Science journalism
Why would the Mayo Clinic update their article about family planning to remove the reported risks of having children too close together?
I am asking here because I’m wondering if there is a better source for this information, as a parent.
The Mayo Clinic article about family planning used to have a section where it discussed the risks of beginning a new pregnancy within 6 months of giving birth. It was reported that doing so put the second child at a greater risks of developing certain conditions, including schizophrenia and autism. The article went on to acknowledge that parents over 35 may feel additional pressures for family planning and recommended that they wait 12 months after a pregnancy to get pregnant again.
I’ve referenced that article several times. Recently that section of the article was removed. Here’s an old comment of mine where I had quoted the article.
Did they cave to political pressure? So many health websites are being censored now. This does sound like information that Catholics and pro-life folks wouldn’t care for. I hope I’m wrong.
I asked ChatGPT to compare the articles and here’s what it found
Edit: It’s strange that the people in this thread really see the value of ChatGPT here but with my other comments about it, they act like ChatGPT is the AI equivalent of AskQuora.
It is a tool that needs to be used responsibly but it is an excellent tool.
Just talk to it about random ideas you have, ask it questions about what it can do, and then just ask it to try things. Sometimes it gets factual info wrong, ask for sources for things. But it’s gotten so much better over the last year and only continues to improve.
I highly recommend playing around with it! It’s not perfect by any means but it can help you to make certain (non-healthcare) decisions. I recently took two screenshots of baby lotions and asked it to tell me which one would be better for baby eczema.
Edited: I removed mention of the specific product I purchased because the comment was getting downvoted and perhaps what I wrote was against the rules
Just an fyi you're supposed to avoid food containing products on eczema skin as it can sensitize them to allergens and potentially cause allergies. There was a post here not long ago about lotions including oats. Our dermatologist recommends Cera Ve moisturizing cream and it works way better than anything else we've ever used.
That may have been one of posts! I appreciate you mentioning that, but the study that I read specifically studied babies who were NOT yet introduced solids. The belief is that when certain allergens found in baby lotions (such as oats and avocado - which are common food additives used in lotions) are introduced to baby through the SKIN prior to being introduced to the GUT it may cause an inflammatory response and may lead to the development of food allergies and skin sensitivities to those food additives.
Because of that study we did not use any lotions or any other products (soaps ect) with food additives until recently once our baby was adequately introduced to those foods.
(Please take all of this with a grain of salt, I’m a parent, not a scientist).
If you know of a different study I would love to read it!
1 - That’s simply not true. ChatGPT knows more about eczema than I do, and when prompted correctly can pull information from the appropriate sources to make a recommendation
2 - This was a very low-stakes request. I’d already narrowed it down to two products, both products were name-brand and were sold by an authorized seller (e.g. Aveeno lotion sold at Target … not an alphabet soup company on Amazon), and both were aligned with the recommendations provided by my pediatrician.
That’s simply not true. ChatGPT knows more about eczema than I do
This is objectively false. No AI knows anything at all; literally all it does is assemble piles of rules for what combinations of symbols are statistically likely to appear in what order in the stolen data that was used to train it.
These days, many of those piles of rules are often good enough to more-or-less accurately reproduce true things from somewhere in its stolen data set, but
this does NOT prevent an AI from confidently producing lies and utter bullshit, and
even when it does manage to produce useful things, AI has no more knowledge than you have USBs in your brain. Even a parakeet mimicking human words has more actual knowledge and understanding than an AI does.
I second this! Ours also recommended Cera Ve, specifically the one with the screw on lid, she said the pumps make the lotion less effective. Only thing that works for both hubby and babies eczema, and we’ve tried prescription creams.
Yes, however, Cera Ve does sell a pump bottle for their moisturizing cream. You can buy them at Costco and it comes in a two pack, one with the pump lid and one that's just a tub. I bought a few pump tubs and now I usually just buy the flat lid tubs and refill the pump tubs. Much cleaner and easier!
The differentiation our dermatologist told us was that lotion typically has a pump bottle, and you don't want to use lotion (something about the alcohol content being irritating?), and moisturizing cream usually doesn't have a pump bottle. I had no idea lotion and moisturizing creams were different until my son was diagnosed with eczema!
That’s interesting. And not part of the info we were given. I appreciate that! I will bring it up next time and see what she says, but thank you for that tidbit!
I agree that it's impressive what it can do! But I try to limit my use of chatgpt due to its high energy consumption, and therefore impact on the environment.
There is build-in compare tools on word, pdfdoc, etc if you have any of them, and it consumes much less energy.
I'm so glad to hear people talking about this! I'm not sure there's enough awareness of that issue. I do use LLMs sometimes but I avoid it if it's something a normal tool can do. For the same reason. Plus it definitely has its limitations with its answers too - you need to use it carefully!
At work in an all-staff call I actually asked whether we'd done an environmental impact assessment on our use of AI (we're being encouraged to play around with it a lot) and the question didn't make it through the chat moderators 😕
I just finished my Master’s in Information Science and my last few courses involved AI and LLMs. We actually predicted (granted this was before the election) that we would start seeing environmental impact statements on things made with AI within the next decade. But right now I don’t think it’s something people care to think about. Possibly because we are barely through the early-adaptors phase. But it does make me feel better that there are people like you helping keep it in the conversation! I’m hoping to spend a lot of time with handwritten text recognition training and I know the work being done in that field is really impressive but ethical considerations still need to be addressed!
Do you have a source? I’m seeing conflicting information.
For instance - the statistics on water usage I’m seeing aren’t clear “how” the water is used. In a coolant system, the water won’t even leave the system - so it’s not really “used”.
Water can’t be “destroyed”, right? It just comes back into our ecosystem as steam or precipitation.
(Please correct me, I’m a parent not a scientist. I’d love to better understand)
Water can’t be “destroyed”, right? It just comes back into our ecosystem as steam or precipitation.
"Water usage" isn't about water being "destroyed." It's about the throughput and inputs of the local water infrastructure, which are limited.
Every gallon that is used to cool a machine while it steals artists' work or produces slop or cheerfully lies (or even does the rare bit of actually-useful work) is a gallon that you can't drink; it's a gallon that you can't use to wash dishes; it's a gallon that you can't water crops with.
Sure, the system can process and transport a new gallon for you... but this costs energy and other resources, and if consumption expands enough then it will cost even more resources to expand the system. (Would you be happy to have your taxes or your utility costs raised just so tech bros can use AI to sloppily replace actual human expertise?)
Worse, there's a limit to how much water can be gotten into the system at all from local sources. River water converted to steam isn't destroyed, but it does reduce the amount of water in the river -- read up on the Colorado River for a hint of why this can be bad. Same for lakes and aquifers and so on and so forth.
Quite possibly pre-eclampsia risk. A long gap between pregnancies increases the risk. There are other risks but pre-eclampsia is the main one I hear about.
It might be that newer studies no longer support this. You could try to inquire with them on why the article has been updated. It sure would be interesting.
I've seen a couple of the popular OBs on social media discuss that it's not as important as we previously thought but I haven't seen data to back that up.
Yeah. It’s different everywhere. The waiting until 18 months has a lot to do with your body needing that time to replenish nutrients, and is recommended whether or not you have had a vaginal or cesarean birth.
My provider said I could start trying at 9 months PP (18 months between deliveries) and I had a planned c-section.
All this to say, everyone’s risk tolerance is different. I know women who’ve had 3 c-sections in 4 years who’ve had no issues. And women who’ve had back to back vaginal deliveries a year apart, also no issues.
So I could see that being part of the reason why Mayo Clinic would update this.
The cited references for the articles are different. The new one cites to an August 2024 paper. I’d look to see if the new information is from that 2024 paper.
Thank you for pointing that out, I hadn’t noticed that difference in the references! Here is ChatGPT’s explanation upon analyzing the two lists of references:
To elaborate a little on this for other people new to AI, ChatGPT (free version) doesn’t have unfettered access to the internet so it can’t pull and parse links. It does use web crawlers to train, but that is different.
While you are correct that ChatGPT has to be promoted appropriately to get correct answers, in this case it is correct:
Schummers et al. (2018) – Article 1
This study examined the association between short interpregnancy intervals (IPIs) and pregnancy outcomes, considering maternal age. The researchers found that short IPIs are linked to increased risks of adverse pregnancy outcomes across all age groups. Notably, the study highlighted that women aged 35 and older face higher risks of maternal mortality or severe morbidity with short IPIs.
Quote:
“The findings of this study suggest that short interpregnancy intervals are associated with increased risks for adverse pregnancy outcomes for women of all ages.” 
Liberman et al. (2022) – Article 2
This research focused on the prevalence of specific birth defects in relation to both short and long IPIs. The study found that both short and long intervals are associated with an increased prevalence of several birth defects, such as gastroschisis and tetralogy of Fallot.
Quote:
“In this population-based study, we observed increased prevalence of several birth defects with short and long IPI.” 
Maybe the research previously linking close gap to schizophrenia & autism is outdated and disproven. That would be 1 reason why they’d rewrite that whole section
They are probably having their articles over a certain age updated by technical writers or marketers specializing in SEO. It was probably another one who wrote it originally. Their team tells the contracted marketers what they are looking for and then they have a subject matter expert check it for anything incorrect. These articles are never expert written only expert reviewed. They can be very good but it's not like you are actually following a single individual or even enteties writing with their own consistency and knowledge base.
Lots of people do, it's often fine. It's just that maybe some risk factors increase to both mom and baby.
But an increase in risk factors is all relative. If a risk is 0.1% you can double it at be at 0.2% likelihood and many people would find that acceptable. (Making up numbers here). But say a risk is typically 5% and doubling it gets you to 10% likelihood. Then maybe you wanna consider if that's worth it to you.
Ideally though, you do want pregnancy to be further apart mostly to protect yourself. Things like your calcium reserve should ideally be replenished before having another baby.
I couldn't find any recent study that addresses this concern at all. Most studies within the last 2 years that focused on Interpregnancy Intervals, have only focused on immediate or short term maternal health or immediate baby related health risks such as low brith weight or preterm birth etc. I also couldn't find any new studies published within the last 2 years that focused on IPI connected to autism or schizophernia. The most recent Meta Analysis was done in 2023, looked at 8 different studies and found that "both substantially short (< 24 months) and excessively long Interpregnancy Intervals/IPIs (> 72 months) are significantly correlated with an increased risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder"
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u/Vertigobee Feb 15 '25
Did they cave to political pressure? So many health websites are being censored now. This does sound like information that Catholics and pro-life folks wouldn’t care for. I hope I’m wrong.