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Autism has been rising over the years. Either it's been under diagnosed, or it's hard to believe it's a purely genetic problem. Even though some people might b

Autism has been rising over the years. Either it's been under diagnosed, or it's hard to believe it's a purely genetic problem. Even though some people might be susceptible to triggers. At the same time, something could be messing up our DNA. This article suggests, next to under & over diagnoising, late parenting and obesity in moms. https://www.verywellhealth.com/is-there-a-real-increase-in-the-incidence-of-autism-260133#:~:text=Since%201990%2C%20the%20incidence%20of,1%20in%2040%20in%202017 https://www.verywellhealth.com/is-there-a-real-increase-in-t....

emmelaich 4y ago
I can believe it's mostly genetic; in these days of social and geographical mobility you're more likely to mate with someone in the same industry rather than say your high school sweetheart.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  And more likely to mate with someone with a different cultural background, which has a greater impact on our genetics.
rogerkirkness 4y ago
People with high functioning autism are more likely to have children than neurotypicals, so there is some favourable selection pressure as well.
- supertofu 4y ago
  This is surprising. I would have assumed the opposite (people with high functioning autism seem less susceptible to social pressure to have children, and more likely to use birth control, for example.) Any guesses as to why?
- MrPatan 4y ago
  The less strong claim is that people with functioning autism reproduce more than they did before
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Do you have a source for this claim? I'm not doubting you, genuinely interested (my now-adult son is on the spectrum).
jklinger410 4y ago
As with every comment I write on this topic, there are surely different disorders called "autism" that are being lumped together. So their causes may actually be different. If you leave a child alone with no human contact, it becomes autistic very quickly. So there's definitely types of autism that come from parenting. But I would be shocked if autism at birth it is not being caused by environmental pollution and low nutrition diets. Which adds a tremendous body count on top of the already monumental body count directly attributed to the FDA and EPA, and the many political bodies that govern them.
- jjallen 4y ago
  Aren’t wealthier families more likely to have autistic kids? Wouldn’t this contradict your statement of environmental pollution and low nutrition diets?
  - jklinger410 4y ago
    I haven't seen the data around wealthier families. But wealthier families have more access to healthcare and can get earlier (and more thorough) diagnosis than poor ones. So unless there was some kind of control for access to healthcare, I would question that correlation.
    - alistairSH 4y ago
      This. We're relatively wealthy (typical middle management salaries) and it took a string of doctor appointments over many months to get a diagnosis for our son. Several of these were multi-hour sessions. In addition to the time off work to attend appointments, there was time on the phone, time on the internet, time talking to school counselors/teachers, scheduling IEP meetings at school, and probably other stuff I've long since forgotten. There wasn't a lot of out-of-pocket cash cost (because decent insurance, not guaranteed in the US), but the time and mental energy expended was significant on its own. And, 100% anecdotal, but my wife's brothers both have similar personality traits as our son. Neither was diagnosed (and as far as I know, neither tested - this would have been in the 70s and 80s). Both ended up as typical middle-class, working-class Americans (own modest homes, but no appreciable wealth beyond that).
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I think public awareness is a pretty major contributor to these "epidemics", often in synergy with media. We've had a lot of autism-spectrum-type characters in the 00s and 10s. This speaks quite loudly to the effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autistic_fictional_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autistic_fictional_cha... There is a lot more portrayals in the 2000s than before. Without awareness of autism-spectrum disorders, someone on the spectrum would probably have been considered shy, eccentric, anxious, aloof, and/or a bit stupid. There's previously been similar "awareness booms" with regard to anxiety, depression, OCD and ADHD. This has roughly coincided with the introduction of Xanax, SSRIs, Ritalin, and so forth.
- _jal 4y ago
  Dyslexia is another similar one. And kind of similar is treatment of left-handed people - it was routine through about the 70s to try to "correct" that.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Goes back a long way. It used to be the four temperaments of melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine and choleric were the basis vectors for explaining human behavior. That's absolutely a way you can reason about things. Psychology, whether modern or ancient, creates a language for speaking about our experiences and the behavior of others, which shapes our way of thinking about it in an almost Saphir-Whorf:ian way.
- brippalcharrid 4y ago
  Some of these issues can also be clouded by the accomodations that are put in place for them being perceived as incentives. The impact of a diagnosis on school and university examinations, for instance (eg. 25% extra time), is widely recognized as being significant, and they are highly sought-after as a result, with some people being more adept at securing a diagnosis for their child than others.
  - ok_dad 4y ago
FollowingTheDao 4y ago
In very few cases it is purely genetic, like these de novo cases they are finding, but the majority of cases are not. I want to throw this out there, not as something I believe, but as an idea to be discussed, that one factor in the rise of Autism might be the sudden rise in wealth of a new type of person (programmers, engineers, etc) which led to different mating patterns and a sudden change in the genetics of the children born to these couples. Or even just a change in how they raise the kids and what food they eat.
- MrPatan 4y ago
  Let's go back a bit and call it "the rise of the accountant". I don't think there's been rich programmers in significant numbers to for enough time to have moved the genetic needle all that much. But widen the category a bit and you'll find that the rewards for a relatively obsessive attention to detail and being comfortable with numbers have shifted in the past five centuries or so, from a one way trip to the monastery (if you were lucky) to a comfortable middle class life style, family included.
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    HA! I like that. But seriously, all it takes is one generation for Autism to appear if the genetics for it are present in the parents. These people who were "accountants" were always working for the rich, never rich themselves. By the way, my father was an accountant (Went to NYU when he was 16 back in 1951) and he later ended up working on some of the first office computers. And here I am, being told in my 50s that I am probably on the spectrum. My mother was from a poor coal mining family in PA and she ran away to NYC to find here way out of that life when she met my father.
  - nfhshy68 4y ago
    My dad is an accountant. I joke sometimes that I got my dad's Autism and my mum's ADHD. Dunno who gave me dyslexia though.
albertopv 4y ago
Or maybe now is "over diagnosed". I met low functioning autistic people and I consider them "real autistic", it's almost impossible to have a social contact with them. I don't think who call autism a "superpower" should be called autistic. Or the way around, classification is a mess, autism class it's too broad.
- cpuguy83 4y ago
  The existence of severe cases does not mean less severe cases don't count.
  - albertopv 4y ago
    I didn't mean that, I mean they should count differently. An autistic guy you couldn't literally touch without him screaming can't be counted in the same class of autistic people that social interact much more.
  - spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Maybe. Calling it a spectrum is an accurate term, and thus, pretty much everybody is on the spectrum. It's not a one dimensional spectrum of course, but like... I'm probably a high functioning aspie. Prone to obsessions, highly temperature sensitive, didn't really grok some basic aspects of socialization until I manually learned some social rules in high school. But it's not severe enough to be noteworthy and you wouldn't think anything was categorically different unless you were thinking within that framework already. Just a bit geeky really. The issue comes in when people want to contextualize it as a disease as an implied bad thing.
MrPatan 4y ago
Why not both? How about modern world makes it easier for autists to reproduce?
jmyeet 4y ago
Don’t underestimate under-diagnosis. Over the last century the number of people who are left handed rose from ~4% to ~12%. What happened? We stopped punishing children for writing left handed and forcing them to write right handed. We like to blame this like autism and ADHD on emotional factors like screen time. Maybe there’s some truth to that. But I firmly believe that a lot of neurodivergence can be explained by better diagnosis and less punishment.
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  Dont underestimate over diagnosing in these overbearing times.
washbrain 4y ago
Almost certainly undiagnosed. A similar thing happened when we stopped stigmatizing left handedness. There was a sharp increase in lefties over the next decade, then it leveled off at whatever the natural point is. I expect autism, depression, trans identities, lgb identities, etc. are all things that are becoming more accepted and we're going to see a sharp rise in them followed by them leveling off at whatever the natural level is.
RobotToaster 4y ago
I imagine it's heavily epigenetic. In other words you need to have the genes for autism, but the genetic switches (epigenetics) that control if a gene is on or off need to be switched. Those switches are also sometimes heritable.
devwastaken 4y ago
It's a largely U.S. problem, same with many other disorders. The industrial era has put so many carcinogens into the air, water, and food that there is bound to be changes. Combine this with American culture of being unhealthy, and now families are started far later in life - it's a "no duh" situation.
ThrustVectoring 4y ago
An autism diagnosis means that you're too autistic to function in society without causing mental health professionals to be involved in your life. There's at least two easily identifiable non-genetic factors: society can lower the threshold of autistic behavior that it tolerates, and mental health professionals can be involved more often and at lower general thresholds.
- camoufleur 4y ago
  Not necessarily. I did a neuropsychological evaluation because I suspected I had ADHD (I do) and it was causing me trouble. I was also diagnosed with autism/asperger's which isn't a significant source of stress for me and that wasn't why I was diagnosed with it.

emmelaich 4y ago

I can believe it's mostly genetic; in these days of social and geographical mobility you're more likely to mate with someone in the same industry rather than say your high school sweetheart.

FollowingTheDao 4y ago
And more likely to mate with someone with a different cultural background, which has a greater impact on our genetics.

rogerkirkness 4y ago

People with high functioning autism are more likely to have children than neurotypicals, so there is some favourable selection pressure as well.

supertofu 4y ago
This is surprising. I would have assumed the opposite (people with high functioning autism seem less susceptible to social pressure to have children, and more likely to use birth control, for example.) Any guesses as to why?
MrPatan 4y ago
The less strong claim is that people with functioning autism reproduce more than they did before
alistairSH 4y ago
Do you have a source for this claim? I'm not doubting you, genuinely interested (my now-adult son is on the spectrum).

jklinger410 4y ago

As with every comment I write on this topic, there are surely different disorders called "autism" that are being lumped together. So their causes may actually be different. If you leave a child alone with no human contact, it becomes autistic very quickly. So there's definitely types of autism that come from parenting. But I would be shocked if autism at birth it is not being caused by environmental pollution and low nutrition diets. Which adds a tremendous body count on top of the already monumental body count directly attributed to the FDA and EPA, and the many political bodies that govern them.

jjallen 4y ago
Aren’t wealthier families more likely to have autistic kids? Wouldn’t this contradict your statement of environmental pollution and low nutrition diets?
- jklinger410 4y ago
  I haven't seen the data around wealthier families. But wealthier families have more access to healthcare and can get earlier (and more thorough) diagnosis than poor ones. So unless there was some kind of control for access to healthcare, I would question that correlation.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    This. We're relatively wealthy (typical middle management salaries) and it took a string of doctor appointments over many months to get a diagnosis for our son. Several of these were multi-hour sessions. In addition to the time off work to attend appointments, there was time on the phone, time on the internet, time talking to school counselors/teachers, scheduling IEP meetings at school, and probably other stuff I've long since forgotten. There wasn't a lot of out-of-pocket cash cost (because decent insurance, not guaranteed in the US), but the time and mental energy expended was significant on its own. And, 100% anecdotal, but my wife's brothers both have similar personality traits as our son. Neither was diagnosed (and as far as I know, neither tested - this would have been in the 70s and 80s). Both ended up as typical middle-class, working-class Americans (own modest homes, but no appreciable wealth beyond that).

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I think public awareness is a pretty major contributor to these "epidemics", often in synergy with media. We've had a lot of autism-spectrum-type characters in the 00s and 10s. This speaks quite loudly to the effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autistic_fictional_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autistic_fictional_cha... There is a lot more portrayals in the 2000s than before. Without awareness of autism-spectrum disorders, someone on the spectrum would probably have been considered shy, eccentric, anxious, aloof, and/or a bit stupid. There's previously been similar "awareness booms" with regard to anxiety, depression, OCD and ADHD. This has roughly coincided with the introduction of Xanax, SSRIs, Ritalin, and so forth.

_jal 4y ago
Dyslexia is another similar one. And kind of similar is treatment of left-handed people - it was routine through about the 70s to try to "correct" that.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Goes back a long way. It used to be the four temperaments of melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine and choleric were the basis vectors for explaining human behavior. That's absolutely a way you can reason about things. Psychology, whether modern or ancient, creates a language for speaking about our experiences and the behavior of others, which shapes our way of thinking about it in an almost Saphir-Whorf:ian way.
brippalcharrid 4y ago
Some of these issues can also be clouded by the accomodations that are put in place for them being perceived as incentives. The impact of a diagnosis on school and university examinations, for instance (eg. 25% extra time), is widely recognized as being significant, and they are highly sought-after as a result, with some people being more adept at securing a diagnosis for their child than others.
- ok_dad 4y ago

FollowingTheDao 4y ago

In very few cases it is purely genetic, like these de novo cases they are finding, but the majority of cases are not. I want to throw this out there, not as something I believe, but as an idea to be discussed, that one factor in the rise of Autism might be the sudden rise in wealth of a new type of person (programmers, engineers, etc) which led to different mating patterns and a sudden change in the genetics of the children born to these couples. Or even just a change in how they raise the kids and what food they eat.

MrPatan 4y ago
Let's go back a bit and call it "the rise of the accountant". I don't think there's been rich programmers in significant numbers to for enough time to have moved the genetic needle all that much. But widen the category a bit and you'll find that the rewards for a relatively obsessive attention to detail and being comfortable with numbers have shifted in the past five centuries or so, from a one way trip to the monastery (if you were lucky) to a comfortable middle class life style, family included.
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  HA! I like that. But seriously, all it takes is one generation for Autism to appear if the genetics for it are present in the parents. These people who were "accountants" were always working for the rich, never rich themselves. By the way, my father was an accountant (Went to NYU when he was 16 back in 1951) and he later ended up working on some of the first office computers. And here I am, being told in my 50s that I am probably on the spectrum. My mother was from a poor coal mining family in PA and she ran away to NYC to find here way out of that life when she met my father.
- nfhshy68 4y ago
  My dad is an accountant. I joke sometimes that I got my dad's Autism and my mum's ADHD. Dunno who gave me dyslexia though.

albertopv 4y ago

Or maybe now is "over diagnosed". I met low functioning autistic people and I consider them "real autistic", it's almost impossible to have a social contact with them. I don't think who call autism a "superpower" should be called autistic. Or the way around, classification is a mess, autism class it's too broad.

cpuguy83 4y ago
The existence of severe cases does not mean less severe cases don't count.
- albertopv 4y ago
  I didn't mean that, I mean they should count differently. An autistic guy you couldn't literally touch without him screaming can't be counted in the same class of autistic people that social interact much more.
- spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Maybe. Calling it a spectrum is an accurate term, and thus, pretty much everybody is on the spectrum. It's not a one dimensional spectrum of course, but like... I'm probably a high functioning aspie. Prone to obsessions, highly temperature sensitive, didn't really grok some basic aspects of socialization until I manually learned some social rules in high school. But it's not severe enough to be noteworthy and you wouldn't think anything was categorically different unless you were thinking within that framework already. Just a bit geeky really. The issue comes in when people want to contextualize it as a disease as an implied bad thing.

MrPatan 4y ago

Why not both? How about modern world makes it easier for autists to reproduce?

jmyeet 4y ago

Don’t underestimate under-diagnosis. Over the last century the number of people who are left handed rose from ~4% to ~12%. What happened? We stopped punishing children for writing left handed and forcing them to write right handed. We like to blame this like autism and ADHD on emotional factors like screen time. Maybe there’s some truth to that. But I firmly believe that a lot of neurodivergence can be explained by better diagnosis and less punishment.

jiggywiggy 4y ago
Dont underestimate over diagnosing in these overbearing times.

washbrain 4y ago

Almost certainly undiagnosed. A similar thing happened when we stopped stigmatizing left handedness. There was a sharp increase in lefties over the next decade, then it leveled off at whatever the natural point is. I expect autism, depression, trans identities, lgb identities, etc. are all things that are becoming more accepted and we're going to see a sharp rise in them followed by them leveling off at whatever the natural level is.

RobotToaster 4y ago

I imagine it's heavily epigenetic. In other words you need to have the genes for autism, but the genetic switches (epigenetics) that control if a gene is on or off need to be switched. Those switches are also sometimes heritable.

devwastaken 4y ago

It's a largely U.S. problem, same with many other disorders. The industrial era has put so many carcinogens into the air, water, and food that there is bound to be changes. Combine this with American culture of being unhealthy, and now families are started far later in life - it's a "no duh" situation.

ThrustVectoring 4y ago

An autism diagnosis means that you're too autistic to function in society without causing mental health professionals to be involved in your life. There's at least two easily identifiable non-genetic factors: society can lower the threshold of autistic behavior that it tolerates, and mental health professionals can be involved more often and at lower general thresholds.

camoufleur 4y ago
Not necessarily. I did a neuropsychological evaluation because I suspected I had ADHD (I do) and it was causing me trouble. I was also diagnosed with autism/asperger's which isn't a significant source of stress for me and that wasn't why I was diagnosed with it.