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Developmental delays are estimated to affect about half of children with congenital heart disease (CHD), but links between autism and CHD are difficult to study because of the rarity of both conditions. To address this, researchers used a very large military health system database to examine the records of tens of thousands of children.
Autism cases (8760 children) were defined as children who had ICD-9 diagnostic codes of autism over two or more clinical encounters. These children were each matched with three controls (totaling 26,280 children) in the database by age, sex, date of birth, and enrollment time frame. Cases and controls were then reviewed for 54 different ICD-9 codes for CHD and related surgical procedures.
After adjustment for …