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The researchers found that children exposed to pesticides before birth and in their first year of life were at risk of more than 10% of the risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
The risk of diagnosing autism with a mental disability, which poses a problem of cognitive, social and practical skills, is 50%.
The research team at the School of Public Health at the University of California at Los Angeles called on public health institutions to make changes to reduce the exposure of pregnant women to harmful pesticides.
However, experts are questioning these controversial findings and claim that previous studies have shown that the spectrum of autism is largely genetic and that a small fraction of cases are due to environmental factors.
Previous studies have linked pesticide exposure to abnormal brain development, but few have studied its impact on the risk of autism.
The team examined some 3,000 autistic patients, including 445 mentally disabled people, and compared them to data from more than 35,000 non-autistic participants.
Participants were born between 1998 and 2010 in the Central Valley of California, an agricultural region, and about 80% of the children were men.
Using data from the state-of-the-art insecticide registry, the researchers analyzed the exposure that patients could have had before and during delivery and found that they had been exposed to 11 common insecticides.
The team also found that the risk of autism was slightly increased in children exposed to pesticides by about 8%.
However, the chances of diagnosing autism with a mental disability, the most severe cases, were 50% higher.
"Our findings suggest that the risk of gonaditis may increase with prenatal exposure to many common insecticides that have influenced neural growth in experimental studies," write the authors of the study.
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