<p>In our efforts to detect severe autism, would we abort or otherwise prevent the births of all those fabulous thinking outside of the box folks who don’t learn to tie their shoes until they’re 12 and can’t hit a baseball to save their lives but invent terrific new technologies?</p>
<p>I think it would be more effective for efforts to increase fetal health, to identify more household/workplace toxins & increase enforcement to reduce exposure rather than go toward more DNA testing.</p>
<p>^ Certainly cannot hurt! Would help with all sorts of other problems, too.</p>
<p>I have a friend who has ALS. As you probably know it is a tragic and fatal disease with no known cure. While ten percent of the cases are familial and related to genetics, the other 90 percent are sporadic. My friend has the sporadic variety (determined with a simple blood test).<br>
What is interesting is that her mom has MS and her grandmother had Parkinsons. There is some research to suggest that a disease like ALS occurs wieh there is the “perfect storm” of factors present. For instance, a genetic vulnerability to neurological issues combined, perhaps with a weakened immune system and an environmental factor or exposure. Because ALS is so rare, it makes sense that all of the factors would have to be present to result in a diagnoses.</p>
<p>Could Autism be similar? As a teacher, I see lots of families with several children on the spectrum. That suggests a genetic component but it could also indicate an environmental issue. I wonder if several factors need to be present to result in an autistic child.</p>
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<p>Thanks, SnowflakeVT! Maybe I AM on the “Hot” Spectrum! But only in dim light! :)</p>
<p>The Geek Syndrome hypothesis has been kicked around for awhile now. The vaccines hypothesis has been thoroughly debunked but still people withhold vaccines from their kids.</p>
<p>The most promising hypothesis at present is later in life parenthood and children born in quick succession. That would probably correlate with “Geeks” to some extent.</p>
<p>Then there’s a lot of evidence that the disorder is simply diagnosed much more readily now. A generation ago, these kids would have been labeled “eccentric” and not been diagnosed with anything. </p>
<p>It is a fascinating and frightening and puzzling epidemic.</p>
<p>Totally anecdotal, but I come from a loooong line of engineers and techies and there is a ton of autism in my family. It spans at least three, quite possibly four generations. I’m the lone wolf who went into government instead of engineering, but I have dyscalculia, too. :P</p>
<p>Worth mentioning that asperger’s wasn’t even an official diagnosis in the US until the early 90’s-- of course diagnoses have been spiking since then, what would you expect!? I’ve heard people refer to my age mates and I as the “lost generation” as we JUST passed out of the age window where autism is typically discovered when asperger’s and high functioning autism started getting diagnosed. Getting these kids diagnosed, and NOT just labeling them as eccentric, is critical. Autism, even high functioning, is not pretty when left on its own with no intervention or awareness. Believe me, I lived it! Getting my diagnosis at age 21 changed my life in the most profoundly positive ways possible and it physically hurts me to think I could have had this and more as a child if we’d only known not to be so dismissive of my eccentricity. I can confidently say that I would have failed at life without my diagnosis.</p>
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<p>Perhaps it just was not diagnosed back then. Perhaps back then, only the most extreme or severe cases were diagnosed medically, while less extreme or severe cases were just thought of as personality quirks or something.</p>
<p>What emaheevu107 said [that’s a hard screen name to remember, E!].</p>
<p>It is sad to think about some of the adults who pretty obviously have undiagnosed Aspergers. There was a guy at church…he’s probably in his 50s now…sterotypical fairly extreme Aspergers behavior…parents deceased, living on his own, wanting a girlfriend. He paid a* lot *of unwanted attention to single women at church. Nothing ever physical, but talked to them way too close, for way too long, and the women had a hard time getting away from him. People would just see him coming and avoid him. One woman even got a restraining order against him.</p>
<p>Wonderfully, he found a woman to marry him and they moved away. But he really could have ended up with criminal consequences because there was no one in his life to tell him in absolute blunt words that he just couldn’t behave like that. (I think that a guy in choir finally did, but with a diagnosis that folks knew about, I think there would have more intervention without branding the guy as such a weirdo.)</p>
<p>My grandfather was an automotive engineer, one of the first. (He was born in 1875.) Of his great-grandchildren, there are at least three diagnosed Asperger’s spectrum people. In my generation, I’d say there are four or five–but none of us are diagnosed. My two uncles, both deceased, both became engineers and were both “anti-social”, preferring to tinker in the garage over talking to people. My two aunts became architects and were known for their quality work–but I only met them once (at my grandmother’s funeral). My mother, a very social journalist, did not get along with her entire family and thought them all weird–as in “none of them knows anything about going along to get along.”</p>
<p>My grandfather wrote an autobiography when he was in his fifties. I find it fascinating. It’s full of small details of the places he worked, the engineering he did, the cars he met over the years (riding shotgun observer for an early race, in Rolls’s car). He spends two pages of a fifty-page memoir on handwashing conditions over the years, from his first factory in Glasgow, where he had to eat lunch with dirty hands at his work bench, to his last job (as a professor at Ohio State) where the cafeteria was well lit and the public bathrooms had hot water. In his entire memoir, the only other person he mentions is Rolls (and he gets a mention for inspiring his interest in cars). Not his wife, not his children.</p>
<p>I know many very accomplished young adults with siblings on the severe end of the autistic spectrum who have decided they are not going to have children because of a perceived risk of having an autistic child. </p>
<p>Aside from any genetic risks, during the past twenty years or so, even as parents have no longer been deemed “accountable” for making their children autistic, the burdens of caring 24/7 for such children seem to have shifted to families increasingly ill-equipped to shoulder these burdens, too often until parents are either incapacitated or dead. </p>
<p>In some traditional cultures (many Asian cultures, orthodox Jews) such young adults are not even considered marriageable, except perhaps among other families with similar children. There is evidence that the stigma is extending to individuals diagnosed with Asperger’s and their siblings as well.</p>
<p>Read <em>Unstrange Minds</em> by Roy Grinker.</p>
<p>Husband (and his late father) and 2 sons all engineers. None would be considered to be “on the spectrum.” Just happen to have great math and science aptitude. Sons are both popular, socially skilled kids .</p>
<p>My parents have 10 grandchildren. We think my dad has undiagnosed aspergers, posibly my brother. Of the grandkids: 1B: normal, 2B normal, but needed intensive speech therapy, 3B aspergers, 4B: moderate autism, 5G normal, 6G normal, 7B ADD, 8B aspergers, 9B ADD, aspergers, 10G probably undiagnosed aspergers. There has to be a genetic component.</p>
<p>^^^^^^I told my children if they change their minds and decide they want to have children after all, they should first of all find a partner who will not run for the hills as soon as a child has issues (harder than they might think - I have seen too many well-compensated autism professionals unable to handle an autistic child for more than an hour or so at a stretch, and even then only in a clinical setting), and then try to have girls if they want to minimize autism risks, although I admit I have seen families with an autistic girl and one or more “normal” boys. </p>
<p>I would also advise them to find a way to live on one salary, with a good bit left over for treatment not covered by educational entitlements or insurance, by increasing earnings or decreasing expectations for what most would consider a middle-class standard of living. And, not to assume that they will receive any “respite” (families with normal children can hire babysitters, or even get others to watch their childen for free, and service providers who are fine with Asperger’s kids often refuse to work with the lowest-functioning) or residential placement as their children get older or become adults, unless they become strong advocates.</p>
<p>I am not so concerned about Asperger’s.</p>
<p>Frazzled,
You stories really touched me, and taught me things I am unaware of. Thank you.</p>
<p>One thing I am also thinking is that marriage itself, and having children, even with no fears of genetic issues, are going though a major transformation on our society. We are at a crucial anthropological point with this, IMO.</p>
<p>I think that many of our children will not marry.
And many will not have children.</p>
<p>And many will “select” the genetic material, using the various technologies out there, and still developing.
However, I still believe that the ability to isolate the genes and prevent the perfect storm may elude us. Though we will be able to mage the probabilities a bit.
(And certainly some will have children even if not married.)</p>
<p>You deserve a lot of kudos for your patience and wisdom.</p>
<p>Rather than worry about DNA testing, I hope we put some effort into reevaluating curriculum and teacher training.
Large classrooms & linear curriculum aimed at the middle doesn’t really work for many kids.</p>
<p>So true. Neuroscience, psychology, education, genetics, biochemistry- all these can make a good contribution in research.
But we can start changing and trying to improve practices right away. Unfortunately, there is a definite lack of freedom in how the US public school system works; it is neither standardized nor individualized.
This is one reason why so many do leave the public school system…</p>