[Bagor]

• Circumcision before the age of five can double a boy's risk of developing autism, controversial research suggests.
• Scientists believe the finding may be linked to stress caused by the pain of the procedure.
• The study of more than 340,000 boys in Denmark found that circumcision raised the overall chances of an autism spectrum disorder before the age of 10 by 46 per cent.
• But if circumcision took place before the age of five it doubled the risk.
• Circumcision also appeared to increase the likelihood of boys from non-Muslim families developing hyperactivity disorder.

The research, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, examined more than 340,000 boys born in Denmark between 1994 and 2003.
At the age of nine, their health was tracked - and almost 5,000 cases of ASD were diagnosed.
Professor Morten Frisch of the Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, who led the research, said: 'Our investigation was prompted by the combination of recent animal findings linking a single painful injury to lifelong deficits in stress response...and a study showing a strong, positive correlation between a country's neonatal male circumcision rate and its prevalence of ASD in boys.

He added: 'Today it is considered unacceptable practice to circumcise boys without proper pain relief.
'But none of the most common interventions used to reduce circumcision pain completely eliminates it and some boys will endure strongly painful circumcisions.'
The study goes on to discuss how painful experiences in babies have been shown - both in animal and human studies - to have a long-term effect on pain perception.
This is a characteristic often encountered among children with autism, they add.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/ar...m-ADHD-10.html


Yup, I read the title myself and had a bit of a but it's a legitimate study published in a decent journal with a good sample size.

Ritual circumcision among Danish boys is linked to an overall 46–62% increase in ASD risk in the first 10 years of life, with the upper risk estimate obtained after restriction to the period with the most complete data. More strikingly, risk was 80–83% increased in the first 0–4 years of life, an increase that was restricted to infantile autism. Non-therapeutic cir-cumcision is uncommon in Denmark outside Jewish and Muslim communities, but due to our study’s national coverage over two decades (1994–2013), findings were based on fairly solid numbers, and a series of robustness analyses confirmed the main findings.

Full Article.
http://jrs.sagepub.com/content/early...65942.full.pdf