First I just want to make it abundantly clear, vaccines do not cause autism. The main paper that people cite in order to show that autism and vaccines are related has been absolutely discredited by 99.99% of the scientific community. As a scientific community we have determined that there is no correlation between autism rates and vaccines. In addition, even if vaccines did cause autism (which they do not) the benefits of them vastly outweigh any of the costs. As a species we have only exterminated one virus, the small pox virus, and that was through careful vaccination programs. If you are against vaccines look up historical accounts of what small pox did to the human body and the survival rates.
Back to the point of this blog post… Autism and the brain…
Autism is an incredibly scary neurological disorder because we don’t know what causes it… Or even how to treat it. While we know many of the symptoms of autism, and how to treat some of the innumerable symptoms these treatments do not treat the disease they treat the symptoms. To actually treat the disease we would have to have a greater understanding of the brain than what we currently have. Will the day come that we have the ability to treat/cure autism through medication or alternative means? Yes. Is that day today, or even in the near future? No.
Currently treating Autism is kind of a guess and check, and hope that whatever medication is given to the patient is actually working, and not making other issues that we don’t know how to treat. Something that might help reduce autism in later generations would be to increase the amount of zinc we eat. A decrease in zinc (a VERY important metal in our body) is frequently seen in autistic patients, and this could be the cause of innumerable of the symptoms seen with autism. Before going out and buying all the zinc you can consume be aware of two things: 1) zinc treatments while somewhat helpful by no means undo autism and 2) if you consume too much zinc then you’ll have a completely different set of physiological disorders to contend with.
While researching autism I found an interesting correlation that scientists have known about for a while: how similar autism is to mercury poisoning. The similarities are stark, and quite frankly scary. The symptom list of in utero/infantile exposure of mercury reads almost identically to the symptoms of autism. In addition scientists found about a 2.1 higher concentration of mercury in autistic children than normal, non-autistic children. Does this mean mercury causes autism? No. Does this mean there’s some sort of correlation? Probably, but I would have to do more research in order to confidently say so one way or another.
Ultimately autism is a disease that as a scientific community we have no idea what causes it (but we know what doesn’t!) or even how to treat it. However this doesn’t mean that we should despair! Far from it, we should embrace how little we know and understand that we will be making leaps and bounds in the field of neuroscience in the not too distant future. Who knows, maybe in thirty or forty years I’ll be writing a post about how we have “cured” autism.
Autism and the Brain
Were I a scientist I’d begin by looking at everything we are doing now, that we weren’t doing fifty years ago, when Autim was heard of much less than it is today. Even odd things,like restraint on certain children, as in car seats. The lack of interaction between toddlers and their older siblings, because of the phones they are constantly using, is another. Fruity drinks, which were not nearly as prevalent in years past would be another, as would latex paint. Perhaps we’ve replaced one bad paint, leaded, with another equally as bad?