2 ms·

There are certainly ethical issues associated with detection of autism risk during pregnancy allowing the choice for termination. I'm not sure about your point

There are certainly ethical issues associated with detection of autism risk during pregnancy allowing the choice for termination. I'm not sure about your point though. Fixing things after it has happened is generally hard. I am no immunologist, but preventing excessive immune response is a possibility maybe for prevention of the injury (not completely removing the immune response, just retarding it).

AstralStorm 10y ago
First you have to know what to look for. As many cases of autism are unexplained, there appears to be no symptoms to look for. Big leukaemia would be detected while taking a routine sample during pregnancy as done already for testing of blood immunoreactivity alongside known viral and bacterial infections. (Full blood group test preferably.) However to find less obvious immune reactions first we need to know what are we looking for and when. (during pregnancy or after) To find out requires a comparable effort to human genome project. That is progressing as ImmGen project (currently mouse stages), Human Immunology Project (ImmuneSpace) and probably some others, but getting precise and numerous enough samples during pregnancy is problematic. Parallel research is going into toxins in utero, later immune reactions after exposure to toxins and so on. Yet more is going into studying infant microbiome esp. gut microbiome which would be related to method of delivery, feeding, exposure to chemicals and so on. Any of the above might prove crucial. Or all of them. It is a young and exciting field.