Can autism really not be on the rise?

[nikos]

Me and dh were talking this morning. He's a journalist on a national newspaper and already has one colleague with a son with autism. He's just heard that another journo has a grandson dx with autism, they had suspected something was wrong. Dh is not in a massive team so that's three including us.
I know the arguments that dx is better and can account for the increase. But if you think that even 20 years ago most paeds would only see one case in their careers.
I know we've talked about this many times on here, but it just struck me with renewed force this morning.

In the 3 streets near me there are 10 children with severe autism, 2 are mine, 2 are my sisters and te other 6 are children we know via school etc.

There are around 30 houses in each street,so that's 10 Autistic children in 90 houses in a tiny area.

Not to mention the many, many other children/adults I know in my small town.

Autism is on the rise, don't care what anybody says !

I think it's down to interpretation - it's not more diagnosis but different diagnosis. Many children now dxd as ASD were dxd as mentally retarded/handicapped , and those we now say are Aspergers, were seen as candidates for Freudian psychoanyalsis etc

I do see it everywhere now. Admittedly, I'm in engineering where it is far more common. A number of the staff have boys with dxs, but they were not dxd themselves, I know a few would have been if they were a child in this decade.

Also I am aware of a few families up the road with autistic children. I still believe it is more a case of awareness, but also used to be dxd as schizophrenia.

It is interesting. I worked in psycho-geriatrics for a while 10 years ago & there were patients in their 60s, 70s, 80s who were clearly autistic and had been in & out of psychiatric units most of their adult lives with vague diagnoses of possibly catatonia/depression/schizophrenia or just 'socially inadequate' (yes really ) by that age no-one really saw the point of re-diagnosing them.

I know of a mother who was diagnosed after her son was, she'd had a history of depression before. I can also think of a number of past colleagues who might well be diagnosed now. (Actually, I would put a lot of boys I used to be keen on as Asperger's now...I hate to think what that says about me.)

Testing largish groups of adults shows the same number of autistic individuals as we're seeing in younger people. It's just that we were all categorised as geeks/weird/odd/rude/ whatever else before, and left to fail or find a tiny niche where we could survive.
There certainly are clusters of people with autism, not least because some jobs attract the very skills we tend to have, e.g. silicon valley in California, Thames Valley IT sector in the UK.

I have a friend who is 61 who was educated at Special Schools and shows every sign of being on the Autistic Spectrum. It just wasn't recognised in those days.

nikos, I really don't know whether autism is really on the rise or whether it is as previous posters have said, different diagnosis in recent years. If it is truly on the rise, then I'd be very interested in the ideas of Dr Michael Goldberg. There is a lot of interesting information, I will try to keep it as brief as I can.
As you can see from my name, I am interested in CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). Dr Goldberg believes that many cases of autism are actually down to medical disease, a neuro-immune disorder. Back in 2000 he wrote

"I stumbled into the field of autism somewhat by accident. My wife had had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for over ten years. That began my journey into clinical research. It rapidly became apparent we were dealing with some component of the immune system, an autoimmune like reaction. During that time, as I was investigating all options for my wife, a few ?Autistic? children were referred to my practice. Much to my surprise, these children had blood work comparable to that of my wife and other adults with this undiagnosed disorder, and to that of children I had been seeing diagnosed with quiet ADD and mixed ADD. I remember thinking then, ?What could the immune system have to do with autism??"

From here nids.net/testimony.htm
That was from 2000, for more recent stuff search youtube for Michael Goldberg autism.

Last year Dr Judy Mikovits found a new human infectious retrovirus in CFS patients, called XMRV. Apparently this is the third human retrovirus to be discovered, the others are HTLV and HIV. What's interesting here is she is also finding this virus in a substantial percentage of autistic children, although this study is so far very small and is not published. www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzIdpMUunHE#t=5m12s

So whether or not XMRV is the source of immune problems, there appears to be agreement between these two doctors that similar immune deficiencies are seen in both CFS and some cases of autism e.g. reduced Natural Killer Cell function, and both conditions have supposedly been on the increase since the 80s.

certainly retrospective studies show similar orevalence rates, however as there is also supposed under dx in groups such as females and black people, it may that there is a clear rise but we just do not have the stats yet.

California is quite intresting on this; they seem to haev a rise but there are several theories- intermarriage in techie heavy areas of people with traits that actually make them very employable in teh culture but presidpose them to ASD (and of course the rise of the techie does possibly suggest that indviduals with ASD are more liekly to marry than in cultures where stereotypical skills may not be valued), mercury polluition, wet climates.... maybe we should all mvoe to the Sahara?

CFS there ahve been related studies published showing a link between aprental auto immune disorder and ASD affected children.

Ds had some sort of infection quite a while after his MMR which the Dr said was a "measles-type" thing. I wonder if that is significant?

Amber I do agree about clusters of people with autism. Dh worked in the computer games industry all over the world before he met me (AS) and his father and mother's father were both engineers. The Silicon Valley article was very interesting!

I am of the feeling that we are just much better a diagnosing this now. I remember reading a book years ago (1980s) about a little girl with autism and her Mum said it was really hard to get that diagnosis. Now it seems to be the first answer to many social communication disorders.

I have even seen a child diagnosed with it at 2 because she had no speech who at 4 is chattering away like anything - so much so that the original diagnosis is now in doubt.

BTW Milady - am loving the name change to scorchio - (off topic but HAD to comment).

milady there's a thread I started here some months ago about a project linnking possible administration of paracetamol to feverish infants (reg after MMR0 with ASD; link