by ultrasound. If you don’t look, you don’t know it’s happened. But looking outside doesn’t make it rain; and looking at an unborn baby with an ultrasound doesn’t cause the baby to be small. And, in any case, this is again irrelevant to autism. See point #1.
4. The author of the article has written a book in part about her assertion that ultrasounds are to blame for what she calls “an astronomic rise in neurological disorders among America’s children.”
5. The mice studies I referenced before—those come up now, several paragraphs in, the first even remotely relevant material. The lesson here: if you are a mouse, do not get seven hours of ultrasounds a day.
6. A neurologist named Manuel Casanova shares the author’s concerns, and says he and colleagues have been testing the ultrasound-autism hypothesis for three years. However, and this is important: after several technical paragraphs about his ideas, he’s uncovered zero evidence to support this claim. What he’s saying are generalities about brain development that are true, and he’s juxtaposing this against information about ultrasounds and information about autism, but he doesn’t in any way refer to any of his or anyone else’s actual research establishing a connection. These are ideas. Ideas are not evidence.

That’s it. The whole article.

Obstetrician Dr. Jacques Abramowicz has also looked at this issue, concluding in the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine:

...analysis of in utero exposure (to prenatal diagnostic ultrasound) in humans has failed to show harmful effects in neonates or children, particularly in school performance, attention disorders, and behavioral changes. There is no independently confirmed peer-reviewed published evidence that a cause-effect relationship exists between in utero exposure to clinical ultrasound and development of ASDs in childhood. 

Personally, after being bombarded nightly by various cable news pontificators, I'd suggest that the proliferation of cable news might be associated with autism. Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.