Do Toxins Cause Autism?
February 25th, 2010Just take a breath of fresh air.
Via: New York Times:
Autism was first identified in 1943 in an obscure medical journal. Since then it has become a frighteningly common affliction, with the Centers for Disease Control reporting recently that autism disorders now affect almost 1 percent of children.
Over recent decades, other development disorders also appear to have proliferated, along with certain cancers in children and adults. Why? No one knows for certain. And despite their financial and human cost, they presumably won’t be discussed much at Thursday’s White House summit on health care.
Yet they constitute a huge national health burden, and suspicions are growing that one culprit may be chemicals in the environment. An article in a forthcoming issue of a peer-reviewed medical journal, Current Opinion in Pediatrics, just posted online, makes this explicit.
The article cites “historically important, proof-of-concept studies that specifically link autism to environmental exposures experienced prenatally.” It adds that the “likelihood is high” that many chemicals “have potential to cause injury to the developing brain and to produce neurodevelopmental disorders.”
The author is not a granola-munching crank but Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and chairman of the school’s department of preventive medicine. While his article is full of cautionary language, Dr. Landrigan told me that he is increasingly confident that autism and other ailments are, in part, the result of the impact of environmental chemicals on the brain as it is being formed.
“The crux of this is brain development,” he said. “If babies are exposed in the womb or shortly after birth to chemicals that interfere with brain development, the consequences last a lifetime.”
Concern about toxins in the environment used to be a fringe view. But alarm has moved into the medical mainstream. Toxicologists, endocrinologists and oncologists seem to be the most concerned.
Research Credit: RR
Toxins — from the tens of thousands of chemicals in daily use that have had little or no testing on them ( http://rawstory.com/2010/01/17000-potentially-harmful-chemicals/ ) — not only may cause autism, but likely change your DNA ( http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/26491295.html ), create severe deformities in children ( http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/toxic-soup-children-win-blame-case-1764187.html ) and even make you fat ( http://www.alternet.org/health/143036 ).
But you know what? Most people don’t care because chemicals make stuff really cheap to buy…so we’ve got that going for us, huh?
PS – anyone wanna share the format for embedding links on WordPress?
It could be. It has to be something modern. While people discuss underdiagnosis in the past, the children (and an adult college student) with asperger’s who I’ve encountered stand out substantially. This theory about either excess or strong ultrasound exposure during a key prenatal period seems to match much of the epidemiology. It is also interesting that autistic children seem to be born with a small head size, but then have large head diameter at age 1-2. http://carolinerodgers.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/does-prenatal-care-increase-autism-risk-new-cdc-numbers-indicate-it-does/
quintanus, the link on ultrasound is very interesting. Ultrasound was already a routine part of prenatal care in 1982, when I was pregnant with my oldest daughter.
I refused ultrasound for the second daughter and had the other three at home–no prenatal care at all. When I refused ultrasound, clinic personnel made threats. I can’t remember what they were exactly, since it’s been 26 years ago. But I do remember that clinic personnel were very displeased with my decision and applied pressure.
The value of ultrasound seems to me to be somewhere between marginal and non-existent. It’s mainly just another medical profit-center, sold to parents as “baby’s first picture.”
It always seemed to me that it was merely “presumed safe,” with little, if any, actual inquiry as to whether it really was safe–and even less interest.
At the time, I had no particular reason for refusing ultrasound. I was just going on the general principle that all medical procedures are claimed to be safe (including prenatal X-rays), right up until it was discovered that they weren’t. Or may I should say “acknowledged that they weren’t.”
One thing you can see from the statistics presented in the article is, the more health care you get, the more likely you are to be damaged.