Autism Linked to College-Educated Parents

A recent posting by Josh Clark (Discovery News), NEWS: Autism Clusters Tied to College-Educated Parents, describes a recent epidemiological study by the University of California, Davis, that found clusters of autism in regions of Southern California with high concentrations of highly educated parents.

The study by Dr. Karla Van Meter, published in the journal Autism Research, examined the birth records for 2.4 million California births between 1996 and 2000, 10,000 of whom were later diagnosed with autism. Van Meter and colleagues found a difference in the rate of autism in areas of highly educated parents to be almost double that of nearby areas with lower levels of parental education. They also found that the prevalence of autism increased with the amount of education.

There is still considerable debate about the causes of autism. While, there is no logical mechanism for the education of parents to directly cause the disorder, other studies have shown a correlation between the age of parents and the incidence of autism. Highly educated parents tend to delay child rearing, partially in order to finish school and partly to give themselves time to establish themselves in the competitive and demanding careers for which they are training. Therefore, one possible explanation for Van Meter’s observations is that high degrees of education correlate with delayed child rearing and that it is actually the advanced age of the parents that is the causative factor.

Ironically, college-educated middle class California families are among those most likely to skip vaccinations out of the irrational (and refuted) fear that vaccines cause autism.

Modern School
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/

Shitty design imho.

College educated parents are more likely to have the money and the desire to take their kid in for such testing.

You don't see problems where you don't look for them.

After carpooling for a few shopping trips it was obvious he had OCD and declining health was pushing him into hoarding. She asked him if he had ever had a diagnosis and he said no, He was raised in AL. She told him life would be a lot easier if he could understand why he did things and perhaps find alternatives that were not so isolating. So he did go get some counseling.

He stopped the hoarding and now has a lot of friends where neighbors shunned him before he got some help.

First thing I thought before I looked at the actual study was that college educated parents would see this as something that could be looked into and improved where average parents would look at is as simply bad behavior to be tolerated or ignored.

to help her neighbor!

And a good example of what the study might be missing. From what I understand, the increase in the diagnosis of autism is partially due to how autism is defined. Some behaviors that might have once been considered a personality quirk are actually a form of autism.

You can find dozens of correlative factors, but autism is too complex a disorder for a study like this to even remotely start speculating on causation. Birth records give very little real information, and there is no actual way of following a highly mobile population based on static records of who was where at the time of their birth.

Poor Dr. Van Meter. I very much doubt she intended her work to be used this way.

disgustedly,
Bright

conditions.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19307110
Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids. 2009 Apr;80(4):221-7.
Plasma fatty acid profiles in autism: a case-control study.

Wiest MM, German JB, Harvey DJ, Watkins SM, Hertz-Picciotto I.

Division of Epidemiology, Department of Public Health, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA. mwiest@uidaho.edu
Abstract

Increasing evidence is mounting in support of fatty acid metabolism playing a role in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. In order to definitely determine whether fatty acid concentrations were associated with autism, we quantitatively measured 30 fatty acids from seven lipid classes in plasma from a large subset of subjects enrolled in the Childhood Autism Risk from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) study. The CHARGE study is a large, population-based case-control study on children aged 2-5 born in California. Our subset consisted of 153 children with autism and 97 developmentally normal controls. Results showed that docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, 22:6n-3) was significantly decreased in phosphatidylethanolamine. Dimethyl acetals were significantly decreased in phosphatidylethanolamine and phosphatidylcholine as well. These results are consistent with the only other study to measure dimethyl acetals in children with autism, and suggest that the function of peroxisomes and the enzymes of the peroxisome involved with fatty acid metabolism may be affected in autism.

PMID: 19307110

I know this is anecdotal, but it seems that the higher the parent's IQ, the more chance of an autistic child. There are several extremely intelligent families in my small college town with autistic kids. I think it's the brain chemistry of highly intelligent people, though, and not because of age.

When one's genes have programmed one to excel in hard sciences, law, etc...and women can finally go to schools that teach to their strengths, and they marry their classmates and reinforce those particular genetic traits in the next generation...

Whamo. Too many "intelligence" genes. Too many copies of the DNA that creates genius, and you've gone a gene too far.

It's takes an ability to deal with genetic reality to admit this was a breeding error, instead of looking to pin it on "vaccines" or other shit science.

In previous generations, women like me would have been spinster teachers, unlikely to marry anyone at all, let alone someone at our level of ability.

Just my luck to meet a fellow carrier...and produce one very highly intelligent normal child, and one severely handicapped, high functioning autistic one. And then, Daddy decides he can't handle it...

The shadow of autism shaded several generations in both families, but it wasn't reinforced...our first child got every bad gene in the pool. The second only got the bad eyesight and allergies, a combination that pairs with high IQ, by the way...

There's no "scientist," "lawyer," or "intelligence" gene and success in either of those professions doesn't indicate intelligence, but education and class.

Your post implies eugenics.

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:eyes:

colleges and universities?

College educated parents are more likely to notice problems in their children and thus seek treatment (and have the funds to seek treatment).

Kind of like the disparity in mental health statistics between whites and black. Whites are more likely to seek help, while blacks (culturally) are more likely to suffer in silence. But if you look at the statistics without this reporting distortion in mind, you'd conclude that whites are crazier than blacks.