Asd toddler causes

[Noahsark23]

I have a 3 year old who has moderate asd. there is zero history or asd on both sides of the family. I was however taking 100mg of sertraline whilst pregnant. Basically I’ve been going down a black whole of why this has happened I constantly chasing for something I will never get answers to. I’m constantly thinking why did this happen and why does my baby have to be different ps he is very loved and taken care of. He is my first and this wasn’t what I was expecting. Hearing all the other children his age saying mama which is something I dream about everyday I find myself holding tears back a lot of the time. I don’t really know what I’m asking or looking for. Today has been hard because i attended a taster session in his new nursery the lump I had in my throat seeing him compared to every other child it just broke my heart

Not all Autism has an obvious genetic link. Diagnosis is a lot more common now than a generation or two ago, there may well be Autistic members in the older generations that was never recognised or diagnosed. You're medication didn't make him Autistic, the way his genes are or how they've expressed is the reason he's Autistic not the necessary medication you took.

It is hard, you grieve the way you thought things would be, you see the differences, you know life will be harder for them, it's tough, it's ok to be sad about that. I'm guessing he's non verbal currently?

I have 4 Autistic DC, that's not what I ever imagined parenthood would be like. 2 of my DC have needed a lot of speech therapy. One had big developmental delays between 2-5 years, would interact with siblings but was completely oblivious to other children at 4, wouldn't interact at all now has friends and is doing well at primary school. Being ND still effects him significantly and always will but developmentally he's miles from where he was a few years ago.

I suspect you'll find there is an undiagnosed link somewhere.

We didn't think we had a genetic link either until a child was diagnosed, we learned more, and hey presto, there are plenty of unexpected genetic links.

It can be impossible with present state of knowledge to know why, for any specific case, except that there seems to be some kind of inherited component for at least some cases of ASD, that ASD can be more common in people who have certain other conditions, and that there are a handful of identified environmental factors so far, including some specific medications (not the one you took).

We do know that antidepressants like the one you were taking probably don't cause ASD — this page has a good explanation of why people thought for a while that medications like sertraline might play a factor, and how we now know that these drugs probably don't cause autism www.spectrumnews.org/news/link-antidepressants-autism-explained/
In short, it's something else (or a combination of something elses), some other factor or factors, which means that women who are more likely to need to take antidepressants are also more likely to have children with ASD. That can initially make it look like the antidepressants can cause ASD, but when they did more sophisticated studies to make sure that other factors were accounted for, the association between mothers taking antidepressants and children having ASD disappeared.

It sounds so hard for you, please don't let worries about the medication you needed to keep yourself healthy through pregnancy become another layer of stress for you. You didn't harm your little boy.

I know I very consciously didn't take any medications when pregnant. I have heard that a difficult birth can make it more likely, and my most affected child did have a difficult birth. There's definitely the genetic component, though we weren't aware of that for many more years.