Experts call Kennedy’s plan to find autism

For many experts, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior has a promise to “draw back” to find the causes of autism in a few months, and unrealistic. This is because it ignores the decades of science connecting around 200 genes that play a role – and the discovery to understand the difference inside the brain that may exist at birth. David Amal, a long -time researcher at the UC Davis Mind Institute, said, “In fact, whatever the evidence in the region is due to autism – and there are many reasons, this is not the same reason – they all affect how the fetus’s brain develops.” “Even if we cannot see the behavior associated with autism until a child becomes 2 or 3 years old, biological changes have already taken place,” he said. Kennedy announced on Wednesday that the National Institute of Health of Health will creating a new database “to highlight the basic causes of autism and other chronic diseases by merging Medicade and Medicare Insurance claims with other data and other data. He has cited rising autism as evidence of the epidemic of “preventive disease” due to some type of environmental risk and promised some answers by September.,

What is autism?

Autism is not considered a disease. It is a complex brain disorder known as an autism spectrum disorder, showing that it affects different people in different ways. Symptoms vary widely. For some people, intensive autism means to be non -abusive and important intellectual disabled. Others have a lot of impact, such as difficulty with social and emotional skills. Autism rates are rising – not in intensive cases but a millers, said that Boston University’s autism expert Helen Tagar -Fluceburg said. This is because doctors gradually learned that mild symptoms were part of the spectrum of autism, which led to a change in merit for diagnosis guidelines and educational services in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

What is the position of Autism,

The hard decades ago between genes and autism is for the study of twins. There are some rare genetic variants that pass from parents to children, even if the parents do not show any signs of autism. But this is not the only type. As the brain develops, rapidly divided cells make mistakes that can only cause mutation in a type of cell or one part of the brain, amral explained. He said that non -veg testing can distinguish the pattern of brain activity in infants that will not yet be diagnosed with autism, when the symptoms become clear, they said. Changes in the brain structure or its nervous circuitry requires those types of changes to study brain tissue to understand them only after death, America said, which is the scientific director of a brain banking collaborator called Autism Brannet. The bank funded by the Non -Grouping Simons Foundation has collected more than 400 donated minds, about half of people with autism and remaining for comparison.

What about environmental effects?

Researchers have identified other factors that can interact with genetic vulnerability to increase the risk of autism. These include the age of the father of a child, whether the mother had some health problems during pregnancy, including diabetes, the use of some drugs during pregnancy, and preterum births. Any worry that measles vaccination can be linked to autism, has long been debunned, Stressed Tagar-Flousberg, which leads a new alliance of autism scientists, pushing back to the abuse of administration about the situation.

What about Kennedy’s database plan?

The US, with its fragmented health care system, will never have a detailed medical tracking available in places with national health systems in countries such as Denmark and Norway, where research shows similar increase in autism diagnosis and any increase in environmental smoking guns. Experts say Kennedy’s employed database is not suitable for highlighting the causes of autism as there is no information about genetics. But the researchers have long used to use insurance claims and similar data to study other important questions, such as access to autism services. And NIH described the upcoming database as useful for studies focusing on care, treatment effectiveness and access to other trends.