ReviewCurrent environmental health reports2015
Air Pollution and Autism Spectrum Disorders: Causal or Confounded?
Review in Current environmental health reports, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 67 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
67 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Exposure to heavy metals in utero and autism spectrum disorder at age 3: a meta-analysis of two longitudinal cohorts of siblings of children with autism.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2024Pooled it
- Maternal Dietary Factors and the Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Systematic Review of Existing Evidence.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2020Pooled it
- Air Pollution (Particulate Matter) Exposure and Associations with Depression, Anxiety, Bipolar, Psychosis and Suicide Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.Environmental health perspectives · 2019Pooled it
- Linking "Big" Geospatial and Health Data: Implications for Research in Environmental Epidemiology.Environmental health perspectives · 2026Article
- Prenatal Air Pollution Exposure and Autism Spectrum Disorder in the ECHO Consortium.Environmental health perspectives · 2026Article
- Review
- Environmental metal exposure and autism spectrum disorder: spatial analysis of exposure patterns and associated risk among children in Alabama.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2026Article
- Historical Neighborhood Redlining and Fertility in a Cohort of US Black Women.Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Perinatal exposure to gaseous pollutants and autism spectrum disorder in children: A nested case-control study in the nurses' health study ii cohort.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2026Article
- Causal Covariate Selection for the Regression Calibration Method for Exposure Measurement Error Bias Correction.Statistics in medicine · 2026Article
- Prenatal ozone exposure and risk of intellectual disability.Journal of exposure science & environmental epidemiology · 2026Article
- Pitfalls of Using Negative Control Outcomes in Environmental Epidemiology.Current environmental health reports · 2025Article
- Association of PMPaediatric and perinatal epidemiology · 2025Article
- Air Pollution and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Unveiling Multipollutant Risks and Sociodemographic Influences in California.Environmental health perspectives · 2025Article
- Impacts of Vehicle Emission Regulations and Local Congestion Policies on Birth Outcomes Associated with Traffic Air Pollution.Research report (Health Effects Institute) · 2025Article
- Epidemiological trends in autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders in Kazakhstan (2016-2022): a regional and national perspective.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Associations between prenatal metal and metalloid mixtures in teeth and reductions in childhood lung function.The Science of the total environment · 2024Article
- Prenatal exposure to air pollutant mixtures and birthweight in the upstate KIDS cohort.Environment international · 2024Article
- Environmental Risk Factors in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Narrative Review.Current medicinal chemistry · 2024Review
- Environmental Influences on Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorders with Special Emphasis on Seasonality: An Overview.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
7 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In the last decade, several studies have examined the association between perinatal exposure to ambient air pollution and risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These studies have largely been consistent, with associations seen with different aspects of air pollution, including hazardous air toxics, ozone, particulate, and traffic-related pollution. Confounding by socioeconomic status (SES) and place of residence are of particular concern, as these can be related to ASD case ascertainment and other potential causal risk factors for ASD. While all studies take steps to address this concern, residual confounding is difficult to rule out. Two recent studies of air pollution and ASD, however, present findings that strongly argue against residual confounding, especially for factors that do not vary over relatively short time intervals. These two studies, conducted in communities around the USA, found a specific association with air pollution exposure during the 3rd, but not the 1st, trimester, when both trimesters were modeled simultaneously. In this review, we discuss confounding possibilities and then explain-with the aid of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs)-why an association that is specific to a particular time window, when multiple exposure windows are simultaneously assessed, argues against residual confounding by (even unmeasured) non-time-varying factors. In addition, we discuss why examining ambient air pollution concentration as a proxy for personal exposure helps avoid confounding by personal behavior differences, and the implications of measurement error in using ambient concentrations as a proxy for personal exposures. Given the general consistency of findings across studies and the exposure-window-specific associations recently reported, the overall evidence for a causal association between air pollution and ASD is increasingly compelling.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.