Autism 'caused by genetics', study suggests

[Bearware]

49. Not fictions at all

The sources I listed have information drawn from the science of vitamin D written in a non-technical style. If you follow links down within articles - at the bottom they list the peer-reviewed journal articles in Pubmed.

Over the years I have seen numerous genetic studies of various neurological diseases. What happens in most cases is there are some genes that will cause the disease but this is a minority of all cases. These same studies find a considerable number of other genes that predispose one for the disease but require an environmental trigger which often seems to be an immunological challenge leading to the formation of an autoimmune disease. A good example is diabetes. There are a purely genetic forms (MODY) as might be expected but the greatest number of cases are type 1 diabetes which is definitely autoimmune. The same is true for MS and other neurological diseases.

Claiming the vast majority of autism is completely genetically determined means you have to ignore clear evidence on the incidence of autism both by time of year and latitude. You also have to ignore populations living near the equator who have no experience with autism but sudden discover it in their children born in high latitudes (Finland, Northern Canada). I believe the sources I gave have references or you can just go directly to Pubmed.

Also I repeatedly hear about the increasing rate of autism is due to better reporting. The rate of all autoimmune diseases have been increasing at a rate similar to the reported incidence of autism. Genetically determined diseases do not show this kind of behavior.