Losec and risk of autism?

[Kilminchy123]

Hey guys,

my little girl is 18 weeks. She has been unsettled since birth and has reflux but always appeared in severe pain. Crying during and after all feeds, constant arching back, cough, cold like symptoms etc. She was trialled for CMPA and this doesn’t appear to be the case (she’s on goats milk at the moment but also partially breastfed and I am not dairy free anymore). She was prescribed Losec at 8 weeks, 3mg per kg (highest dose which I didn’t realise at the time) even though her weight is perfect. Just the excessive crying etc. This tablet does work wonders for her however, I have recently seen an ‘association’ rather a relationship between PPI’s and autism especially if taken during pregnancy (i didn’t) or during the first 6 months of life. Anyone’s baby taken this medication and been fine?

My daughter took omeprazole from about 10 weeks until 6ish months. Tbh in hindsight I don’t actually think she did have reflux was just a fussy baby which she grew out off about 6months when she was able to move but I was a desperate FTM! It never really done anything for her. Anyway she’s almost 4 and is absolutely definitely not autistic! For what it’s worth I also occasionally took it in pregnancy when heartburn was particularly awful. From my very limited understanding of autism, there’s no known definite cause but genetics play a large part. Try not to worry.

My daughter has been on omperazole since 8 weeks and since 17 weeks has always been on the maximum prescribable dose. She is nearly 4 and not once has the risk of autism been raised, she is under 2 paediatricians for her reflux as it's hard to manage. She also has no signs of autism

Autism is genetic.
We 'see' more of it now as parents are older (+ risk) & diagnoses are widened. I'd give your baby the meds that they need now & try not to worry x

An unsettled baby is more likely to be autistic. If an unsettled baby is more likely to be given this medication then could that account for the association later on? There are also known correlations between autism and digestive issues. Disclaimer I am neither a medic nor know anything about this specific drug but I am autistic myself so take notice of what's going on in research about that.

There is a common phrase in science which is correlation is not causation

Which means that just because two factors often appear at the same time that one is caused by another. It could be that people with autism all used omperazole. This could mean that omperazole causes autism, it could mean autism causes you to need omperazole, it could mean that cause C causes you to need omperazole and also causes autism. It also can mean that cause D results in the need of omperazole and cause E causes autism and it's just a coincidence that in some people there is cause D that causes reflux and cause E that results in autism

There's an AI on detecting skin cancer. The team thought that they had trained it to detect the difference between cancerous and noncancerous moles. What they hadn't accounted for is that all the cancerous moles photos were taken in a clinical setting so had a rule in the shot. The noncancerous photos didn't. What they AI learnt was cancerous moles have a ruler next to them.

Under 4 months 40% of babies will have experience some form of reflux. At 1 year 10% still have reflux, approximately 4% babies overall. A large proportion of those will be medicated with ppis such as omperazole. 1% of children are diagnosed with autism. Reflux is a much more common problem so you will see children that had reflux treatments and autism but you will also see many more reflux treatments and not have autism or other neurodiversity.

You can take 1000 children with autism and 1000 children without and finding a long list of meds and habits that are common to both lists. Humans are so complex, even over the course of the first 5 years two children will have very different exposures to medications, viruses, bacteria, pollution, foods, stress, relationships, sleep, and everything else we experience on a day to day basis even without factoring genetics and epigenetics. All of those needs to be teased out to truly work out cause and effect. It is a real nightmare and when done without proper rigor you get incorrect correlations that makes the headlines but then the corrected science or the counter argument isn't as attention grabbing or "interesting" so is restricted to the footnotes and fear about drugs and vaccines and food and everything else end up rife