New research may shed more light on the disorder
By Deborah Jeanne Sergeant
When parents receive a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder for their child, it’s only natural to want to know why their child will face these challenges.
A new study from University of California San Diego School of Medicine has looked at possible reasons behind autism to include genetics, environmental factors and prolonged activation of the cellular stress response at important developmental periods.
Potentially, early interventions could prevent or at least minimize two of the three factors, leaving only genetics as an immutable factor, since it appears that autism is not the result of only genes or only a certain environmental exposure, but is the outcome of a few different factors.
Researchers compared the possible reason behind autism as having similar action as the development of phenylketonuria (PKU), a genetic disorder that causes intellectual disability. If PKU is discovered and treated early, nearly all children experience typical development despite the gene. The thought is that if these three factors are the cause for autism, interrupting the causes that doctors can affect will reduce cases and help lower the extent of disability in children who will experience autism.
Healthcare providers would need to institute screening protocols for parents and newborns to assess risk for autism.
The study’s findings indicate that up to 50% of all cases of autism could be prevented or mitigated with prenatal and early interventions. Even now, early intervention strategies help children achieve better outcomes.
“There is a strong genetic component to autism,” said Suzannah Iadarola, faculty at URMC in developmental and behavioral pediatrics. “There are some environmental factors but it might be more what the baby is exposed to in utero and what the mom is exposed to. It’s a neurodevelopmental disorder.”
She added that the range of genes associated with autism are not entirely known, nor is it known why these genes are present in some individuals but not in others.
The University of California study looks at autism as a possible neurometabolic and neuroimmune condition, which may help more providers and researchers look at possible tools for earlier diagnosis and interventions that can help.
Iadarola emphasized that vaccines do not cause autism and are not even correlated with autism.
“We’ve had multiple studies that show there’s no link between vaccines and autism,” she said. “That fallacy was based on a fake science article where data were completely fabricated. If it were not for the doctor who created that article and who subsequently lost his license, no one would talk about any correlation between autism and vaccines.”
Researcher Andrew Wakefield, who published the now-debunked study, looked at only 12 children in 1998 in a non-controlled study regarding the routine childhood “MMR” (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine containing thimerosal, a preservative used in MMR vaccines to prevent growth of bacteria and fungi.
Thimerosal was removed from the US vaccine supply in 2001. Infants typically receive MMR at about the developmental stage when autism traits present (although well-trained experts can spot autism traits much earlier). Parents whose children receive an autism diagnosis want answers and try to look for anything that happened that could be the cause.
The Associations for Autism and Neurodiversity states on its website that more than 40 high-quality studies of more than 5.6 million children across 25 years reach the same conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism. This viewpoint is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the American Medical Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and more than 50 other national organizations.