"Your child has autism." These words can be scary and overwhelming for a parent to hear. About five years ago, my aunt heard these words when my younger cousin was diagnosed with a form of autism. Since I am quite close with my aunt, I was involved with a lot of the intervention services he received and as a result I learned a lot about the disorder. Autism spectrum disorder or ASD refers to a number of complex brain development disorders. Symptoms of these disorders include difficulty with social interaction, communication both verbal and nonverbal, and even repetitive behaviors. Before my cousin was diagnosed with autism, I knew little about it, just like many other people personally unaffected by it. However, with rates of autism on the rise and no clear cut cause or cure, I think it is important for autism awareness to increase. As of March 2014, based on information from the CDC, one in sixty-eight children have autism, and it is more prevalent in boys than in girls. Since there is no clear cut way to diagnose ASD, the real prevalence of autism may be higher. With autism becoming so common in recent years, I think it is important for people to educate themselves and learn more about it. What causes autism? Autism has a wide range of symptoms which suggests it could have a wide range of causes. For example, when you get a sore throat, your sickness could have been caused by a variety of different things. You may find out that your infection is viral or maybe it’s bacterial and you need antibiotics to treat it. The same goes for autism, there may be many different ways to arrive at the same end result. (From a genetics perspective, there is no specific gene that causes autism but there are genes associated with it. Autism is not solely heritable, as there are many different environmental ‘risk factors’ that come together to cause autism. High maternal age at the time of conception, maternal prenatal medication, gestational diabetes, and bleeding during pregnancy may all contribute to the development of autism. Autism is also correlated with abnormal neurological development of the baby during pregnancy which itself has many causes. Other external factors may contribute to the cause of autism and researchers are currently studying a possible correlation between high stress levels of the mother during pregnancy and the child developing autism. I find this interesting in how it relates to what we are studying in lab where we are looking at the stress levels of salamanders and how stress affects their blood on a cellular level. Even though salamanders and human children are different test subjects, stress affects both adversely. A study done by Ohio State University Medical Center found that mothers who had a highly stressful event during their pregnancy such as a loss of a spouse or loss of a job had a correlation with having a child with autism. People who have autism are known to have an abnormally formed cerebellum and it is possible that combined with other risk factors, a high stress event during pregnancy may cause this abnormal development of the brain (Beversdorf 2013). You can read more about that study here. http://mentalhealth.about.com/library/sci/1101/blpregnant1101.htm A little stress from time to time is normal and unavoidable, and so long as the stress is short term, your body will relax and your chemistry will return back to normal. The danger comes in with chronic stress which causes your body to trigger an inflammatory response. If you are pregnant, this could negatively affect the fetus’s brain development. So can extended periods of high stress levels cause autism? Maybe, we’re not exactly sure yet and more research needs to be done. What does NOT cause autism? Say it with me, vaccines. I get frustrated and sometimes angry when I hear people claim that vaccines are bad and that they cause autism and expose your child to a complex of harmful chemicals. A study was done by Dr. Andrew Wakefield claiming that the MMR vaccine causes autism. If this was true, this would be an alarming finding. The problem however, with Dr. Wakefield’s work was that he was paid in order to find a link between autism and vaccines which created a conflict of interest. A good scientist should be unbiased and he was not. He was trying to show that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine so that lawyers could sue the vaccine manufacturers and make a profit. Dr. Wakefield also misrepresented or altered the medical history of the twelve patients in the study. Five of his subjects showed symptoms before receiving the vaccine, and three of the patients didn’t have autism at all. His paper created a panicked uproar and decreased overall vaccination rates. Not only was he wrong, but due to the ignorant sense of fear he has helped spread across the world, people are choosing not to vaccinate their children allow previous practically eradicated diseases to spread across the population again. Now before I go off on a rant about vaccination and herd immunity, just know that the study done by Dr. Wakefield was not sound science and those who have studied the same subject since have failed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
If you're interested, here is a link to 107 studies that show there is no link between MMR and autism. http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/05/autism.vaccines/ ~Alexa
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The Slime Times is written by the Stress After Dark Creative Inquiry TeamScience isn't all white lab coats and ivory pillars, sometimes you just need to get slimy. Archives
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