Knowing About Autism Earlier & Earlier & Earlier?

by Kristina Chew

categories: Diagnosis, Science

Published July 01, 2009 @ 02:23PM PT

A review of 40 studies in the British Journal of Psychiatry examines over 50 prenatal factors for autism:

The factors associated with autism risk in the meta-analysis were advanced parental age at birth, maternal prenatal medication use, bleeding, gestational diabetes, being first born v. third or later, and having a mother born abroad. The factors with the strongest evidence against a role in autism risk included previous fetal loss and maternal hypertension, proteinuria, pre-eclampsia and swelling.

(For the record: I was 28 years old when Charlie was born and had pre-eclampsia.)

A BBC report on the study from yesterday is (rather misleadingly) headlined Problem pregnancy 'autism risk' and quotes Richard Mills of Research Autism:

"Age is a very interesting line of inquiry, but it is very hard to tease out one clear factor. It is like trying to complete a huge jigsaw puzzle - we still just don't know how all the pieces fit together."

Indeed---just as as many as 100 genes have been linked to autism, so it seems that multiple factors are being identified and studied, and not one of them has been, it seems, taken off the table. One reason for such studies is to be able to detect autism at earlier and earlier stages of a child's life and, too, before a child is born. Another BBC news story reports that a "universal embryo test" is "'very near'":

The test - which will cost around £2,500 - uses a technique called karyomapping which looks for the inheritance of sections of DNA or chromosomes.

Rather than knowing the exact gene mutation which is passed down the generations in an family affected by a condition such as cystic fibrosis, doctors can just look for the block of DNA containing a faulty gene.

At the moment genetic testing of embryos is generally limited to a few conditions.

But karyomapping could in theory be used to test for any one of the 15,000 genetic defects known about.

Using the same test doctors could also look at whether any chromosomes are missing or duplicated which suggests the embryo will not be viable.

Autism is specifically cited as one condition--a "'major [disease]" that the test could be used for, by looking for genetic causes that occur in 5% of cases.

While there is currently no prenatal test for autism, it is looking more and more inevitable. In view of the British Journal of Psychiatry study on the causes of autism and how various factors in pregnancy might affect this, autism is definitely going to be something that families expecting a baby hear about.

All the more reason to get the word out about older children and adults on the spectrum and how, while things are often not easy, it's a good life.