Prenatal exposure to phthalates and autism spectrum disorder in the MARBLES study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Evidence from experimental and observational studies suggests that prenatal phthalate exposures may be associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We examined whether prenatal phthalate exposures were associated with an increased risk of ASD. METHODS: We quantified 14 metabolites of eight phthalates in 636 multiple maternal urine samples collected during 2nd and 3rd trimesters of pregnancy from 201 mother-child pairs in MARBLES (Markers of Autism Risk in Babies - Learning Early Signs), a high-risk ASD longitudinal cohort. At 3 years old, children were clinically assessed for ASD and classified into three diagnostic categories: ASD (n = 46), non-typical development (Non-TD, n = 55), and typical development (TD, n = 100). We used multinomial logistic regression to evaluate the association of phthalate metabolite concentrations with ASD and Non-TD. RESULTS: Most associations of phthalate biomarkers with both ASD and Non-TD were null, with the exception that monoethyl phthalate (MEP) was significantly associated with an increased risk of Non-TD (per 2.72-fold relative increase in concentration: Relative risk ratio (RRR) = 1.38; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.01, 1.90). When stratified by prenatal vitamin use during the first month of pregnancy, among mothers who took vitamins, ASD risk was inversely associated with mono-isobutyl phthalate (MiBP, RRR = 0.44; 95% CI: 0.21, 0.88), mono(3-carboxypropyl) phthalate (MCPP, RRR = 0.41; 95% CI: 0.20, 0.83) and mono-carboxyisooctyl phthalate (MCOP, RRR = 0.49; 95% CI: 0.27, 0.88), but among mothers who did not take prenatal vitamins, Non-TD risk was positively associated with MCPP (RRR = 5.09; 95% CI: 2.05, 12.6), MCOP (RRR = 1.86; 95% CI: 1.01, 3.39), and mono-carboxyisononyl phthalate (MCNP, RRR = 3.67; 95% CI: 1.80, 7.48). When stratified by sex, among boys, MEP, monobenzyl phthalate, MCPP, MCNP, and sum of di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate metabolites (ΣDEHP) were positively associated with Non-TD risk, but associations with ASD were null. Among girls, associations with both ASD and Non-TD were null. CONCLUSIONS: Our study showed that phthalate exposures in mid- to late pregnancy were not associated with ASD in children from this high-risk ASD cohort. Further studies should be conducted in the general population without high-risk genes to confirm our findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".