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Vitamin D Deficiency During Pregnancy Linked To Autism (newatlas.com)
New submitter future guy quotes a report from New Atlas: The researchers examined around 4,200 blood samples from pregnant women and their children and discovered a link between autism and low levels of vitamin D. More specifically, they found that pregnant women who were vitamin D deficient at 20 weeks gestation were more likely to have a child with autistic traits by the age of six. Rather than taking in more sunlight and the heightened risk of skin cancer that it carries, the researchers suggest that making inexpensive and safe vitamin D supplements available to at-risk groups may be a better path forward. "This study provides further evidence that low vitamin D is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders," says Professor John McGrath from the University of Queensland. "Just as taking folate in pregnancy has reduced the incidence of spina bifida, the result of this study suggests that prenatal vitamin D supplements may reduce the incidence of autism." The research was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
No, you look after them for the rest of their lives, just like any responsible society does for those not able to look after themselves.
Many of them can look after themselves, especially if they get some help to get started. In America, 80% of autistic people are not employed. But with coaching, and targeted help, most autistic people are employable. Some countries do a far better job of this than others. The Economist recently had an article about the effectiveness of education and employment policies for autistic people.
Where is the news?
This seems to just confirm previous data, which is important to researchers, but not that interesting to the public.
Well, this is how science works. Overall, it is extremely rare to make astounding, new discoveries; most scientific research is about confirming what we already know or improving our observations - even the Higgs boson was just a confirmation of what we already knew, really. It is easy to get the idea that all science is making sensational finds, if you only read the popular science stuff, and it gives you the completely wrong picture. Important science is mostly routine. It has to be - the scientific method dictates that you must keep testing, because the only certainty you can achieve lies in falsifying predictions. That is why there still are people who keep finding new ways of testing that gravity still works as predicted; next time it might not - that is of course taking it to the extreme, but it is scientifically very valid to keep asking the question.
The vitamin-D hypothesis has been around for years. It would be interesting if a causal link, or treatment, could be demonstrated, e.g. a randomised placebo controlled trial of supplements during pregnancy. But there seems to be none of that yet.
I think you are getting things mixed up a bit. Randomised trials are meant specifically for testing the efficacy of new medicines. The method would work for vitamin D, of course, but it would be ethically unsound to deliberately expose groups of people to the well-documented risks that this deficiency would cause, and it would be extremely difficult to control the parameters, I think; you get vitamin D from many sources, such as exposure to sunlight, and you would have to keep large groups of pregnant women confined indoors for 9 months, and so on. Can't be done practically.
But it isn't really necessary. Firstly, I think we have confirmed that the correlation is real, not spurious, so presumably we now have a confirmed pattern of vitamin D deficiency correlating to a certain increase in the risk of developing autism. Secondly, other research seems to point to plausible mechanisms - we know something about what goes on in an autistic brain, and we know that vitamin D probably plays an important role in the development of certain features that appear to be important in connection with autism.
But you are right, this is not a surprising, new discovery; we are simply inching closer to understanding how autism develops.