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Under Suspicion 		   
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Under suspicion

Researchers now believe that autism can be caused by genes in combination with environmental triggers. The question is, what are those triggers?

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff | August 13, 2007

Nancy Duley wants desperately to know why her daughter Kira, happy and healthy in her first year of life, then "slipped away into her own little world" -- the isolation of autism. To that end, when Duley was recently pregnant with her third child, she eagerly gave blood samples to researchers, and kept batches of urine samples in her freezer for them to collect.
"When no doctor can tell you why your child has autism, or how you could avoid it or treat it or cure it, as a parent that is the most horrifying feeling to have -- that there are no answers," Duley, a resident of Fairfield, Calif., said last week.
She was speaking at a press conference at the University of California at Davis announcing $7.5 million in new federal funding, including about $2 million for a groundbreaking study that seeks to track, earlier and more closely than before, potential environmental triggers for autism -- beginning in the womb.
As the ranks of children diagnosed with autism grow, researchers are focusing more on such efforts. They are casting an ever-widening net to try to detect possible environmental factors -- such as chemicals or infections -- that could be interacting with genetic risk factors.
Money is beginning to stream toward researchers who are on that trail, supporting a new wave of studies.
"Environmental research will be a much bigger field going forward," said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. "A lot of parents have been telling us about their concerns; now we're listening very closely."
Until recently, about 90 percent of autism research has focused on genetics, and only perhaps 10 percent on environmental factors, said Dr. Gary Goldstein, chairman of the scientific board of Autism Speaks, a national research and advocacy group. In the coming years, he expects the ratio to be 1 to 1.
Dr. Martha Herbert, a Harvard neuroscientist and Massachusetts General Hospital neurologist, said a few years ago, autism researchers would be marginalized if they talked about environmental factors. But now, "any major article or proposal concerning the causes of autism is coming to be considered incomplete if it doesn't talk about a potential role of environmental factors."
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08/14/2007by: shannonj
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