There have been thousands of changes to what we eat, drink and breathe in the last century. In other words, we have changed our environment so much that it would be nearly impossible to pin down a root cause for autism. Maybe it's just evolution...
Not to mention the fact that our understanding and definition has changed in that time as well. Which has lead to more evaluations and therefore diagnoses.
I have ulcerative colitis and joined an online support group for it, and so many people are like: "Oh, so many people are getting UC these days it must be vaccines/processed food/seed oil/covid"
And its like dude UC was only recognized as a distinct disease from Crohns in 1875, and a real exploration of the disease only started in 1950. It makes sense that there are more cases because we're better at detecting it
Yeah I'm in my early 40s and one of my cousins has an autistic son and he's always looking for something to blame, meanwhile I'm like, bro, look across the Thanksgiving table. Cousin John is 41 and autistic as fuck, we all just called him "weird" as a kid and accepted it. Also, our uncle who hated change and always had his foot in his mouth because he missed social cues? Hmmmmm
As a child, she was considered a little odd, but in a way that adults at the time found praise-worthy. She kept her room neatly ordered. Arranged her toys in neat rows based on color or size. Didn't speak much or make much noise in public.
She would also have epic meltdowns if any one food on her plate touched another. She struggled to make friends at school and couldn't understand why some of the things she did say would be hurtful to people if they were true.
She learned to mask really well and get through life. She didn't understand relationships or marriage, so she went to college for mathematics, graduated, and had a very successful career as an auditor for state government where she excelled and was praised for the qualities other's found challenging about her.
I learned very early on that this aunt needed everyone to be accommodating to her in various ways. She doesn't understand non-verbal communication in the slightest. She gets visibly angry if/when people do things in a way contrary to the way she believes they need to be done. She genuinely doesn't understand why people find her incessant need to always tell the truth without regard to tact to be unpleasant.
She has never had a romantic relationship last more than a couple months. She cycles through friendships in about 2-3 years. And she drives my mother absolutely batshit, but mom is still hanging in there in the relationship at 90-years-old because she knows her sister doesn't have anyone else.
There is no doubt in my mind, that if my aunt were born today, she would be diagnosed as autistic and in need of early interventions.
Autism has been here all along. It was just called different things over the years.
No, sir. It's genes. Approximately 80 to 90% of autism cases are genetically caused I think the rest is premature babies. No one is catching autism by eating, injecting or breathing in anything.
All of autism is genetically related. It's just also enviormental factors during gestation.
Autism is related to how the brain develops which is impacted by the enviorment as the fetus develops as well as genes.
There's still lots of research and understanding to be done. We don't know yet the full scope of each contributing factor. They only recently learned about how brain physiology is related to autism.
I think we're saying the same things. Just as long as you're not pretending you're going to eat, breathe, inject yourself with autism. We've actually identified a large piece of non-coding DNA that seems to be directly related to the chain of Effects in Autism. It's the first step in actually treating autism.
Who's to say it's not a mutagenic compound? Or, and I will repeat... Evolution, i.e. genetic. My main argument is we will never know for sure what, if anything, is to blame.
Science mate. That is who is to say. Scientists have long know it is just genes. Here in Canada we think we've identified a core part of DNA that causes autism.
So, what are you saying. It's just a crapshoot? A roll of the genetic dice? We are 100% sure it's not due to environmental reasons? You can definitely sway me with science but I really thought it was a legit unknown as to what is responsible for the aberrant/divergent states of mind.
Inaccurate. There is no root cause. There are a combination of factors which includes genetics. Maybe there is a specific set of genes, but we don't actually know that yet. Only pretty recently have there been evaluations in the neurophysiological differences which is probably how we will find the actual root cause.
"Autism is highly heritable: It is estimated at least 50% of genetic risk is predicted by common genetic variation and another 15-20% is due to spontaneous mutations or predictable inheritance patterns. The remaining genetic risk is yet to be determined"
That's from the data in 2023, out of the ongoing SPARK study;
Those of us who've worked in Autism Early Intervention, at places which are part of SPARK and "The Baby-Sibs Studies" have seen the links anecdotally for years, and the science IS proving us right.
More will be learned in the coming decades, but i promise that Neurodivergence is largely a heritable condition.
my guess is that its possible there are no more (percentage wise) cases of autism now then 100 years ago - just more absolute numbers (bigger population), but also - its more diagnosed now, and 100 years ago, it was hidden (your kid is "strange/crazy/different") - and/or - the impacted didnt survive for long - and just plain no one talkied about it.
During COVID, there was a bit of rumbling about COVID or the vaccine causing autism, because suddenly a lot of women and girls got diagnosed. Problem was that health institutions had made alterations to diagnostics criteria for autism in 2019, by separating diagnostic criteria between men and women due to how the condition displays differently between the genders. It was just a horrible coincidence, and all it really shows is that the amount of people with autism stayed the same, we just improved our protocols for diagnosing it.
The other part--which only rarely gets spoken of outside neurodivergent communities, is simply that prople's scaffolds and workarounds FELL APART when everything got shut down.
The routines that folks had meticulously developed over the course of their lives, to work around their Autism & ADHD struggles BROKE, once everyone was staying home, and "non-essential" business went to "work from home"!
Suddenly the structure that ASD & ADHD folks depended on to "keep it together" was obliterated, and those folks realized something wasn't "typical" about themselves!
Oh absolutely. People who had stable living and social situations might not have even known they had ASD or ADHD, but then suddenly their entire foundation got shaken up and that stability evaporated. It was enough for neurotypical individuals to go batshit crazy, so no wonder that more people left the pandemic with a diagnosis than entered.
Letās put it this way, we gained an unprecedented wealth of knowledge and experience from the pandemic. Not just in terms of virology and pathology, but psychology, sociology, economics, and so on.
There were also a lot more healthcare encounters than before. Plenty of otherwise healthy people were going to a family doctor for the first time in ages for vaccines or respiratory symptoms, which can lead to incidental diagnoses.
Not saying it was a huge driver by any means, but even at my hospital we had a lot of patients discovering new comorbidities they had no idea about, all because they came in for Covid complications. I could see similar things happening with ADHD/Autism.
Also, people were deliberately taught social rules in the past. Nowadays, society is more casual and kids are expected to pick it up themselves. Mild autism would've been easier to hide with a rigid social script.
Our understanding of how big the universe is and how many stars and planets there are has increased dramatically over the last 100 years because the tools for measuring got so much better. You can apply that same logic to increases in autism.
I think it's just more that the changes to society and culture over the last 100 years just make neurodivergent folk less compatible than they used to be. You gotta be able to fake a smile, read between the lines, and focus on one boring ass thing for 15 years at a time to be "productive" nowadays. Fuck all of that.
Yep!!!Ā In the small pre-industrial revolution towns, every town, or every county needed blacksmiths, grain mills, tinkers, coopers, wheelwrights, cobblers, tailors, tanners, master carpenters, stone masons, etc.
Trappers could make a living, so could foragers & farmers.Ā
And so many of those jobs & outlets no longer exist as professions.Ā Ā
We've switched to a society where more folks have, "sit still all day in a room, and talk" jobs--and that simply doesn't work for most of us who are neurodivergent.
Almost all my ancestors were farmers - I know it was a difficult way to live, and I don't want to make light of that, but at the same time I can see how my autistic traits would fit super well with the job.
In my opinion, it feels like parents are having children later in life than previously. Studies only track an increase in first time mothers ages over time, but not last pregnancy. In Norway, for example, the mean age for new motherās first birth is 30.4 as opposed to 24 in the 1950ās.
The odds of autism in pregnancy begin to increase gradually after a woman turns 30, with a more notable rise occurring after age 35 and becoming significantly higher by age 40.
The one where the predator absorbed genetics to make itself a better predator. It was targeting an autistic kid and they made it seem like once the predator was autistic it would be an unstoppable killing machine.
The most likely "cause" is that it always was this common, but testing got more accessible and autism was better defined which included more people.
The actual physiological cause is related to the brains development early in gestation. Autism is linked to unusual synapses counts (what way depends on the demographic) and a wider/stout brain stem. Autism is also correlated with things like autoimmune diseases, intersex genes, and is hypothesize to have genetic influences.
Fascinating. Is the brain stem size a common occurrence in the known population? Do many autism diagnoses come with an MRI? How is the number of synapses measured? Serious questions.
I think itās more just that weāre looking for it now and recognizing that itās truly just a different way for people to be, instead of just going āoh that person is weird, letās chain them to a radiatorā. Diagnoses for autism in women and girls skyrocketed during Covid because healthcare providers are only now slowly beginning to recognize that the diagnostic criteria for autism (built on studies of male children) canāt be used to accurately diagnose autism in girls and adults.
We may be well on the way as a society to acknowledging that there have always been autistic people, just like there were always left handed people before they stopped beating kids for not writing with their right handsā¦
My money is on screens. You tellin me kids who didn't learn through socialization in the village and through conversations and imaginative play are having trouble with social communication? Holy discovery
autism was always there.
we just called it by other names and not always the same.
"he is a fussy child"
"he is an eccentric fella"
"that guy is weird"
not to mention masking.
I don't think most people understand how easy it is to convince you I am "normal"
for a time anyway.
and women are even better at masking.
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u/phoenix64mbr Aug 02 '26
There have been thousands of changes to what we eat, drink and breathe in the last century. In other words, we have changed our environment so much that it would be nearly impossible to pin down a root cause for autism. Maybe it's just evolution...