Autism in the News

Autism is once again in the news. In the past several weeks news agencies, such as CNN, have brought autism back into public thinking through coverage both on TV and the web. While the news network has done an adequate job of presenting the concerns of parents and the opinions of the scientists, they have done very little to present the basic scientific information about autism. From my perspective, most people are completely confused about autism. In the past, an autistic child was sometimes viewed as the fault of the parents, and in the current round of coverage the disease is sometimes being presented as a result of a medical community which prefers not to face the facts regarding vaccinations. Neither of which is really true. Instead, we need to recognize that autism is a very complicated disorder – and that complicated disorders can take some time to sort out.

First of all, and probably most importantly, autism is most likely not a single disease. Like Alzheimer’s disease and cancer, autism is a term that we have adapted to explain a related group of symptoms, in this case severe communication disorders. Alzheimer’s researchers now distinguish their disease using terms such as “late-onset” and “early-onset”. We need the same approach for autism. We need to develop a common set of classifications for the disease so that we all know what type of autism we are talking about. And these classifications need to be easily understood by the news organizations and general public. No scientific techno-babble please! For those who are trying to understand autism, we need to be able to distinguish the various forms so that we know if the news and the scientific community is talking about a common form or a rare form. Also, since autism is not a single disease, we can’t expect that the disease is caused by the same factors in each case. Which leads me to the second important point – genetics.

Autism is probably what geneticists call a multifactorial, or complex, disorder. What this means is not only is genetics involved, but also environmental factors. Those environmental factors are without doubt chemicals. While the news has been focusing on thimerosal, a chemical additive that was used in many vaccines, the truth is that we live in an increasingly chemical world. Some scientists estimate that we come in contact with over 70,000 man-made chemicals over the course of our lives. We have no idea how many of these chemicals interact with each other. In other words, our cells, and especially the easily influenced cells of a developing child’s nervous system, are being bombarded with a potentially hostile array of chemical compounds. Now, back to the genetics. Many of our genes have minor variations that go unnoticed until the cell is placed in a certain environmental condition. So say for gene X there are 2 variants, lets call them X-1 and X-2. When X-1 is exposed to a certain chemical cocktail, the gene continues to function normally. But when X-2 is exposed to the same group of chemicals, the environment alters the way the gene works, called gene expression by scientists, producing slight changes in the cells. In a complex trait it may be necessary to have many of these gene variants, say X-1, Y-4 and Z-2 acting at the same time to produce a disorder. Sorting out multifactorial complex traits takes time and patience by the scientific community.

So what can we do? As parents and concerned individuals we need to aggressively lobby our elected officials to increase funding to not only study this disease, but to make life better for the increasing number of kids who are being diagnosed with autism. In addition to long-term studies of people with autism, we need to start enrolling pregnant mothers in prenatal studies that examine everything from the genetics of the parents to the types of chemicals that the mother comes into contact with during her pregnancy. Only then will we be able to provide some real answers on what is causing autism, and maybe develop a means of reducing its impact on future generations.