Developmental vitamin D deficiency increases foetal exposure to testosterone.
Asad Amanat Ali, Xiaoying Cui, Renata Aparecida Nedel Pertile and 6 others
PMID 33298169WHAT IT FOUND
Rat mothers fed no vitamin D had higher testosterone, and their male foetuses had higher brain testosterone.
The enzyme that breaks down testosterone was reduced in those brains. This is an animal study of a biological mechanism. It provides no evidence that vitamin D deficiency causes autism in humans.
Key findings
01Maternal vitamin D deficiency increased testosterone in the mother's blood but did not increase androstenedione or corticosterone.
02Vitamin D deficiency increased testosterone in foetal brains, and this was statistically significant only in males.
03The reduction in testosterone breakdown was linked to lower expression of the aromatase enzyme and higher methylation of its promoter in male foetal brains.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
This is an animal study using rats. It does not measure human outcomes or prove that vitamin D deficiency causes autism in people. Estradiol, another hormone linked to autism risk, was not measured. The protein levels and actual activity of the aromatase enzyme were not assessed, only the gene expression. Brain samples and amniotic fluid samples came from different groups of animals, so the relationship between the two could not be calculated directly. Progesterone levels were not measured in the mother's blood.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research. No commercial conflicts of interest were declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret this as clinical evidence that vitamin D supplementation prevents or treats autism. This study describes a biological mechanism in rat foetuses. It does not test vitamin D status in humans with autism, nor does it show that correcting vitamin D levels changes any clinical outcome.