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Autism in sentence

246 examples of Autism in a sentence

The next question everyone wonders is, what caused autism?
And a common misconception is that vaccines cause autism.
But let me be very clear: Vaccines do not cause autism.
The Institute of Medicine, The Centers for Disease Control, have repeatedly investigated this and there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism.
Furthermore, one of the ingredients in vaccines, something called thimerosal, was thought to be what the cause of autism was.
That was actually removed from vaccines in the year 1992, and you can see that it really did not have an effect in what happened with the prevalence of autism.
So the question remains, what does cause autism?
Just as autism is a spectrum, there's a spectrum of etiologies, a spectrum of causes.
During that period, while the fetal brain is developing, we know that exposure to certain agents can actually increase the risk of autism.
In particular, there's a medication, valproic acid, which mothers with epilepsy sometimes take, we know can increase that risk of autism.
In addition, there can be some infectious agents that can also cause autism.
And one of the things I'm going to spend a lot of time focusing on are the genes that can cause autism.
I'm focusing on this not because genes are the only cause of autism, but it's a cause of autism that we can readily define and be able to better understand the biology and understand better how the brain works so that we can come up with strategies to be able to intervene.
Males are affected four to one compared to females with autism, and we really don't understand what that cause is.
In other words, if one sibling has autism, what's the probability that another sibling in that family will have autism?
It is not that genes account for all of the risk for autism, but yet they account for a lot of that risk, because when you look at fraternal twins, that concordance rate is only 31 percent.
So this provides some of the data that autism is genetic.
When we compare it to other conditions that we're familiar with, things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, in fact, genetics plays a much larger role in autism than it does in any of these other conditions.
And so in fact, in some individuals with autism, it is genetic!
That is, that it is one single, powerful, deterministic gene that causes the autism.
However, in other individuals, it's genetic, that is, that it's actually a combination of genes in part with the developmental process that ultimately determines that risk for autism.
In certain individuals, they can have autism for a reason that is genetic but yet not because of autism running in the family.
And we can actually use that strategy to now understand and to identify those genes causing autism in those individuals.
So in fact, at the Simons Foundation, we took 2,600 individuals that had no family history of autism, and we took that child and their mother and father and used them to try and understand what were those genes causing autism in those cases?
Our genetic information is organized into a set of 46 volumes, and when we did that, we had to be able to account for each of those 46 volumes, because in some cases with autism, there's actually a single volume that's missing.
In doing this within these families, we were able to account for approximately 25 percent of the individuals and determine that there was a single powerful genetic factor that caused autism within those families.
As we did this, though, it was really quite humbling, because we realized that there was not simply one gene for autism.
In fact, the current estimates are that there are 200 to 400 different genes that can cause autism.
We're starting to have a bottom-up approach where we're identifying those genes, those proteins, those molecules, understanding how they interact together to make that neuron work, understanding how those neurons interact together to make circuits work, and understand how those circuits work to now control behavior, and understand that both in individuals with autism as well as individuals who have normal cognition.
This particular infant, you can see, making very good eye contact with this woman as she's singing "Itsy, Bitsy Spider," in fact is not going to develop autism.
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