Autism had dramatically grown in the past fifty years. The US documented that 19 out of 10,000 individuals had autism in 1992. This rose to 1 in 150 in 2002, followed by 1 in 110 in 2006. As it can be seen, the growth in individuals with autism is huge. The reasons why this number has increased so greatly is not well known. One known contributor is the expansion of the autism spectrum, but there has to be more to it. Some people think vaccines are the cause, and others think genetics or even stress. So with the great confusion, my class decided to look deeper into autism and tried to define the true cause of it.
After reading and analyzing our paper for the week, some potential areas were targeted for a likely cause of autism.
As a whole, we discovered that very simplistically, neurally there is too much glutamate, excitatory neurotransmitters, and not enough GABA, inhibitory neurotransmitters, in the brain. This is causing a myriad of problems. Generically abnormal neuron migration and synchronization is occurring.
Looking deeper into the actual signaling pathway, there are numerous problems that could be occurring. One of which is too much protein synthesis, which produces more than necessary mRNA through over activity of FMRP and eIF4E. Another area of concern is the miscommunication between receptors NRX and NLGN, which cannot dimerize properly and is causing the imbalance of excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters. SynGAP also can be a part of potentially causing autism by not being shut down because it assists in the production of protein. In individuals with autism, they also see a decreased amount of Reelin and dysfunctions with Shank. The image of the pathways is located in the paper on top of page nine.
As you can see, there are various problems that can occur with autism and there is not one specific area that has been discovered to cause it.
I was specifically interested in environmental factors that could induce or cause autism. From what I found, there is not one environmental factor that causes autism, but rather, there are many different items that can induce autism in individuals with a genetic predisposition.
Some of the factors I found were diet, heavy metals, pesticides, stress during birth, drugs, and medications. Vaccines are a factor many individuals believe is the cause for autism. In many recent findings, each of them said that vaccines do not cause autism and it is much safer to vaccinate children from deadly illnesses than to have fear that they could get autism.
Again, there is not one distinct reason for the cause of autism, but tons of research is being done to see if it can be narrowed down to a specific area of the brain or an environmental factor in order to prevent autism growth in the future.
What causes Autism?
