re: Apology for anti-vaccination posts I've made

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early to tell if vaccinations cause autism

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Likely vitamin D and serotonin pathway

Clarifying : not related to vaccines

Likely related to distance from equator and more time spent indoor with rampant use of sunblock when outside (in the setting of a processed shitty diet for Americans and their kids....)

70 percent of the population is deficient. The percentage is likely higher if you calculate how many people have optimal vitamin D levels..

LINK

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Autism Spectrum Disorder [ASD], is a common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired communication, repetitive behaviours and social impairment. For the last 35 years, a dramatically increased incidence has occurred, possibly reflecting increased surveillance, over-diagnosis, a true increase in incidence or some combination of these explanations. As of 2010, ASD is diagnosed in 1 of every 64 American children by the age of eight (8) years. Vitamin D deficiency has been hypothesized to contribute to ASD as far back as 2007.1 High doses of vitamin D were first proposed to have a significant treatment effect on the core symptoms of autism in 2013 based on vitamin D’s mechanisms of action, in particular in anti-inflammatory properties.2 Possible mechanisms of action that explain vitamin D helping attenuating ASD are well known, are related to the fact vitamin D is not a vitamin (it is a pro-hormone) and has been recently reviewed.3, 4 Besides reducing risk or severity through it’s steroid hormone anti-inflammatory effects in the brain, vitamin D regulates DNA repair mechanism genes, has autoimmune effects, raises seizure threshold, increases T-regulatory cells, protects neural mitochondria, and up-regulates glutathione, the master antioxidant, which scavenges oxidative by-products.5 Vitamin D’s anti-inflammatory and anti- autoimmune properties in ASD were evident in Mostafa et al’s study of 50 children with ASD, aged 5-12, which found 25(OH)D levels were very highly correlated with the presence of an anti-neural antibody (r = - 0.86;P < 0.001)) and that serum 25(OH)D levels in children were highly correlated with the severity of ASD symptoms on the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (r = - 0.81;P <0.001).6 Another one of vitamin D’s steroid hormone mechanism is through vitamin D’s effect on serotonin via direct genetic regulation of serotonin’s rate limiting enzymes; both the gene for peripheral tryptophan hydroxylase (TPH)1 and the gene for central TPH2 require vitamin D for transcription. Activated vitamin D (the steroid hormone) genetically down-regulates TPH1 while it up-regulates TPH2, thus explaining the serotonin paradox in ASD in which peripheral serotonin is increased but central serotonin is decreased.7 It is not known if any or all of these are possible mechanisms of action; steroid hormones effect multiple genes in multiple ways; it is possible there are different mechanisms at work in different individuals.

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