Hmmm...somehow this does not surprise me. I mean, didn't phrenology get discredited long, long ago??? Read on:
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There’s long been talk of a connection between autism risk and infant head
size, but a large new study suggests that no such link exists.
In looking at data on nearly 700 children collected at a dozen sites across
the United States and Canada, researchers said they found no evidence that large
head size serves as a predictor of autism.
For the study, data was collected on 442 children considered to be high risk
because they had an older sibling with autism as well as 253 kids with no family
history of the developmental disorder. Researchers tracked the children’s growth
between the ages of 6 months and 3 years, at which point the kids in the
high-risk group were evaluated for an autism diagnosis.
Ultimately, 77 children in the high-risk group were diagnosed with autism and
32 had developmental delay. However, no differences were seen in head growth or
height between children who developed autism and those who did not, according to
findings published online this month
in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
“There are no significant differences in the overall model comparing head
growth between (high-risk) infants (regardless of outcome) and (low-risk)
controls in the first three years of life,” the researchers wrote in their
findings, adding that “head growth was largely uninformative as an ASD risk
marker.”
Though head growth was not associated with autism in the study, the
researchers said the current findings do not include sufficient data to consider
the role that accelerated brain growth may play as a predictor of autism.
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