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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.
Don't forget schizophrenia too. Vitamin D3 deficiency (Calcitriol) is why black mothers who give birth in winter months have a significantly high percentage of having a child that develops schizophrenia. D3 has a strong catalytic effect on glutathione production in the brain (PMID 10428085), and without adequate glutathione the body will not have a way to control reactive oxygen species. This oxidative stress then irrevocably damages the brain during fetal development and you end up with a wide range of problems down the road like Autism and mental health problems.
Also don't forget that the half-life for the active metabolite of vitamin D is on the order of 21 days. That means it takes about 5 months to reach steady state. One of the best advice I can recommend is that all pregnant women take at least 2,000 IU of D3 per day, with a 21 day 4,000 I.U. loading dose.
This is consistent with studies going back to the late 1990's.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vitamin-d-and-autism/
>... Swedish researchers published a study in Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology that found the prevalence of autism and related disorders was three to four times higher among Somali immigrants than non-Somalis in Stockholm. The study reviewed the records of 2,437 children, born between 1988 and 1998 in Stockholm, in response to parents and teachers who had raised concerns about whether children with a Somali background were overrepresented in the total group of children with autism.
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> In Sweden, the 15,000-strong Somali community calls autism "the Swedish disease," says Elisabeth Fernell, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and a co-author of the study.
In Minnesota, where there are an estimated 60,000 Somali immigrants, the situation was quite similar: There, health officials noted reports of autism among Somali refugees, who began arriving in 1993, comparable to those found in Sweden. Within several years of arrival, dozens of the Somali families whose children were born in the U.S. found themselves grappling with autism, says Huda Farah, a Somali-born molecular biologist who works on refugee resettlement issues with Minnesota health officials. The number of Somali children in the city's autism programs jumped from zero in 1999 to 43 in 2007, says Ann Fox, director of special education programs for Minneapolis schools. The number of Somali-speaking children in the Minneapolis school district increased from 1,773 to 2,029 during the same period.
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.
Because the amount of vitamin D available in food sources is piss poor in general. The effective natural way to get it is to go on the sun. This has orders of magnitude more effect than diet.