Many friends asked me this question:
1- This Study was done by. Abramowicz JS ; J.Ultrasound Med. 2012 Aug;31(8):1261-9.Ultrasound and autism: association, link, or coincidence? He found no association at all.
2- This article By Jennifer Margulis that caused parents to be worried.
Are Ultrasounds Causing Autism in Unborn Babies?
Scientists are uncovering disturbing evidence that those sneak peeks at baby could damage a developing brain. That is what Jennifer Margulis had to say.
Jennifer Margulis is the author of The Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Baby Before Their Bottom Line (April 16, Scribner). She was talking about baby ultrasound, prenatal ultrasound, 2D, 3D and 4D , both diagnostic and For baby face ultrasound. She is not talking about people go to do abdominal and other parts of the body ultrasound.
( Einstein was Autistic).
This is an article about a patient who done an ultrasound , and she said “Toward the end of my first pregnancy, a doctor ordered an “emergency” ultrasound because she believed I was measuring small. She turned to go to her next client before I could talk to her about it, muttering that she suspected “intrauterine growth retardation.” She also said ;
“My husband and I sat in the waiting room, flooded with anxiety. The scan showed the baby was fine. It wasn’t until years later when I started researching and writing about pregnancy that I learned that ultrasound scans have not been shown to be any more effective in predicting intrauterine growth restriction (doctors these days try to avoid using the word retardation) than palpation of the pregnant woman’s abdomen by an experienced clinician. The same summer my daughter was born, Marsden Wagner, an obstetrician, scientist, and former director of Women’s and Children’s Health at the World Health Organization, wrote: “There is no justification for clinicians using routine ultrasound during pregnancy for the management of IUGR.”
Most women look forward to multiple ultrasounds because they are lulled into the assumption that this technology will catch potentially fatal abnormalities—such as a heart defect—early, so they can be fixed. When doctors tell pregnant women they will only get one or two scans, some are terribly disappointed, feeling that they won’t be able to bond as effectively with the baby or worrying that the doctor won’t know that the baby is growing normally.
But one study of 15,151 pregnant women published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that an ultrasound scan does not improve fetal outcome. The study, which was conducted by a team of six researchers over almost four years, compared pregnant women who received two scans to pregnant women who received scans only when some other medical indication suggested an ultrasound was necessary. The results showed no difference in fetal outcomes.
Susan Boyle is Autistic.
“This practice-based trial demonstrates that among low-risk pregnant women ultrasound screening does not improve prenatal outcome,” the authors conclude. Even when the ultrasound technology uncovered fetal abnormalities, the fetal survival or death rate was the same in both groups.
What the authors did find, however, was that routine ultrasounds led to more expensive prenatal care, adding more than $1.4 billion to the cost of caring for pregnant women in America & Canada each year.
Another study, of 2,834 pregnant women, published in the Lancet, showed that the babies of the randomly chosen group of 1,415 women who received five ultrasounds (as opposed to the group of 1,419 women who had only one scan at eighteen weeks) were much more likely to experience intrauterine growth restriction, a scary combination of words that means the fetus is not developing normally. Ironically, intrauterine growth restriction is one of the conditions that having multiple ultrasounds is supposed to detect.
Though the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that obstetricians discuss the advantages and disadvantages of having an ultrasound scan with pregnant patients, ACOG does not explicitly recommend the screening. ACOG explains that ultrasound may reduce fetal mortality rates because women who discover they are carrying fetuses that are incompatible with life will often choose abortion, but ACOG also specifies that ultrasound has not been proven to be effective for reducing infant mortality in any other way.
Their policy statement continues: “Screening detects multiple gestation, congenital anomalies, and intrauterine growth restriction, but direct health benefits from having this knowledge currently are unproven. The decision ultimately rests with the physician and patient jointly.”
The authors of the definitive, exhaustive, 1,385-page textbook for obstetricians, Williams Obstetrics, take a similarly conservative stance about ultrasound and do not explicitly recommend it for low-risk pregnancies: “Sonography should be performed only with a valid medical indication,” the authors write, “and with the lowest possible exposure setting to gain necessary information.”
Yet doctors and other birth providers take great exception if low-risk pregnant women refuse to be scanned. In 2004 when Lia Joy Rundle, a mom of three from Mazomanie, Wisconsin, was just a few weeks pregnant with her second child, she changed insurance providers. The new obstetrician reviewed her paperwork. “We might be able to do a quick ultrasound today, if the machine’s available,” she said. “Then you can take a look at your baby.”
Though they were planning to have a 20-week ultrasound, Lia and her husband saw no benefit to doing an early ultrasound and felt there might be some risk. But when they declined the scan, the obstetrician insisted there was no way to get an accurate due date without it. “Look at him, he’s fine,” she scoffed, pointing at their 1-year-old son. “How many ultrasounds did you have with him?”
In 2006, Pasko Rakic, M.D., a neuroscientist at Yale University School of Medicine, found that prenatal exposure to ultrasound waves changed the way the neurons in mice distributed themselves in the brain. Rakic and his team do not fully understand what effect the brain cell migratory alteration might have on brain development and intelligence, but they noticed, rather alarmingly, that a smaller percentage of cells migrated to the upper cortical layers of the mouse brain and a larger percentage to the lower layers and white matter.
At first reluctant to publish these results because they were preliminary and might discourage pregnant women from accepting medically necessary ultrasounds (the mice studies are part of a years-long double-blind experiment that is testing the effects of ultrasound on primate brains), Rakic decided the findings were too significant to ignore and concluded that all non medical use of ultrasound on pregnant women should be avoided. “We should be using the same care with ultrasound as with X-rays,” Rakic cautioned.
Manuel Casanova, a neurologist who holds an endowed chair at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, is one medical doctor who is listening. Casanova contends that Rakic’s mice research helps confirm a disturbing hypothesis that he and his colleagues have been testing for the last three years: that ultrasound exposure is the main environmental factor contributing to the exponential rise in autism.
When Casanova began researching autism 15 years ago he discovered that neuroscientists had not been able to isolate the differences between an autistic brain and a normal brain, unlike with Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s, where the damage in the brain has been localized. Casanova realized that in order to understand both the causes and the potential cures for autism, scientists needed first to figure out where in the brain of autistic children damage was occurring.
Since no damage to individual neurons had ever been isolated, Casanova theorized that we might not be examining the brain in the right way. He began looking at the brain as a system instead of isolated parts.
Bill Gate is Autistic.
It is these columns of neurons working together, which scientists now call “mini columns,” that are responsible for higher cognitive functions like facial recognition, joint attention (if I turn my face and look somewhere, a child will turn and look too. Not because I told the child to look, but because the normal human brain is wired to do so), and much more. Joint attention is one of the many qualities that appear to be abnormal in the brains of autistic children. Casanova recognized the imperative of studying the circuitry within the brains of patients with autism and other psychiatric conditions. He and his colleagues found something surprising: brains of autistic patients have a 10 to 12 percent higher number of mini columns as compared to non autistic brains.
They also found another anomaly. During the normal formation of the human brain, cells divide in the hollows (ventricles) of the brain and then migrate to the surface (cortex), acquiring a vertical organization into columns. At the same time, other cells migrate tangentially and meet up with the columns. Casanova calls these migrations “a very fine ballet,” and explains that the cells that migrate tangentially have an inhibitory role, acting like a container to keep the cells in the mini columns from spilling into other parts of the brain. Compared with other animals, even primates, the neurons in the human brain have to travel a much longer distance, and during this long migration there is, unfortunately, ample opportunity for things to go wrong.
Casanova explains: “You know that a shower curtain keeps water inside of the bathtub. If you have a defect in the shower curtain, water will spill out of the tub. If the radial migration is not coupled with the tangential migration of inhibitory cells, then the minicolumns will have a faulty shower curtain of inhibition and information will no longer be kept within the core of the minicolumns, it will be able to suffuse to adjacent minicolumns and have an overall amplification affect. Actually the cortex of autistic individuals is hyper excitable and they suffer from multi focal seizures. One third of autistic individuals have suffered at least two seizures by the time they reach puberty.”
Translation: As the “mini columns” brain cells move outward, if the complementary cells that inhibit them don’t keep pace, the information in the minicolumns will suffuse out to surrounding cells, causing a chain reaction that can result in seizures.
John Lennon was Autistic.
Ultrasound waves, Casanova explains, are a form of energy known to deform cell membranes. In fact, in the early 1990 s the FDA approved the use of ultrasound to treat bone fractures because ultrasound increases cell division. Some cells in the human body are more sensitive than others.
Among the most sensitive cells? Those stem cells in the brain that divide and migrate.
Casanova’s hypothesis: Prolonged or inappropriate ultrasound exposure may actually trigger these cells to divide, migrate, and form too many mini columns. They divide when they’re not supposed to and there are no inhibitory cells to contain them.
Human ear micro hair cells are sensitive to ultrasound wave.
There are more neurologically damaged children in the United States today than ever before. As of 2007, 5.4 million children (the entire population of Finland) have been diagnosed with attention disorders, and today one in every eighty-eight children in America has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Japan, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Australia, France, Germany, Canada, and the United States are among the industrialized nations that are seeing a huge, troubling, and seemingly inexplicable rise in the numbers of autistic children. These countries are geographically and culturally different. Their vaccine schedules are different. The labor and delivery experience is also different: In Scandinavian countries and Japan many more pregnant women tend to choose un medicated vaginal births.
But all these countries do have one thing in common: the vast majority of pregnant women are getting regular prenatal care and being exposed to ultrasound in the form of anatomy scans and fetal-heart monitoring. In countries with nationalized health care, where virtually every pregnant woman is exposed to multiple ultrasounds, autism rates are even higher than in the United States.
The ultrasounds done on pregnant women today use sound waves with eight times the intensity used before 1991. This time period roughly coincides with the alarming increase in the incidence of autism within our population. Even more disturbing, the majority of technicians using ultrasound machines (as many as 96 percent) do not understand the safety margins they must adhere to in order to make sure the fetus is not exposed to harm.
As ultrasound equipment gets smaller, less expensive, and more portable, it has also become available—without any regulation—to anyone who knows how to surf the Internet. Want to see or hear your baby? You can buy your own ultrasound machine on Amazon or eBay. “Most people believe it’s just about taking pretty pictures,” Manuel Casanova says, his voice thick with regret.
“Are Ultrasounds Causing Autism in Unborn Babies?” and “Scientists are uncovering disturbing evidence that those sneak peeks at baby could damage a developing brain.”
My answer to these articles and more than 2000 papers and booklets in the market .This is a media hysteria, sky-is-falling reporting is damaging adult brains. As Emily said, the internet seems to cause anxiety disorders, and it’s articles like this that get everyone worked up. May be Too much Dr oz show. So let me clear things for you from the Public health side.
First: autism is a complex neuro developmental disorder that causes problems with communication, social interactions, and repetitive behaviors, starting very early in childhood.
Bill Murray is Autistic.
The best current evidence shows that whatever’s gone wrong, it’s going wrong very early in life, possibly even before babies are born. There are strong genetic influences, and there is still a lot we don’t know about what causes autism and how to best treat it.
Autism is especially scary because we’re hearing so much about it. It may be as common as 1 in 50 boys, and it seems like the incidence is rising dramatically—but a lot of that apparent increase is because of an ever-widening definition of autism, combined with efforts at early detection and what’s called “diagnostic substitution” (kids who would have once been diagnosed with mental retardation or other disorders are now diagnosed with autism.) But whether the true rates of autism are increasing or not, it’s certainly a huge problem for families and communities, and increased awareness, early detection, and early treatment are urgently needed.
So what about ultrasounds? It is true that prenatal ultrasounds are being used more commonly, and the rise in their use generally follows the trend in the observed rise in autism over the last 30 years. But that observation, alone, doesn’t really show that one thing causes the other. After all, over the last 30 years we’ve also seen a dramatic increase in cell phones, cable television, frozen food, personal computers, and many other technologies. We’ve also seen a decline in the prevalence of cursive handwriting, licking stamps, and the Sizzler Steakhouse chain. Are any of these connected to autism, or to each other? Maybe. Maybe not.
Is there some basic science about ultrasounds that makes a connection with autism plausible? Again, maybe-sort-of. Research on the effect of ultrasounds on developing mouse brains has shown a difference in the way brain cells move and migrate—but those studies looked at ultrasound exposures for many hours a day, and mouse brains develop much more quickly than ours do. We’ve also got much bigger brains, and much more tissue between our babies and an ultrasound probe than mice. Lab research on the effects of ultrasound on moving cells or bubbles is similarly unconvincing—something to think about, but a huge leap from there to “ultrasounds cause autism.”
Several studies have looked for any direct biological effect of fetal ultrasounds on human children. A 1978 report looked at about 1000 infants of mother who received amniocentesis, ultrasound, or neither—it found no developmental effects of ultrasounds. In 1984, a different group looked at 425 children, finding no biologically significant differences among those who were and were not exposed to diagnostic ultrasounds. There are also many studies looking at potential ill-effects of ultrasound technology for diagnostic use in babies,and children,and there are none caused by the ultrasound itself.
This is what’s actually reported in some of the articles :
References to a study showing that among low-risk pregnancies, routine ultrasounds don’t improve outcomes. This is true. It’s irrelevant to the title or thesis of the article, but it’s true. Media lesson #1: if you don’t have a study to prove your point, talk about a different study that says something else entirely.
Women who undergo frequent ultrasounds are more likely to have a pregnancy where the baby is found to have growth restriction. Well, this is true. It’s also true that if you look inside Tim Horton you’re more likely to see a police officer eating a breakfast. Fetal growth restriction is diagnosed by ultrasound. If you don’t look, you don’t know it’s happened. Looking at an unborn baby with an ultrasound doesn’t cause the baby to be small. And, in any case, this is again irrelevant to autism. See point #1.
The mice studies I referenced before—those come up now, several paragraphs in, the first even remotely relevant material. The lesson here: if you are a mouse, do not get seven hours of ultrasounds a day.
Neurologist Dr. Manuel Casanova shares the author’s concerns, and says he and colleagues have been testing the ultrasound-autism hypothesis for three years. However, and this is important: after several technical paragraphs about his ideas, he’s uncovered zero evidence to support this claim. What he’s saying are generalities about brain development that are true, and he’s putting this against information about ultrasounds and information about autism, but he doesn’t in any way refer to any of his or anyone else’s actual research establishing a connection. These are ideas. Ideas are not evidence yet.
Now, there is a reasonable point that I will agree with—prenatal ultrasounds do not necessarily improve the health of babies, and they’re often unnecessary, it cost more one billion dollars a year to the health Authority in USA AND CANADA..
Dr. Roy Benaroch, MD ,Many other Radiologists and scientists said that Vanity ultrasounds to take 3-D pictures of unborn babies use far more energy, and it’s not implausible that there could be ill-effects—things like this are not medical uses, and ought to be discouraged until there is definitive proof of their safety.
According to Australian family physician Dr. Sarah Buckley, MD in her book Gentle Birth, Gentle Mothering, ultrasound adversely affects body tissues in three primary ways:
- Heat , Cavitations. Acoustic streaming ,Heat
The sonar beam can cause heating in the tissues beings scanned. During normal pregnancy, increases in whole-body temperature of up to 4.5 degrees F (2.5 C) are presumed to be safe, and research suggests that elevations of tissue temperature up to 1.8 – 2.7 degrees F (1.0 to 1.5 C) caused by ultrasound are also safe.
Sylvester Stallone was autistic.
The degree to which ultrasound machines raise temperatures in the tissues depend on which tissues are scanned. Bone heats more than soft tissue, which in turn heats more than fluid. Heating is also dependent upon exposure time, the intensity of the machine, and whether the transducer is held stationary or moved frequently.
Doppler ultrasound, which uses continuous rather than pulsed waves, has been shown to CAUSE SIGNIFICANT HEATING– especially in the baby’s developing brain. A recent study suggests that heating in late-pregnancy fetal tissues exposed to normal pulsed and continuous Doppler ultrasound may be high than what is regarded as safe : 2.5 to 10.4 degrees F (1.4 – 5.8 C) respectively.
Autistic
A 1997 study found that significant temperature increases can occur at or near to bone in the fetus starting in the second trimester, if the beam is held stationary for more than 30 seconds in some pulsed Doppler applications. This in turn can lead to heating of sensory organs in-cased in bone.
Though both animal and human studies have shown that temperature elevations can cause abnormal development and birth defects, so far human studies have not shown a direct causal relationship between diagnostic ultrasound exposure during pregnancy and adverse effects to the developing baby.
Autistic.
Current limits in the U.S. have risen dramatically, and now allow intensities of up to 720 mW/cm2 – more than 7 times the limit in 1992. This means we have no large, population-based studies examining the effects of ultrasound at the much higher intensities commonly used today.
This is highly problematic, because, according to a 2001 review called “Guidelines and recommendations for safe Use of Doppler Ultrasound in Prenatal Application “
When modern sophisticated equipment is used at maximum operating settings for Doppler examinations, the acoustic outputs are sufficient to produce obvious biological effects, e.g. significant temperature increase in tissue or visible motion of particles due to radiation pressure streaming effects. The risk of inducing thermal effects is greater in the second and third trimesters, when fetal bone is intercepted by the ultrasound beam and significant temperature increase can occur in the fetal brain.
Autistic
A 2007 study. reached a similar conclusion:
(1) thermal rather than non thermal mechanisms are more likely to induce adverse effects in utero, and (2) while the probability of an adverse thermal event is usually small, under some conditions it can be disturbingly high.
Cavitations
Cavitations occurs in tissues with significant pockets of gas (such as the lung and the intestine) after birth. There is no consensus on the significance of cavitations effects in human fetal tissue, but some evidence suggests that mammalian tissue may contain micro bubbles that are susceptible to cavitations effects.
Acoustic streaming ;Acoustic streaming involves a jet of fluid created by the ultrasound wave, which causes a mechanical shearing force at the cell surface. While the effect of this force is not fully understood, research suggests that it may change cell permeability and have adverse effects on both early and late prenatal and postnatal development.
Animal studies suggest diagnostic levels of ultrasound may cause harm
One study found brain hemorrhages in mouse pups exposed in the womb to pulsed ultrasound at doses similar to those used on human babies.
Another study found exposing adult mice to dosages typical of obstetric ultrasound caused a 22% reduction in rate of cell division and a doubling of the rate of apoptosis of cells in small intestine.
Other research has found that ultrasound induces bleeding in the lungs among other mammals, including newborns and young animals.
AIUM CONCLUDED; There exists abundant peer-reviewed published scientific research that clearly and convincingly documents that ultrasound at commercial diagnostic levels can produce lung damage and focal hemorrhage in a variety of mammalian species…. The degree to which this is a clinically significant problem in humans is not known.
I want to be clear: we can’t extrapolate the results of these animal studies to humans, and so far, many longer-term human studies have not shown harm to the fetus from diagnostic ultrasound exposure. However, when the stakes are this high (i.e. the health of our children), I believe the animal study results warrant caution and further study before plowing ahead with ultrasound technology.
Some human studies also suggest harm…
Single or small studies on humans exposed to ultrasound have shown that possible adverse effects include premature ovulation, preterm labor or miscarriage, low birth weight, poorer condition at birth, prenatal death, dyslexia, delayed speech development, and less right-handedness.
This is especially true for Doppler ultrasound, which is used in specialized scans, fetal monitors and handheld fetal stethoscopes (sonicaids). Ordinary scans use pulses of ultrasound that last only a fraction of a second. The machine uses the interval between pulses to interpret the echo returns. Doppler, on the other hand, uses continuous waves – leading to much higher levels of exposure than with pulsed ultrasound.
A large UK study found that healthy mothers and babies that received two or more Doppler scans to check the placenta had more than 2 times the risk of prenatal death compared to babies unexposed to Doppler.
An Australian study found babies that received more than 5 Doppler’s were 30% more likely than babies that received routine (pulsed) ultrasound to develop intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR). This is ironic because Doppler is often used specifically to detect IUGR.
A 1996 study split 2,743 women into two groups: one that received a single Doppler at 18 weeks and further scans only when clinically indicated, and another that received 5 Doppler readings during pregnancy. When compared with the regular group, and after adjusting for other confounding variables, babies in the intensive group tended to be shorter when measured at birth and at 2-3 days of age. There were also reductions in the circumferences of the chest, abdomen and mid-arm, and in the skin-fold thicknesses of the triceps, para-scapular and sub scapular regions – although these differences weren’t statistically significant.
A later study in Lancet found similar effect on fetal growth in women receiving repeated ultrasound exams, although measures of growth and development later in childhood (up to age eight) were similar in both groups.
A case control study of 72 children who had undergone a formal language evaluation found that children with delayed speech had a higher rate of ultrasound exposure in utero than normal controls.. Their findings suggested that a child with delayed speech was twice as likely to have been exposed to prenatal ultrasound. (Note that this is a correlation and doesn’t prove causation.)
One of the reasons it’s difficult to make any clear determinations from the research is that the methodology of many of the trials is faulty. For example, in a randomized controlled trial in Sweden in the late 70 s that found no differences in hearing, vision, growth or learning at age 9 in kids exposed and unexposed to ultrasound, 35% of the supposedly unexposed group actually had a scan. This means there was no true control group.
In fact, there are very few studies at all comparing outcomes between women who have received no ultrasounds at all and women who have received ultrasound during pregnancy. This is the kind of research we need to make an accurate determination of the effects of ultrasound on mothers and developing babies.
Another problem which I mentioned earlier in the article that casts doubt on current safety assessments is that scanning intensities used today are up to 6-8 times higher than they were in the 1990 s, when all of the large population-based studies assessing ultrasound safety were done. This means we have no data on the large population level indicating whether ultrasound scanning at the frequency and intensity commonly practiced today is safe.
In a 2002 publication of the prestigious journal Epidemiology, the authors concluded: Until long-term effects can be evaluated across generations, caution should be exercised when using this modality during pregnancy.
there is sufficient evidence that multiple pulsed ultrasound scans, or as few as two continuous wave Doppler scans, or any ultrasound scan performed by an unskilled operator may cause harm. There is also a pressing need for large epidemiological studies to be performed using the higher ultrasound intensities commonly used today.
When making a decision to perform any medical diagnostic test or procedure, benefits must always be weighed against risks. It’s rarely a black or white issue. Clearly, if ultrasound was 100% safe with no potential for harm, there would be little medical reason not to perform routine ultrasound during pregnancy.
But the evidence indicates that ultrasound is not risk-free, so we are forced to weigh whatever benefits routine ultrasound might provide against the potential harm it could cause. That harm could be physiological – including the effects we’ve covered in this article – and it could also be psychological. And of course psychological effects like stress and anxiety very quickly produce real physiological changes in both the mother and the baby.
The authors of the 2010 Cochran review on ultrasound remind us that:
Subjecting a large group of low-risk patients to a screening test with a relatively high false positive rate is likely to cause anxiety and lead to inappropriate intervention and subsequent risk of Iatrogenic (relating to illness caused by medical examination or treatment) morbidity and mortality.
Translation: giving all women ultrasounds may end up introducing unnecessary stress and anxiety, which in turn can produce real complications that would not have otherwise occurred. The screening for potential abnormalities can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.Routine ultrasound also increases the likelihood that more tests will be performed, which could also increase the risk of complications.
And then there is the new trend of non-medical fetal ultrasound (also known as ‘keepsake’ ultrasound), which is defined as using ultrasound to view, take a picture, or determine the sex of a fetus without a medical indication. This practice involves long exposures using 3-D and 4-D ultrasound techniques, which have not been studied adequately, and do not provide the patient with medically appropriate data.
For this reason, major organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, AIUM and the FDA do not support keepsake ultrasound.
That being said, there is no evidence for a link between ultrasounds and autism, none whatsoever. It’s not being uncovered. It’s just not there yet.
Thank you for reading.
Steve Ramsey, PhD ,Public Health ;MSc Medical Ultrasound, BSc Diagnostic Imaging. PGD- Natural health. Calgary. Alberta – Canada.