Autism disorder has a wide spectrum of severity ranging from high functioning to low functioning individuals. This disorder is characterized as affecting communication skills, social behavior and learning abilities. Autism has been distinguished as highly genetic but new evidence has linked environmental factors during gestation of a human baby and the susceptibility to it has to being born with autism.
There are many environmental factors that I have been linked to autism including zinc deficiency in the mother, maternal diabetes, the age of parents during conception as well as prenatal exposure to various toxins including valproic acid or thalidomide. The factor that I want to focus on in this blog post is stress on the mother and its affect on the baby being born with a form of autism. No mother wants to hear that it is their fault their baby developed a form of autism, but recent research has shown that heightened prenatal and perinatal stress has been seen to possibly lead to increased chances of their baby developing a form of this disorder.
The hypothalamic pituitary adrenocortical (HPA) axis plays a major role in the regulation and response to stress. When the HPA axis is activated, there is a release of cortisol, which is the primary stress hormone in humans. Cortisol stimulates placental adrenocorticotropic-releasing hormone (CRH) in pregnant women and fetuses so there is a positive feedback loop created between them. Cortisol is needed in normal fetus development but too much of it has been shown to have very negative affects. Under stressful conditions and sustained activation of the HPA axis in the mother, there is a loss of the positive feedback loop between the mother and child due to extremely high levels of cortisol. With the imbalance of cortisol (levels being too high) and the loss of the positive feedback loop, research has shown that there is an increased risk in the occurrence of Autism in the developing baby. Pregnant women general have 2 times higher cortisol levels than that of non-pregnant women, so as I said cortisol is needed in normal fetus development. It is when the levels of cortisol are TOO high (due to sustained activation of the HPA axis) that the baby could be affected.
There are more cases of Autism disorder than ever before and many do not know if this is due to an actual increase in the incidence of Autism or if it is simply being over-diagnosed. Regardless of that issue, there seems to be many different factors that can cause Autism to arise in a person. Genetic factors as well as environmental factors have been scientifically shown to play a role in the risk of Autism arising in an individual. It wasn’t until reading this article did I realize how many things could do wrong in a pregnancy and yet somehow millions of people all over the world are able to give birth to healthy babies everyday. It amazes me that healthy babies can even be born due to the large amount of factors that could affect a fetus negatively. Hopefully more research will give rise to more information on this disorder which overall is quite the mystery because there is still no cure.
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Autism and Stress: Quit Stressing Out Mom!
