Researchers studying autism found that a lack of allopregnanolone caused autistic behavior in mice . This raises the simple solution for autism: get a shot during pregnancy. It also raises the specter of parental guilt because premature babies are more likely to be deficient in allopregnanolone. As the article says, 1 in 10 babies are premature, 1 in 59 have autism. So maybe there's a direct connection to how long the baby stays in the womb? There's a simple answer to whether this allopregnanolone is going to be the key factor in curing autism. Since premature babies are far more deficient, we would expect far more autism in premature babies. Less allopregnanolone, more autism. That's the connection we need to explore. Let's start with the less extreme cases of prematurity. B abies born less than 37 weeks are considered premature . So let's look at babies born between 27 and 37 weeks. Well, " studies tend to use different cutoffs to define prematurity, mak