Environmental Factors Contributing to the Development of Autism Spectrum Disorder
A Large Database Retrospective Study
Preliminary Results:
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex, serious, biologicallybased disorder of brain development. It affects the brain, immunesystem and the gut. Starting in 1988 the rate of children developingASD increased dramatically. In California for example, there has beenan eight fold increase in the number of children born with ordeveloping Autism since 1990. The US prevalence rate has nowskyrocketed to more than one percent of all US children in 2009. For male children the rates are even more staggering – one in 63 or 2.6% of all male children in America.
Over the last several years there has been renewed interest and research into the interaction between vulnerable genes and environmental triggers with a growing sense that low-dose, multiple toxic and infectious exposures may be a key contributing factor to ASD onset. A very recent EPA study concludes that environmentalfactors have contributed to the increase.
Preliminary results from a retrospective data analysis of a very large ASD clinical database is showing confirming information that indeed children with ASD have elevated levels of several toxic chemicals that have been documented to be neurotoxic and that these same children have genetic variations that interfere with the proper detoxification of these chemicals. With over 2,000 patients in thedatabase, this may be one of the largest studies to show that environmental factors and associated genetic components may be contributing to the causation of ASD.
Future analysis of the database will evaluate hundreds of other physiological components as well as clinical data relating to the correction of specific biochemical pathway abnormalities with condition improvement.
