Maternal blood folate status during early pregnancy and occurrence of autism spectrum disorder in offspring: a study of 62 serum biomarkers.
Olga Egorova, Robin Myte, Jörn Schneede and 7 others
PMID 32131900WHAT IT FOUND
Higher maternal blood folate at week 14 was linked to autism in offspring, but this failed significance after correcting for testing many markers.
Vitamin D and inflammation showed no link. The study was too small to confirm any association.
Key findings
01Higher total folate in early pregnancy was associated with increased odds of autism in the child, but the result lost statistical significance after adjusting for multiple testing.
02Maternal vitamin D and inflammatory markers like CRP showed no significant association with autism risk in this sample.
03The study was designed as a pilot with limited samples, resulting in low statistical power that cannot detect small effects.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study was a pilot with only 200 participants, giving it low statistical power to detect small but real associations. Blood samples were stored for years under non-optimal conditions, which meant 13 biomarkers could not be measured reliably and others may have degraded. The exact gestational age at sampling was unknown for all participants, so samples from weeks 7 to 18 were treated as if they were all from week 14. The study did not collect data on maternal diet, supplements, socioeconomic status, or family history of psychiatric conditions, which are key confounders. The positive finding for folate lost significance after statistical correction for multiple testing, meaning it may be a chance result.
Declared interests
The authors declared no competing interests. The study was supported by the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, and other non-profit grants.
The easy way to misread this
Do not advise pregnant patients to avoid folate supplementation based on this paper. The association with higher folate was not statistically significant after correction and the study was too small to draw any conclusions about safety or causality.