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This might be a true association but still not explain most of the cases of autism in kids being born today- DDT has been illegal in most countries for 30 years
by fallingfrog 8y ago
This might be a true association but still not explain most of the cases of autism in kids being born today- DDT has been illegal in most countries for 30 years. There must be something else accounting for the more recent cases- perhaps another chemical having a similar effect.
- alexandercrohde 8y agoYeah. Seeing how long it has taken us to find this DDT-Autism link it makes me wonder how many other pesticides since have an uncaught link.
- gowld 8y agoThis isn't a DDT-Autism link, it's a preliminery curiosity in the data that is motivating further research.
- hyperpape 8y agoDDT is very stable and bioaccumulates. I don't know how much exposure a woman giving birth in the 2000s would have relative to earlier years, but I don't think you can assume it's that low. My instinct is that based on the study's moderate effect size and the lack of strong birth order effects or links to breastfeeding in autism, this effect can't explain the dramatic rise in autism diagnoses in the past several decades. I'm not a scientist, so take this with a grain of salt.
- chimeracoder 8y ago> This might be a true association but still not explain most of the cases of autism in kids being born today- DDT has been illegal in most countries for 30 years. Not necessarily. The effects could be transgenerational (there's already precedent for that with other substances and executive function disorders, of which ASD is one[0]). Even the rise in autism cases isn't necessarily evidence against this link, because the ability to diagnose people 30+ years ago was dramatically different from our ability to properly diagnose people today. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3931498/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3931498/