I wonder, are we simply underdianosing the women with autism as usual?
And I wonder if there's a correlation between drinking diet sodas (as opposed to naturally sweetened?) and getting your children evaluated for autism (like, say - diet soda drinkers are on average wealthier, and that correlates with better access to healthcare and more parental involvement, thus reducing underdiagnosis of autism?)
Given how sensitive obstetrics are to even small risks and how prevalent aspartame is, I'd be surprised if there is a genuine causal link here of such strong statistical effect. I mean, how many people use zofran? And yet obstetrics we're limiting its use in pregnant women just for a very very small alleged increase in the risk of heart problems in the baby.
Abstract:
> No statistically significant associations were found in females.
Discussion section:
> Several possible explanations exist for the lack of associations among girls in our study; these include insufficient statistical power, inherent sex dimorphism in response to DS/aspartame exposures, and possibly even the recruitment strategy itself, which, by including as controls neurotypically developing female siblings of male cases, increased the likelihood that any early-life exposures found to be risk-enhancing among their brothers with ASD might appear to be negatively associated with ASD in the analyses for females. Further research with larger sample sizes for both sexes and prospectively gathered data would be important for investigating this association further in females and in all participants combined.
This study didn't find an effect in females, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.