re: A Question For Medical Experts Here; What Do You Think Caused the Spike in Autism?

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The 'scope' of autism widened

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Agree, and this plays a part, but it's not only this. I see more moderate to severe autism in my clinic now than I did 20 years ago. I could go months without seeing a patient with moderate to severe autism in my resident clinics at LSU. Now, I can't go a week, and it's usually a few per week. I'm not even talking about the mildly autistic kids who are mostly just socially awkward and concrete. I'm just talking about the kids who will never be able to live on their own. That's anecdotal but it's been my experience after 26 years in pediatrics.

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The 'scope' of autism widened. Dated a gal who was studying child psych and she explained it to me. Wasn't vaccines or anything like that. Just more characteristics became 'autism'.

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This.

Many cases once considered borderline or marginal diagnosis began to be identified with a higher certainty of being autism.

The reason? I don’t know. It’s either parents pushing for a better explanation than not autism or a pharmaceutical push.

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This is a big part of it. That, and every goddamn leftard under thirty claims to be "on the spectrum".

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I saw a TikTok with a couple hundred thousands likes of someone having an "autism" reveal party like a gender reveal party where she read the results of her test. Was some mid-30 year old single white woman. The epidemic is the need of these people who have privileged lives to need something that makes them disadvantaged to satiate their white guilt.

There is also studies that suggest that autism is genetic, so as we diagnosis more and more people with it and they have children the odds are that their children have it go up so the amount of people diagnosed with it will go up.

The amount of junk we eat and breath, combined with the lack of proper prenatal care in lower income households (the ones that have higher amount of children ironically) probably play a part in it as well.

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I imagine in the future we will discover that this disorder is really comprised of multiple separate syndromes we are lumping together due to lack of understanding right now. Some will be heavily driven by genetics, some heavily by environmental insults, some by a combination of those things. And not all insults/exposures will affect people the same way, likely due to genes.

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This is exactly where we are at right now. It seems that anyone that is neurodivergent falls under the autism umbrella because they can not define exactly what is causing it. There are a multitude of ways to help with the symptoms but finding which one can be a pain and expensive

My wife works for an autism clinic. She’s certified BCBA

They have no idea what causes autism….which tells you it’s big pharma.

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Not an expert, but I had always assumed it was because it was underreported.

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I agree. It used to be that we all knew someone who was just a little weird or off. Not dangerous or mentally slow. Just a little awkward or something. Now, those types of people are getting diagnosed as being on the spectrum even though there's really no effect on them being able to live a normal life due to their "condition".

And as others have said, its a badge of honor for some of the kids or the parents of these kids. They want their kid to be "special" and want to be seen as a hero because they are raising a "special needs kid".

I think it has to be with the massive fall in "unselective breeding". That is to say, in the old says, Johnny married Julie since they were in the same town and their parents/friends knew each other. They didn't match up according to politics or even intelligence. It was much more of a community social type of dynamic.

Fast forward several decades, and now the class stratification for mating is extreme. It's basically the 2 "non-trashy" people at the beginning of Idiocracy. They are already slightly spectumy themselves - high IQs, neurosis, etc. Then they all go to the same schools, mate and create mini mes that are concentrated versions of the same shite.

TL;DR: spectrum traits used to be overwhelmed by mating diversity. Now, they are concentrated and passed on.

I do genetic testing so I can speak to part of it. Until VERY recently, genetic testing was too expensive for almost anyone to have access to it. Furthermore, the only way to determine if a variant is pathogenic or benign is to have a lot of data. So until about 15 years ago, we had little testing and little data. Now it's extremely affordable & most companies don't bill Medicaid patients. The better genetics labs submit their data to an international database that helps us to determine with greater precision if a variant is pathogenic. Chromosomal microarrays, neurodevelopmental panels, & whole exomes have given a diagnosis that just simple wasn't available not very long ago.

I will also add that the term autism is a very broad generalization that covers a plethora of neurodevelopmental disorders. As a kid of the 90's, I remember having the 'special ed' kids in my school. You didn't really know what was wrong with them , only that they were off. They got clumped together which in retrospect was a major disservice as we now have a better understanding of the disorder. Individual education plans specific to the child's defect can provide a world of positive change that we just didn't understand until recently. And quite honestly, we have a lot left to learn.

Are there environmental components? 100%. But the amount of genetic testing done now is astronomical compared to even just 10-15 years ago.

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TL;DR: spectrum traits used to be overwhelmed by mating diversity. Now, they are concentrated and passed on.

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May be some of that dynamic going on, but I think some of the effects of the sexual revolution (increased sexual encounters, abortions) may have impacted things in this category as well.