A new study shows a link between polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS, in moms and a diagnosis of autism in children. But is there anything you can do to prevent it?

If you are one of the five to ten percent of women who have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), you might feel like you get all the bad luck—lack of ovulation that can make it hard to get pregnant, links to obesity and diabetes. And now, a new study published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry shows that the hormonal imbalance present with PCOS could raise the rate of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children. But although it’s not exactly good news, the increase in risk is not enough to be a huge concern for moms; instead, it might actually help scientists to uncover the causes of autism in order to develop earlier and better treatments.

Researchers looked at the Swedish health database to study children born over a 20-year period, including 24,000 with autism and 200,000 without. “We compared children who received a diagnosis of autism to those who did not in terms of how often their mothers were affected by PCOS,”

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