Autism Is Genetic, Says UK's Largest Autism Charity in Landmark Update

The part about being autistic for life is not really helpful. I personally know people who learned to "stop being autistic" from an outside POV, and they got to the point where they're not consciously masking anymore, it all comes natural. Just decided to act "normal" for a change and stuck with it.

Of course it's not easy, not everyone can do it (like if they also have some intellectual disability) or wants to do it, but it's the right solution for a lot of people. It's not really curing autism because it's not changing your DNA but it's definitely treating the most socially disabling symptoms.

But I think the statements all good and does what it's supposed to if it helps fight forced therapy child abuse and anti vax movements. Don't need to be perfect to make a change.

I feel like this is a willfully confusing article. So autism may involve disrupted genetics, but you may not have inherited those genes from your parents, they may be what are called "de novo mutations" which are mutations to the sperm or egg cells in the parent. This is evidenced by autism being more prevalent when the parents are older and those mutations are more common.

Also it clearly must be to some degree mutations if you believe the rates are going up, which even the government is no longer disputing (though that may not be conclusive proof, to me it seems evidence leans to more likely than not currently).

De novo mutations can also be caused by environmental factors, this is very well established and called "genotoxicity"[1] and certainly some people have been exposed to known genotoxic chemicals to varying degrees over time (formaldehyde) and who knows what undiscovered ones there are, newer standards of pesticide testing are starting to look for reproductive health effects but many chemicals that have been in use for a long time haven't been held to the highest standard.

Another reason you might think it would be "de novo" mutations is that this could be any sorts of random errors in the genome. If autism is an umbrella label for various genome errors (which it very well may be, since it correlates with other conditions very often), that may explain why it's so hard to pin down a few genes and why symptom expression varies so drastically.

1. https://en.wikipedia.or […]

So many misconceptions in this writeup.

Here's one: even if it were genetic, there could be triggering environmental factors that trigger the onset of autism (I'm just giving a hypothetical example, not making a claim here).

Autism looks to me similar to what a guy had when we were children. His mother was known for drinking even durring pregnancy. I'm pretty sure that we are disrupting some development mechanism today with all the substances we consume, even without knowing. Food, cosmetics, clothes, the air and so on. I think this onslaught on our bodies is what disrupts normal body functioning, in unpredictable ways. Combine that with pregnancy and the disruptions get written in "hardware". So no real cure, maybe some improvements. At government levels I think this is known, but they don't know what to do about it. Giving people a clean environment again, will have to undo most of the "progress" we got. Anyway, this is just my hunch but at individual level is better not to wait for 100% scientific confirmation.

Heritable != genetic.

There are very strong reasons to suspect that gut microbiome at least plays a major role in at least a large portion of autism cases, complete with studies where we've been able to induce/reverse a subset of autism symptoms in mice, and even humans, as well as linking individual gut microbe metabolites to them. And ~80% of autistic people have gut problems.

There's no question in my mind that at least some of the propensity to develop autism is genetic, but calling the whole of it genetic feels ridiculous in the face of preliminary evidence to the contrary consistent with the massive increase in diagnosis rates beyond what can be explained by changing criteria.

"They think" autism is genetic and that would be fine as a title, but they have not proven it is (only or even mostly) genetic

> We don't fully understand how genes combine to make a person autistic.

> Until recently, ideas about what causes autism have been vague, and this sense of uncertainty has allowed misinformation to escalate. ... Autism is genetic. You’re born autistic and you’re autistic for life. Most autistic people are autistic because of genes they got from their parents. This is why autism often runs in families. Much less commonly, other factors can play a role, but usually in combination with genes from parents.

Psst, words like "most", "often", and "usually" aren't helping your "vague" problem.