One word that parents always dread hearing is coming up more and more in elementary schools. Autism. For some it’s a debilitating disorder that impairs basic function. For others, it can be a minor hinderance, but one that can be coped with. Regardless of the severity, autism can offer several challenges for individuals who have been inflicted by the disease. With the rising amount of diagnosed cases of autism comes increased research on the disorder. In our Concordia College neurochemistry class, we discussed a paper on the environmental effects of autism, and I’m here to dispel several myths (and add a few truths) about what we currently know about autism.
- There is no (zip, nada, zilch,) correlation between vaccines and autism, but there is a correlation with maternal viral infections.
That’s right. Vaccinating your children won’t give them autism, but some data has indicated that if the mother’s immune system could be playing a role in autism. The mother’s antibodies may be interfering with the development of the baby’s nervous system. 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4776649/ ▲
2. Autism is not a disease that’s all or nothing, instead it’s a spectrum.
One thing that I’ve found rather interesting with the diagnosis of autism being redefined is that it’s a spectrum now. Now, some diseases that were once their own separate illnesses have been put under the umbrella of autism. In middle school I knew an individual who had some classical symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome and as such he was diagnosed with said syndrome. In high school, the idea of autism being a spectrum disorder received traction, and he explained to me and the rest of our class that his diagnosis had technically changed even though his symptoms had remained consistent.
3. Autism could all be caused by a zinc deficiency
Wait what?? A zinc deficiency? That’s it? Those were my thoughts as well. Interestingly, zinc is needed for proper neurological function as well as stabilization of some protein domains and proper immune function. It’s also a trace element, meaning we don’t need a whole lot of it. Women who become pregnant often do not know until many weeks after conception, and then begin taking their prenatal vitamins. Although zinc is unlikely to be the only culprit, it could be playing a significant role in autism’s development.
4. It’s a developmental disorder
One of the concepts that our neurochemistry class grappled with after reading the literature on autism is the actual onset of the disease. It still remains unclear, and there is added difficulty to understanding this problem since autism has a wide array of manifestations. One possibility is that the damage from autism has already occurred when the baby is born. This is one of the hardest things for people to wrap their head around, especially since we don’t typically see symptoms until the baby is a couple of years old already. https://www.autismspeaks.org
Although much remains unclear about autism, one thing is for certain. Scientist, psychologists, and parents are all hard at work trying to understand this disease and how we can deal most effectively with it. Moving forward, it is likely that more research on neural development under stressful conditions will be needed to fully comprehend this disorder.
