What the hell causes aspergers??

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Oh. That's right you joined teenfx.com and send me an e-mail. I will tell you now to keep yourself out of my barracks. You're on my list maggot.

Hi scrapheap

Buggered if I know (can you say buggered here? Its OK in Australia - even on TV ads). I am not diagnosed but having heard of AS only recently know it fits. My family for generations has been very undemonstrative and aloof. But no AS I know of, except maybe a cousin.

I look for it in my kids now (they both needed speach therapy) but I don't see any traits.

Thinking about my early childhood, I had a lot of trouble having my speech understood. Did I shrink away to avoid teasing and frustration? Yup.
Did this develop AS traits or was the speech problems caused by AS?

Chicken & Egg problem

Cheers

PS - my best skeet score is 24. Can't get to the 25. Use a Miroku 10. I only have friends that shoot

I'm very like my mother, i think she has quiet a few AS traits, my father is very intelligent, but i think quite social, however other members of my family on his side are a bit strange. I have a small cousin with an undiagnosised learning disability and some brain damamge who has loads of autistic traits. I think i'm the only one of six children who has AS ( though i'm not diagnosed) and i was very ill as a baby with a serious flu/virus. I was also brought up by quite aloof parents. So who knows!! !! !!

Well, here's mine:

Dad-absolutely CERTAIN hes undiagnised aspie.
Mum and brother-not at all social but couldn;t say if theyre aspie or no
Birth- Placenta broke away early, was induced, if I;d been born 1 minite later i would have been stuillborn
Baby-fell out of cot onto head.
Child: Cut head open at 6, had ansolute s**t beat out of me from 9 till i was 12.

I think it's genes and environment. Maybe the genes are there, (many of them) and it can be either 1) many genes that basicly make you aspie from birth or
2) Genes that are "turned on2 by biryth/early childhood trauma or
3) Genes that are triggered by something in the food eaten by the mother (NOT blaming mothers here, it could be pollution, hormones in food , pestivcides, trans fats or something else they coulfdn't help eating.)

Opinions, people?

Julie

Theorectically if its wiring in the brain shouldn't it be present at birth and /or detectable with a scan. Not nesscerily the case i'm sure. Maybe its a simple part of human biolgy. Maybe AS isn't a disorder but the natural state of a certain percentage of the population for some reason?? YOu'd have to look at how people with AS affect populations perhaps?

Although my mother doesn't have the same difficulties coping with/understanding people that I do, I only realized quite recently that she's always been quite an 'unsocial' person, and she's often said that it wouldn't really bother her not to see anybody for weeks on end. She definitely has a stim, a foot twitch when she's sitting down. And she adores computers and gaming, probably not one of the most common interests for a woman in her fifties! So maybe there's a genetic factor there, I'm not sure.

Pre-birth: My mother once tripped and fell, quite heavily, when pregnant with me. Apparently I was very quiet for quite a while afterwards, and she was getting really worried until she felt me move again.

Birth: I was nearly four weeks overdue and was induced, then the doctors only realized why labor was taking so long when they found that the cord was around my neck (so that every time I tried to move, I was being yanked back again).

another level of complexity to add if you're interested....

i took an epigenetics class the other term and found it copletely fascinating.... gave me so many things to think about (get confused about!)

anyway. epigenetics is an area of biology that deals with DNA modifications BESIDES changes in the sequence. it deals with all the molecular machinery and mechanisms that regulate gene control and gene expression in our DNA and IMO could greatly explain what is causing AS. It's kind of an old area of biology, but is only now taking off due to andvances in science and it is already helping to figure out causes for a lot of genetically inherited conditions.

there are so many things that interact with our DNA to result in an organism.... it just makes sense to me that this is the level the issue may be occuring on. i mean these governing mechanisms are so important... scientists are starting to think that's why we
(humans) can only have a 2-3% difference in our genetic code and yet be so different from monkeys or mice.... it's not the DNA (or the written genes) that matters, but all the forces that act on it to express (interpret) those genes.

to give a working example (for the cat lovers): the coloration of callico cats is special because it derives from an epigenetic process that effectively silences a particular [color] gene on a RANDOM cell-by-cell basis (to take a step backward: every cell in your body has a complete set of your DNA and yes, entire organisms have been cloned from one of their random cells).... so the [color] gene in every skin cell in these cats can be on a spectrum of being fully expressed (black), muted (white), or somewhere inbetween (orange).... it's really quite a cool process.

(if you're really into this topic and are asking "so why do calicos have patches of colors and don't look like a RANDOM blur of polka-dots?".... the answer is simply that these RANDOMLY assigned cells in the baby cat (im talkin embryo)divide and their replicates keep the same color as their parent cell... resulting in an adult cat with patches of these colors instead of polkadots)

anyway, my point.... is when scientists try to clone [say]callicos (yes they can... they've been cloning mammals since the 90s)... they can't seem to reproduce these random epigenetic events. granted, they do have other isssues with cloning... but one of the major things they cant understand is why twins in nature can be such close replicates....yet these conditions cant really be reporoduced in the lab. The callico that they [say] cloned would indeed be a cat and of the same sex and all, but the coloration would be completely different...

simply because it's a radom process that is not linked with the simple DNA code, but the machinery that governs it.

there are a ton of different machineries that act on DNA in a multitude of ways, so it just seems to fit with me that there are multiple ways to mess any of them up and possiblyget AS... especially if they think AS is associated with some genes in our code that are predisposed to problems.

i really hope that this area of science can shed some light on AS.... in the class I took, I learned a lot about the kinds of genetic diseases/conditions derived by epigenetic issues and i see great potential. the great thing about this kind of research is that when they find out what's happening, they can come up with a "Gene therapy" that in a lot of cases can treat the condition (cause in theory... it's not your DNA that's the issue; it's how it's interpreted). so if they can fix how it's interpeted....

i do recognize the effect of environment on biological beings, and so maybe the gene therapy that they would come up with might not be enough to treat all people currently with AS... but it could definiatley help those who are born with it in the future.

go google "epigenetic" and "autism" together or go to www.pubmed.gov and look around for some real science papers on this kind of stuff

k ill stop lol

just what ive been thinkin about on that subject

edit: spelling