ANOTHER ARTICLE SUGGESTING A LINK BETWEEN AUTISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS.
Here is another article suggesting a link between Autism and Environmental Factors. I wonder how many more of these articles we really need to read before someone actually connects the dots. An interesting train of thought especially with the current Carbon Tax details being released this weekend in Australia.
Call for answers as research puts environment in the autism mix.
By Adam Cresswell- Health Editor/ The Australian/ July 6, 2011
AUSTRALIAN experts have called for an urgent acceleration of autism research in the wake of a US study suggesting the devastating condition may be far more due to environmental factors than previously thought.
Earlier studies have found 90 per cent of autism is due to inherited genetic factors, but the new study of nearly 200 sets of Californian twins -- the largest population-based study of autism -- suggests environmental factors may explain 55 per cent of the risk, instead of just 10 per cent.
Australian experts said if confirmed by further research, the findings would "radically alter people's understanding" of how autism should be addressed -- and might for the first time allow for prevention strategies.
The study's authors, from Stanford University, suggested that environmental factors implicated as possibly linked to autism might include low birth weight, multiple births, maternal infections during pregnancy, and women becoming pregnant at older ages. Autism rates in the US have exploded from between four and five cases per 10,000 children in the 1960s to about 40 per 10,000 today. While this is thought to be due to better diagnosis, if the new theory is correct it would also fit with a marked shift towards older mothers, rising obesity and other social trends.
Ian Hickie, director of the Brain and Mind Research Institute at Sydney University, said the prospect that more than 50 per cent of autism was due to environmental factors "raises the question of much more serious prevention strategies". "We need a serious, national autism research agenda," Professor Hickie said."We need accurate diagnosis and population sampling, so we can determine if there is a genuine increase in the rate of autism.
"This will also allow us to evaluate the effectiveness of various early intervention strategies."
For the study, published online yesterday by the US journal Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers identified 192 sets of twins born in California between 1987 and 2004 in which at least one twin was diagnosed with autism or a related disorder.
They compared autism rates in fraternal twins versus identical twins, when one twin had it and also when both twins had it. If autism were a completely genetic disorder, both twins in each identical-twin pair would have it, the researchers reasoned. And if it were caused by environmental factors alone, the autism rates in fraternal twins and identical twins would be the same.
The results, showing a far greater environmental impact than earlier thought, showed "clearly that we have to take both environment and genes seriously, and we have to study much more the interactions between genes and environment", said lead author Joachim Hallmayer, psychiatry professor at Stanford University's school of medicine.
In a separate study also published online by the same journal yesterday, another set of researchers claimed to find a moderately higher risk of autism among women who took antidepressants while pregnant.
Autism expert Bruce Tonge, the head of Monash University's department of psychological medicine, said the finding needed to be taken with caution, given recent research showing depressive illness was more common, particularly on the mother's side, in families affected by autism. "It's an important study, but more work needs to be done," he said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING: SHIRLEY S. WANG, WALL STREET JOURNAL
The other article I suggest you read is;The "Sebree" power plant complex in Robards, Ky., released more than 30 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment in 2009, according to EPA data. A new study of California twins with autism suggests environmental factors are more important than genetics in causing the developmental disability.
New study suggests link between autism, environment
Do Kentuckiana toxic releases cause developmental disability in Ohio River Valley children?A new study of California twins with autism strengthens the case that the epidemic that has swept the nation in the past three decades is related to environmental pollution. The damage, its authors suggest, occurs in the womb and during the earliest days of life.
by Steven Higgs/ July 8, 2011
"Increasingly, evidence is accumulating that overt symptoms of autism emerge around the end of the first year of life," say the authors of the study, which was released online July 4 in the Archives of General Psychiatry. "Because the prenatal environment and early postnatal environment are shared between twin individuals, we hypothesize that at least some of the environmental factors impacting susceptibility to autism exert their effect during this critical period of life."
If that conclusion is true, an analysis of Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data from the six states with Ohio River shorelines show that kids in Indiana and Kentucky are at high risk for autism spectrum disorders.
Industries along an 80-mile stretch of the Ohio from Mount Vernon, Ind., to Hawesville, Ky., reported 166.8 million pounds of toxins released into the environment in 2009. That's more than half the 318 million pounds of TRI chemicals released into the air, water and land by the six states through whose territories the nation's 10th longest river flows.
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