Parental Exposure to Occupational Asthmagens and Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder

asthmagen;autism spectrum disorder;occupational exposure;Epidemiology

Singer, AlisonNavas-Acien, Ana ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: asthmagen;    autism spectrum disorder;    occupational exposure;    Epidemiology;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/40682/SINGER-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a diverse neurodevelopment disorder manifested by repetitive or stereotypic behaviors, and interaction and communication impairments.The etiology is not well understood, but both genetic and environmental factors are suspected to influence ASD.There is evidence linking both environmental exposures and maternal immune activity during pregnancy to ASD, yet few studies have examined occupational agents that can trigger immune responses in relation to ASD.Asthmagens are agents that are capable of triggering or exacerbating asthma.The aim of this dissertation was to examine the association between prenatal parental exposure to asthmagens in the workplace and ASD in two population-based case-control studies.Methods:Our first case-control study included 437 ASD cases, 660 general population (POP) controls and 628 children with non-ASD developmental delays (DD) with employed mothers from a United States ASD case-control study, the Study to Explore Early Development (SEED).Maternal jobs were coded according to the International Standard Classification of Occupations 1988 (ISCO-88).The second study sample included 6,830 cases and 29,670 controls in maternal analyses, and 7,799 cases and 32,335 controls in paternal analyses, selected from the Danish Registers.We linked children in the study population to maternal and paternal Danish International Standard Classification (DISCO-88) job codes.In both studies, we estimated occupational asthmagen exposure by linking job codes to an asthma-specific job-exposure matrix (JEM).Since exposure misclassification is a concern in our analyses, we also illustrate an application of a Bayesian correction for exposure misclassification, as a dissertation chapter. Results: In the SEED study, we saw no evidence of a marginal association between maternal occupational asthmagen exposure and ASD.We observed an inverse association between maternal and paternal occupational asthmagen exposures and ASD in the Danish study.We attribute this inverse association to possible unmeasured confounding or selection bias.After correcting for exposure misclassification, our results were consistent with no detectable association between occupational asthmagen exposure and ASD, but also demonstrated the potential importance of accounting for exposure misclassification.Conclusions:Overall, our results are consistent with the conclusion that there is no measurable association between occupational asthmagen exposure and ASD.