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The debate about what causes autism continues, with two new studies suggesting there might be more of an environmental component at play than previously thought.
The first, published online Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, suggests that at least half of what the authors call "liability to autism" might be explained by environmental factors.
Researchers considered more than 50 sets of identical twins and 130 sets of fraternal twins, in which at least one child had a diagnosis of strict autism or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Relying on both parental reports and direct observation, they then used existing twin models, which rely on the degrees of shared genetics among fraternal and identical twins to determine how much certain factors are associated with autism risk. They found that only 40 percent of the risk of autism development was owed to genetic heritability, while 55 percent was linked to environmental factors.
"The take home message is that we really have to take more seriously the environmental factors, and how these come together with the genetic factors to play a role in the etiology of autism," said Dr. Joachim Hallmayer, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Stanford School of Medicine. Environmental factors, he explained, could include anything from a virus to drugs taken during pregnancy.
Medication during pregnancy was the subject of a second study published in the same journal, which suggests that prenatal exposure to certain antidepressants may "modestly" increase the risk of ASD development.
07:09 PM on 7/04/2011
I wonder…
Is there a link between autism and the radiation that nuclear power plants put into the environment?
Here’s an NRC document showing radiation released by nuclear power plants that’s found in fish, drinking water, milk, cows, veggies, etc.
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/ops-experience/tritium/plant-info.html
Open the document and find the nuclear power plant near your home and see what radiation they found!
This can’t be good for anyone, especially a developing fetus or a young child.
07:59 PM on 7/04/2011
i think there was a food coloring that was recently implicated. not sure if there was any hard evidence as I don’t follow it closely, but it’s certainly worth looking in to. pretty much anything is except vaccines, which we’ve now ruled out
07:10 PM on 7/04/2011
It can’t be the process foods.
08:18 PM on 7/04/2011
If vaccines cause autism (which is what I believe you are implying with your reference to mercury), then why is the incidence of autism as low as it is?
12:43 AM on 7/05/2011
I also played with mercury when I was young. A few decades later I did come down from mercury poisoning. I believe it was due to environmental causes, not from playing with it as a child. But we all high different tolerances and different immune function. If everybody contracted disorders from the exact same exposure to the "elements", we would not have as many medical mysteries.
07:59 PM on 7/04/2011
How old are you? When I was a freshman in high school, 1969, our science/biology teacher not only gave us mercury to play with, he let us all take a gob of it home about the size of a quarter. We brought it home in empty pill bottles. I have no recollection of what ever happened to it.
07:58 PM on 7/04/2011
No proof. The moderators should be careful to censor such comments that spread psuedo-scientific misinformation.
07:12 PM on 7/04/2011
While I don’t doubt that taking meds while pregnant is a bad idea in general, I think the real culprit is all the mercury we directly pump into their bloodstream. Has the world gone mad, everyone knows that mercury is poison. We were warned as children never to come into contact with it.
08:32 PM on 7/04/2011
Every nurse i know asks the same question. With proper training maybe it’s fine, but out there in the world, where the rubber hits the road, we wonder how those machines are being used. As a matter of fact, my youngest daughter-in-law’s doctor refused to use the ultrasound at every pre-natal visit for this very suspicion.
08:00 PM on 7/04/2011
I’ve heard about 1,000 different theories on what causes ASDs. I think people should be cautious in trying to assign blame based on apparent correlation. Correlation does not mean causality. There are well documented cases of autism as early as the 1700s, well before ultrasound. Autism wasn’t widely accepted as a valid diagnoses until the 1980s, but was studied in the 1930s when Aspergers was first recognized. The first hand-held ultrasound unit was not distributed until the mid-1960s. Also we need to remember that an increase in diagnoses does not always mean an increase in prevalence – it can also simply mean an increase in awareness (leading to more diagnoses), an increase in knowledge among doctors and nurses who might have overlooked it before, a change to diagnostic criteria with includes a wider range of symptomology, an increase in public knowledge (leading parents to recognize signs and get their child checked), etc.
I could just as easily say that the increase in ASD diagnoses started up around the time
07:57 PM on 7/04/2011
it’s the same time period in which ssri s became more commonly used. there are many correlations, but we just need to keep following the evidence, not jenny mccarthy
07:56 PM on 7/04/2011
No…it isn’t. The widespread use of ultrasound happened to coincide with a broadening of what constitutes an autism spectrum disorder. This was during the ’80s. You can find the same correlation between autism and the widespread use of synthesizers in popular music.
07:43 PM on 7/04/2011
What an interesting question.
07:13 PM on 7/04/2011
If you look at the time line of when autism started to become almost an epidemic, you will notice it is also around the time that ultrasound became the standard in pre-natal care. I can’t help but wonder what ultrasound does to the developing brain.
07:50 PM on 7/04/2011
Well said. Saying that all autism has a singular cause would be like saying that all cancers are caused by the same thing. Same with treatment protocols. There is such a HUGE range of functioning levels. My younger sister has very mild Asbergers but is incredibly high functioning – she was valedictorian in HS and college, she’s social and funny and completely independent – no one would even know about her diagnosis unless she tells them. My cousin is on the spectrum, too, but he’s non-verbal and stims a lot, can’t tolerate touch for any extended period, etc. Every case needs such individualized treatment that it’s hard to come up with standard protocols. And I agree that it’s a big concern about these kids growing up, parents aging or dying, and what happens to them then. They need to start figuring that out BEFORE it’s a problem, or innocent people on the AS will suffer for it.
07:14 PM on 7/04/2011
Autism is such a broad disorder. I think they will find quite a few causes in the coming years. It is important to discover as many possibilities as they can…especially those which can easily be avoided. However, having read all of the recent articles about breast cancer risk increasers and risk reducers, my chances of developing breast cancer range from -300% to +200%. So the idea that we can eliminate all risk is probably not possible. I have a son with autism who developed normally until he was almost 2 years old when his functioning changed overnight...lost all of his language and eye contact, etc. I know three couples with triplets, two have two of the triplets with autism and one without and one couple has all three triplets with autism….all are fraternal and all are boys. I personally beleive a lot of autism is an over active immune response to something in the environment…a virus, an allergic reaction to an immunization, pollution, toxin or whatever. What causes autism is an terrifically important topic. What is seldom addressed is how are we going to treat, employ and house this large number of inidividuals with a broad spectrum of capabilities as well as needs as adults. The education system is trying to address students with this diagnosis but once they graduate the community and government are pretending that they don’t exist.
05:50 PM on 7/04/2011
It would seem that this notion that drugs are a trade off is iffy. I think what trade off.
03:21 AM on 7/05/2011
There are bad studies that are published all the time. There are very badly designed studies that end up killing people (seen it first-hand in a case that ended up reported here on huffpo).
The real issue is sending stories like this to the media– articles that are little more than headlines-– bearing very premature results.
I spent 15 years working in mental health as a professional. Not saying that I am an expert, but I have seen countless theories come and go, and all sorts of diagnostic trends. Including ‘autistic spectrum disorders’ in the mix is absurd, as they are the disease of the week.
07:18 PM on 7/04/2011
Good point. One thing though about science alot of people…tho not sure you..don’t undrestnad. Because science is peer reviewed, it’s the kind of thing they’d think of to test to rule out. Like the controls were depressed women not on antidepressants, perhaps.(we could check). Scientists design studies trying to narrow out that kind of thing because they want to have the data clean and actually say something and stand up to both public scrutiny and the scrutiny of other, rival, PhD level scientists who are looking for flaws in their methodology. If they didn’t think of it, it likely wouldn’t get into a scientific journal to be published (the board on the journal woulnd’t publish it because they need to uphold thier reputation). and IF a bad study like you propose got published, it would be pilloried by rival peers of scientists for the flaw you suggest and the scientists doing the study and the journal that published it would be humiliated.
you think like a scientist and anything is theoretically possible. It’s good to question studies then look to be sure they covered it. But at same time, people need to know peer review process. Not that scientists are inherently more moral people but the rivalry in the field makes other scientists poised to test out each study to be sure thier rivals didn’t screw up. IT’s all about reputation as a good scientists (for scientists and for journals). You get ahead, or not, from that.
06:54 PM on 7/04/2011
That’s a thought….my step sister was adopted as a baby from a third world country and has autism. Her mother would not have had access to anti depressant drugs but I could certainly understand her being depressed.
06:31 PM on 7/04/2011
Sounds like you’ve considered it.
So conduct a study.
05:52 PM on 7/04/2011
Huh… that almost was an article…. but more realistically, it was the world’s longest headline.
Anyone ever consider that having a depressed mother might "cause" autism (rather that a mother using SSRIs)…?
06:00 PM on 7/04/2011
How does this study differ from earlier ones that found higher heritability?
09:34 AM on 7/05/2011
And throwing another "fact" into the mix: the psychiatric nurses I speak with also identify depression having a direct correlation with extremely high intelligence. Is it a brain function, brain structure, or a social reaction to being so much more intelligent than most of the peer group? Where DO cause and effect merge on the issues?
07:12 PM on 7/04/2011
I am sure that many people on antidepressants do not have brain abnormalities tho some may.
06:58 PM on 7/04/2011
That is my theory too. There are lots of pathways that bring us to autism.
06:42 PM on 7/04/2011
thank you for your post … u made me think from a different perspective : )
06:05 PM on 7/04/2011
SSRI’s are anti-depressents. People who take anti-depressents have brain anomalies or "different wiring." I have a child with Autism and have never taken SSRI’s but my husband has many family members that do for bi-polar type conditions. Perhaps it isn’t the drugs themselves but a genetic predisposition. Someday I think the will find that Autism is more than just one condition.
06:29 PM on 7/04/2011
Adherence to the theory of genetic causality led to a lot of wasted time when the autism rate began to spike — beyond anything that could be explained by genes — 15-20 years ago. Now they’re beginning to sort through changes during this time-span that could account for greatly increased autism rates …. now one in 70 males. That includes cell phones, vaccination combinations, maternal SSRI use, chemicals related to plastics, including polyurethane foam beds loaded with flame retardants, even OTC analgesics, which were recently found by Danish researchers to be more anti-androgenic than phthalates….
06:07 PM on 7/04/2011
This is hardly startling news as written. All the developmental disabilities can be specifically or generally attributed causally to some degree to such products and situations. If what this says is that there now exists the ability to isolate and link (more) specific causal factors to more specific outcomes, then that indeed is progress. It wasn’t clear to me.