Why are so many kids autistic?

As someone not very informed about the issue, it strikes me as wildly abnormal that so many children are allegedly autistic. Can the rate I heard quoted on television (1 in 166 kids) really be that high?

Can someone clue me in, because it sure sounds improbable to me, and I'm not certain what the truth is. I know this will rankle some, but it's interesting to me that so often "autistic" goes along with "gifted". But as I said, I'm not sure what to conclude, and insight would be appreciated!

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:spank:

Scandinavia, wouldn't you think the rates would go down?

They haven't.

Plenty of children with normal functioning brains (thought processes, whatever) will try to fool adults.

And as most quacks like to read from a book rather than looking into insight (like Libertarians and the utterly stupid, they alter facts to fit their beliefs), most of them aren't worth the money they demand.

Hell, one I saw a few years ago used my sartorial taste to help peg me "schizo-typal". (She was... unique... in that assertion, may I add...) But I digress. You should have seen her outfits, she liked to dress as a Late-70s prostitute with those boots and skirts... (Note: She apparently resigned 2 years later... I can imagine why...)

and lets not forget all of the GM foods. No one knows what we are doing to ourselves

link to a pic?

Just kidding of course...

There would be too many dull requirements for a 1-3 year old to put up with in terms of doing speech and occupational therapy. A good developmental specialist could see through it.

My son was diagnosed at age three, but we had it figured out before then, and I worried about him occasionally when he was a baby. He had me with him all the time as a SAHM, and a stimulating environment.

There have been some breakthroughs in Retts Syndrome research indicating the genetic link and that there may be some treatment hope.

But doctors who've been practising for many decades are seeing more youngsters with problems that weren't widespread years ago.

and sent to doctors by a society who does not accept differences any more. All kids in the same mold or they must be sick.

Actually, it is very reveling that the US has a lot more diagnosed autistic kids than other occidental nations.

On the plus side, we're trying to help kids who might otherwise have fallen through the cracks. On the minus side, we may be pathologizing some normal differences in our efforts to help everyone be normal.

Obviously, this doesn't apply to children who have severe autism, which is clearly a disability. And we are diagnosing more of these children too, so the change isn't entirely due to our new concept of the autistic spectrum.

It is something serious and terrible for the people who are touched and their families. However, I do not know the statistics considering them to know how much it has increased in the last 30 years.

However, what is certain is that the huge increase that is usually claimed by the media is at least in part linked to the redefinition of autism, with its good and bad aspects.

Asperger's and PDD, less severe conditions. If I were a child today, I'd probably have an Asperger's diagnosis. (I was a precocious nerd with hyperlexia.)

Teachers will tell you that they're seeing more of this -- it's not just more diagnoses.

I don't have a dog in this hunt, but as a scientists, the jump to root causes and solutions sticks in my throat.

The increase in autism is, however, correlated to a clinical change in definition in the late 1970's as well as the reduction in funding for special education programs during the Reagan and 41 era. This funding increased during the 90's a bit, but NCLB has sucked up lots of education funds. So, the same thing is happening again.

So, the increase these teachers are seeing is because they have over-mainstreamed these children with needs, and 15 - 20 years ago, the teachers simply didn't see these kids. Now, over the last 5 years the same phenomenon is occurring.

Earlier diagnosis, but no place to specially educate these kids mean teachers see more of them. My wife was a special ed teacher who saw the changes occur at exactly these intervals of policy and medical changes.
The Professor

twenty years ago that are now recognized as Asperger's or PDD? It's not a mere fad to relabel the situation. Instead of punishing kids these days, teachers are learning how to reach them.

be some common culprit to all those kids.

may be part of the problem. I read this in the KC Star wish I had a link for you.

Or is it vaccines?

I always forget which phony answer is in vogue.

That's some intense stuff, if you've ever experienced it -- it is clearly something going on in the brain.

That borderline stuff, who knows.

My girlfriend used to babysit a young girl with severe autism (rarer in girls than boys, btw). She was about 9 years old and couldn't speak. That wasn't just bad parenting. I'd say it was probably something genetic.

bornagainhooligan is so virulently, insanely pro-vaccine (ANY vaccine, it seems) that it comes out in inappropriate ways sometimes -- without the :sarcasm: smilie and all that.

normal.

First, people talk about "Autistic Spectrum" which relates a lot of problems, some light and that could probably be ignored, other very severe (the ones that we normally associate with autism).

In my experience, also, a lot of people call autistic people who have communication problems, but are not autistic. I have the experience myself with my younger son, who has a language disability, but is definitively not autistic (according to the professional psychologues who saw him). However, every now and then, well-intended people, including teachers, insist he is autistic because it is easier to put him in a well-known category.

Of course, there is also those parents who are in a fairly dramatic situation with kids really severely touched, and every nuance in between.

Many of those kids would have just been considered "odd" in the old days.

But if there's a clear increase in severe cases, I'd blame environmental toxins (maybe mercury, maybe something else). There are just so many more chemicals we're in contact with than ever before...

is that our overall genetic make-up has been corrupted and polluted by constant assault by known and unknown pollutants. Starting with the Boomers and their children who are now bearing many of the new autistic generation we have ingested an unfathomable amount of teratagens. Autism may just be one way this is expressed, just like the mutant multi-legged frogs.

that pollution was a lot worse forty years ago.

I've often wondered if there's something that isn't considered overtly bad and less regulated that may have an unknown effect on unborn children or even on the parents preconception that they pass along.

Time will tell, but this is just one of many possible things I've considered in relation to this increase.

chromosomes and DNA. I think some kinds of pollution may have improved over time and some may have gotten worse. The rivers may not be chrome yellow but that doesn't mean that genetically altered tomatoes aren't causing unforeseen consequences on us. Codfish have never seemed particularly outgoing to me.

including several of us Evil DUers :hi: There is no lowered life expectancy in autism, so I always wonder what is supposed to become of us when we turn 21; do the doctors spray "The Typical" on us or something? :sarcasm:

Better diagnosis may be a factor, but it alone doesn't account for the rise in incidence. I suspect some sort of environmental cause, but if I had the whole answer, I'd be back in the field, pulling down some major grant bucks at a top university.

I think it will eventually come out that there is a link between our environmental pollution and autism. As to what specific pollutant I have not a guess.

I don't blame vaccines nor do I think it's largely related to a broader description of autism. Instead I feel that it is something we've done to the environment that is the cause.

My own experience:

Over a two year period of time, three different clients had pregnant female employees or children of employees. All three kids turned out to have autism. (Two still don't talk at five years of age, the the third is severely limited.)

While three autistic kids by themselves may be unremarkable, the fact that this happened to 100% of the pregnancies I knew about has to be more than just a coincidence.

Probably product placement in movies.

I haven't got any evidence for that, but I don't like it.

Still seems pretty high a number.

It messes up they're brain development.

and it's been extensively researched.

Fr the record, I'm just throwing this out there. I'm the father of a 10-year old high-functioning.

But I saw this and said "bingo".

It's just a hunch.



http://kikipotamus.wordpress.com/tag/autistic-spectrum-disorder/

My son is autistic (high-functioning--Asperger's)...He goes to a small school, maybe 100 kids max in K-5, and there are at least two other autistic boys there.

Probably the most likely explanation is that the range of the autistic spectrum has been greatly expanded since the 90s--it now includes a lot of kids who in the past would have just been thought of as odd or weird. Kids like my son are highly verbal (verbally gifted, really), so "autism" nowadays does not just refer to kids who never or rarely talk.

and kids with the mildest form, Asperger's Syndrome, are now being diagnosed as autistic rather than identified as quirky or weird or super nerds. I once worked at MIT, and the place was full of them.

Autistic kids used to be dismissed as retarded, lumped in with all sorts of other kids with different diagnoses.

The latest research has identified it as a congenital disease with a strong genetic component. It's hoped that this research may lead to an eventual cure.

(donning asbestos suit and waiting for antivaccination zealots to show up)

increase over that period of time. My oldest had no kids with Asperger's in any of her classes. Five years later, there was one boy in my child's grade. Another five years, and my third child had three in his class. And now he's in a new school and this time has two.

He draws a very plausible link between the mercury-based preservative used in multi-dose vials of the routine vaccines children get--and the number of vaccines children now receive in the first months of life--and the rate of autism. To respond to one of these posts, 1 in 166 is HUGE. And the uptick is quite recent and seems tied to the increase in the number of vaccines children now get. I can't recall the year that the change in medical guidelines was implemented, but I believe it was in the late 80s/early 90s.

If any of you is really interested a quick google search should turn up a lot of information. And it's worth looking into. Big Pharma seems complicit in all of this. The preservative is (or was--I'm not sure if they've stopped using it or not) only used in the multi-dose vials, which are cheaper per dose than single-dose vials. And if you know anything about big Pharma, you know that all their prices in the US are unbelievably jacked up--whatever the market will bear, you know. I'm in marketing (for which I may go to hell, but that's another story) and have done a lot of work for the Pharma companies in our area because that's where the work is. The more you know, the more disgusted you are sure to become.

Smoke and mirrors.

Of course mercury is safe to consume.:sarcasm:

And there was no difference in the incidence of autism among children immunized after that time.

immunizations and autism, and why it's unlikely.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=222&topic_id=17583&mesg_id=17583

Seriously though, I do think that there may be a link between the amount and intensity of a child's early exposure to television.

When I was a kid the TV was a black and white box about the size of my computer monitor. The earliest I can even remember being allowed to watch it was at about 4 years old.

Today, people set their 2 year olds in front of their HD big screen with 5.1 surround and let the TV do the babysitting.

It's a fact that watching TV alters your brain waves. Beta waves are suppressed and alpha and theta waves increase.

"Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state.

They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders. The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate."

http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/faculty/profiles/Waldman/AUTISM-WALDMAN-NICHOLSON-ADILOV.pdf

While to predisposition to autism is likely genetic and/or influenced by exposure to substances in utero, it makes perfect sense that early TV watching would be an environmental trigger.

I hope someone does a follow up on looking at autism rates in Amish children.
I'd like to see if the anecdotal evidence could be supported by actual numbers.

In the mean time, if folks out there have small children, they may want to consider killing their television.

as presumably they're exposed to far fewer types of toxic chemicals as well.

actually the TV watching that did the damage. It's always possible that children with autistic tendencies are more drawn to TV. But limiting TV is a good idea anyway, for a lot of reasons.

That's the point of the article. Assuming you buy their methodology, their results are only based on increases in TV watching "because of a rainy day". The paper claims to control entirely for "innate" differences in tendency-to-watch TV.

It would not shock me. People have no clue about brain development in children..and that until they are in their late teens the brain is still creating connections, etc. Even something as seemingly benign as bas eyesight can make permanent changes in the brain and how kids relate to the world. TV is used as a babysitter and small kids should not be subject to hours of flashing lights, talking screens, etc. But they are...

It is definitely something that needs to continue to be monitored though.

Various hypotheses have been put forwards, and most of them have been hotly challenged.

The only thing generally agreed on is that more frequenct recognition and diagnosis probably plays a big part in the rise in the number of recorded cases, although how big is debated.

using epidemiological data. There seems to be a genetic predisposition that is triggered by early exposure to toxins.

Especially striking are two maps of Texas, one showing the areas with the highest incidences of autism and another showing the areas with the highest numbers of toxic emissions and toxic waste dumps. There's an almost perfect overlap.

Evidently, some children have shown marked improvement after undergoing chelation therapy to remove toxins from their blood and then having their diets modified.

Read the article, It's on newsstands now.

My suspicion is that some people are genetically predisposed to not be able to metabolize and waste-out the toxins they encounter. this is probably causing a teratogenic effect in the fetus, such as a chemical blocking a gene from being turned on that would prevent such symptoms.

would seriously seem to be an issue worth looking into.

There is too much stimulation, causing some to withdraw.

Doctors and psychologists are much more autism-conscious than in the past. Nowadays, at one end of the scale, children who might have been described as anything from 'just a bit odd' to 'maladjusted' are diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and related disorders. At the other end of the scale, children with very low IQs are increasingly diagnosed as autistic if they exhibit particular problems with social and communication skills, whereas 30 years ago they might simply have been described as 'mentally handicapped'. Moreover, 30 or 40 years ago, a significant number of children were diagnosed with 'childhood schizophrenia' or 'childhood psychosis'. It is now generally believed that psychosis rarely manifests before adolescence, and that most children who had such diagnoses were probably autistic.

Another likely reason for the rise in cases is that autism is commoner in children who survive extreme prematurity and other life-threatening prenatal and perinatal complications, which might well have proved fatal 30 years ago.

There may also be something in the environment, but nothing has yet been demonstrated. It's unlikely to be vaccines (extensively researched by now), or television (unlikely cause of a disorder which shows symptoms by the age of 2 in most cases); but there are other possibilities. I suspect that if some pollutant *does* contribute in any way, it probably does so prenatally, and that research should focus more on environmental factors that may affect pregnant mothers, as compared with those that affect children in the second year of life or later.

People who never married, or were married for a short time, never had kids, and pursued lives of strange obsessions supported by parents, siblings, and other family members.

But it was never labled as anything, and to a very large extent covered up.

That was my own experience too. I was asked to take time off from college twice, and they weren't really asking me, they were telling me to leave and maybe come back when I got myself together. But nothing was ever written down, no records were kept, and this was seen as a courtesy because the stigma of mental illness might be harmful to me in the future.

So with me, it's very strongly genetic. But even now I still try to fly under the radar, mostly because I feel the social stigma is still there and certain people who will be uncomfortable or close the door on you if they know you require drugs and therapy to keep your feet on the ground.

There's a range of social acceptance ranging from "possessed by demons" to "let's be practical and deal with this" so that as we move away from the "posessed by demons" stigmas a diagnoses becomes more acceptable and even essential as a way of dealing with problems in a practical and effective way.

It is going to take all afternoon to get them penned up again.

very likely by vaccinations laden with mercury preservatives. However, it could also be caused by pollutants in the air, food or water.

FYI-Several of the replies in this thread are blatantly ignorant. Saying that people are nuts to care about this is the epitome of ignorance. And saying that Autism is caused by television is ridiculous considering most children undergo a sudden change, a before and after that follows vaccinations at around age 1. How many parents put their infants in front of T.V.?! It's just common sense to know that infants sleep long hours. So when are they getting that T.V. watching in then, hmm? :eyes:

T.V. watching starts at the toddler stage, 2 or 3, long after the child undergoes a noticeable behavioral change that is diagnosed as Autism. Also, older Autistic children are drawn to T.V. watching because they are spacial learners, meaning they learn in pictures.

That the U.S. government, the medical community and health organizations have pretty much turned a blind eye to this epidemic is a FULL ON CRIME. So much of what has gone on speaks of cover up and conspiracy, with parents and children hung out to dry. Think about it. This is being done to CHILDREN.

CHILDREN.

How cruel, heartless, self serving and greedy can these people be?! :grr:

i believe it was his two year old pack of shots that triggered it. the night immediately after and subsequently i saw behavior out of the blue that had me saying to husband "autism". but because stories like mine are anecdotal, they are not only ignored but sneered at.

had nothing to do with tv, kids even older rarely watch

not bad parenting or non parenting though i hear that argument with other disorders with adhd, bi polar.... i can give it credence to a point, but in our house it isn't used as an excuse, justification for certain behaviors. not allowed to slip by at all. further i put the onus on son telling him he is aware of this and has to be the one to correct or strengthen this weakness of his. he is so gifted in many ways, life is easy for him in these areas like all of academics. i tell him is a challenge some kids have with reading and they have to work harder, spend more time in these areas to make it. they get no cop out. same with him. his areas he simply has to be more aware of and work harder than other kids, strengthening this particular weakness of his. a reason. but never an excuse.