Autism theory: Hypovitaminosis D

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19699591

I found this in a Google search. Do you think it's just another ridiculous, crazy theory, or could they be on to something here?

Interesting find. But the PubMed entry only shows the abstract of the research article, which leaves me wanting a whole lot more. Besides, the article is merely talking about a variety of correlations that may or may not contribute to the development of ASDs. They authors point out that they have a hypothesis, and they (and others) will test it.

One obvious caveat: you can find apparent correlations for just about anything if your sample size is large enough. Correlation is not causation.

I agree. The abstract does not provide proof of their theory. It is fairly abstract: from what I understand there are many processes and contributors to DNA maintenance and replication and perhaps although vitamin D may indeed contribute, so do many others.

I think perhaps there could be various hypotheses like this, because at the moment there are so many contributing processes and molecules all interacting biochemically that no one has yet isolated major contributor/s to the occurence of autism.

It is interesting though.

It almost seems basically what they're saying is that not getting enough sunlight can cause autism, although I think they're talking about in utero rather than 'actual' life.
It reminds me of experiments done with monkeys that show a self-forfilling prophecy is true, to some extent: monkeys raised from birth in isolation develop 'autistic' tendencies; in other words if you isolate enough (including having decreased sunlight) then you may generally increase autistic tendency. That's more along the lines of psychology though and less along the lines of biochemistry.