Washington – For many experts, Health Secretary Robert F. There is a promise to “pull the screen” to find the causes of autism within a few months of Kennedy Jr. – and unreal.
This is because it seems to ignore the science that connects to about 200 genes – and the difference in the brain that may be present at birth.
David Amaral, a long -time autism researcher at the UC Davis Mind Institute, said, “Virtually all the evidence of the field refers to autism – and multiple reasons, it may not be a single cause – they all affect how the fetus develops the brain develops,”.
“Although we do not see the behavior of autism until we are 2 or 3 years of age, biological changes have already taken place,” he said.
Kennedy on Wednesday announced that the National Health Institutes would create a new database “To uncover the root causes of autism and other chronic diseases” merges Medicaid and Medicare insurance claims with electronic medical records and other data. He referred to the growing autism rate as an epidemic of a “preventable disease” that is caused by any kind of environmental exposure and promised “some answers in September”.
Autism is not considered as a disease. It is a complex brain disorder known as autism spectrum disorder, reflecting that it affects different people in different ways.
Symptoms are widely changed. For some people, deep autism means being incredible and significant intellectual disability. Others have a light effect on the distance, such as difficulty in social and sensitive skills.
Helen Tagger-Flasburg, an autism expert at the University of Boston, says that autism rates are increasing-not among the cases, not among the light issues.
Because physicians slowly learned that light symptoms were part of the spectrum of autism, which led to the change in the late 1990s and in the early 2000s, which changed the diagnosis and the qualification for educational services, he said.
The connection between gene and autism is related to the study of twins decades ago. Some are rare genetic forms have passed from parents to child, even if parents do not show any sign of autism.
However, this is not the only kind. With the development of the brain, rapidly divided cells make mistakes that can only be transformed into one type of cell or one part of the brain, immoral explained.
He said non -ninasive testing can identify the differences between brain activity types in children who do not get autism, when the symptoms are clear, he said.
These types of changes are derived from the brain structure or its neural circuitry – and to understand them it is necessary to study the brain tissue that is only found after death, who was the scientific director of a brain banking cooperation called autism brainnet. The bank, funded by the non -profit Simon’s Foundation, has collected about half of the autism and about half of the remaining parts from the remaining parts.
Researchers have identified other factors that can contact genetic weakness to increase the risk of autism. One of these includes the age of the father of the father, including diabetes, has some health problems during pregnancy, whether the use of certain drugs during pregnancy and pre -birth births.
Any anxiety that can be added to the ham with autism has long prolonged, stressful tagger-flasburg, who led a new coalition of autism scientists to the wrong action of the administration about this condition.
In countries like Denmark and Norway, in the United States, with its fragmented healthcare system, the kind of medical tracking that is not available – the national health system where research is similar to the diagnosis of autism and does not look like environmental smoking guns.
Experts say that Kennedy’s designed database is not suitable for autism in the part because there is no information about genetics.
However, researchers have long used insurance claims and similar data to study other important questions such as access to autism services. And NIH describes the upcoming database as useful for study, treatment effectiveness and access to other trends.
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Associated Press Health and Science Department has received the support of the Science and Educational Media Group and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of the Hughes Medical Institute. AP is the sole responsible for all content.
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