Autism link to immigration - BBC

Post Reply New Topic

2/3 of autistic people are high functioning. I see no reason why the ratio should have been different in the colonial days.



I don't think it's caused by stress. I think it's genetic. Though I do believe that stressors make it more difficult to deal with. I know I certainly have an easier time functioning in society when I don't eat certain foods, get enough sleep, avoid spending too much time around lots of people, exercise regularly, and avoid jobs and pasttimes that are highly competitive. When I don't pay attention to these stressors, I become much more noticeably "off."

If certain groups have more problems with their children I would be willing to bet that it has more to do with food and chemicals.

Certain races have raised cows for thousands of years. We are used to drinking cow's milk and are less likely to be "lactose intolerant" than other groups.

The native populations of the USA and Australia have a terrible problem with alcohol. We Europeans and middle easterners have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years.

In the olden days anyone who couldn't adapt to the (stricter but easier to learn and not as all-encompassing) limits of society tended to be shut away, so most people never found out that there were people who didn't fit into the society and the families with such people were not usually in contact with enough people with similar disabilities to realise they were not housing an isolated case. People could have a limited amount of quirkiness in certain respects without having mainstream society reject them, so what tended to happen was the autism community was split in two; the element that was accepted as yet another part of "normal" (and therefore not considered interesting) and the part most people didn't know about except perhaps as an isolated "mad person". Also, settlements tended to be smaller in the olden days and there was less communication between settlements, meaning people generally knew fewer people in the first place.

I would be interesting in reading the study and understanding the controls that were placed around the study to normalize the incidence rates observed.

It is open to conjecture that migration pressures on families may make some presentations of ASDs more likely to be referred to specialists for diagnosis. If we are observing a higher incidence rate among migrant families, is that due to a higher actual incidence rate, or merely a higher rate of identification and diagnosis?

Actually reading the article, they suggest two things might be a culprit:

A) Stress during pregnancy can aggravate the development of the neurons in the fetus, especially in the third trimester. That is, someone who may have been with Asperger's would then be aggravated into something more lower functioning. And as LadyMacbeth mentioned, this may not be true in areas with larger numbers of immigrants because there is a better support system to alleviate the stress and that the areas with less immigrants might be more stressed due to the lack of services and support for them.

B) Shock from the lack of sunshine Vitamin D?

or

c) Both? More?

I moved from Israel to New York when I was six months old, but that probably has nothing to do with my diagnosis.