If you have not seen today’s New York Times I will attach a link below. They now have evidence that many of the cases of what we currently call autism are actually an autoimmune disease. This is not news to many of us, but what is news is that they think that they understand now WHY this particular form of autism occurs.
The trigger is when the mother has an inflammatory episode while pregnant. So lets say the mother has an ear infection and her body mounts a typical inflammatory response. Her immune response, not the illness, seems to drastically increase the odds of autism.
There was a single sentence that made my blood run cold. In an analysis of over 700,000 births they noted that children born to mothers with celiac disease have a 350% increased risk of autism. I wanted to scream. While you can’t yet get prescription worms or prevent getting strep throat while pregnant, you can indeed get tested for celiac disease. This is fixable. We have the ability to stop eating gluten, dairy and corn thereby preventing an immune response. And don’t tell me we can’t do it. Celiacs do it every day all over the world. Pregnant women routinely stop drinking, quit smoking, and eat stupefying amounts of veggies on behalf of the children we have not yet met. How dare anyone tell a woman that it is too hard for her. Shouldn’t that be her choice?
The IgA blood test should be standard, especially for anyone with a history of Crohn’s, colitis, RA, allergies, or type 1 diabetes. How many children might we spare with a test like this?
That said, your doctor may not be willing to test you. I have seen too many people who have textbook symptoms being told that it isn’t worth testing. I find this to be an example of astoundingly poor math skills. The odds that I, a thin woman in her 40s with no family history, have breast cancer is way under 1% and yet someone thinks its a good idea to annually smash and irradiate my breasts in that machine…just in case. Yet a blood test for something that affects 1% of the population and is fatal and now seems to cause autism is a waste of time?
Seriously? Shouldn’t ideas this bad cause headaches?
You have a choice. If your doctor won’t test you, use the resources on this site and get yourself tested.
You can read the full article here
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/immune-disorders-and-autism.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
And try not to scream.
On a side note, one thing that the piece fails to address but seems like a rather obvious inference is that vaccinations given to pregnant women might also cause the same problem. Vaccines work via having the body mount an immune response to a pathogen sufficient that it will remember it but not sufficient to make the person ill. Isn’t it therefore reasonable to test the hypothesis that the practice of giving pregnant women flu shots could be an issue?
It also provides a real hypothesis for why parents have been insisting for years that the vaccine caused the autism. Personally, I believe in vaccines, and my child has had all of his recommended shots. That said, why couldn’t the inflammation from the immune response of so many vaccinations within days of birth cause a similar side effect? Is it not possible that we need to revisit the timing of some of these vaccines?
It is something to think about.
