Joe Asks Peter Hotez, "What Causes Autism?"

It does need to be. Now, what do you think is causing autism? And in your personal estimation, do you think that it is a, that there's a rise in the factors that are causing autism, or do you think that it's a rise in the understanding of these variables that contribute to it that you could diagnose people with and that before they were previously undiagnosed? So I think most of it is that, that we're just diagnosing it more, and we're including individuals in the autism category that we didn't before. And by the way, the numbers are about to go up even more because we're getting better at diagnosing girls and women with autism, which is also quite interesting. We used to say it was 10 to 1 boys to girls, and now we know there are a lot more girls and women on the autism spectrum. It's just that they're usually more verbal and they can camouflage it better. But they have very high rates of comorbidities like obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. A lot of the teenage girls with eating disorders now they're finding could actually be on the autism spectrum. So the numbers are about to go up again. I mean, that's just an example. I mean, is, I guess what you're really trying to get at is it beyond that? Is there a bona fide increase beyond the number of diagnoses? And that one I'm still not sure about. Yeah, I read an article about early onset gender dysphoria being connected to young girls with autism. Right. And it's a disproportionate number of girls with gender dysphoria who turned out to be also autistic. Right. I've heard that as well. Yeah. That's actually, so it's really fascinating. Think about now. Unfortunately, in fasting at the same time, right? There's a nice paper by a very good environmental scientist named Phil Landrigan, who used to be at Mount Sinai now. I think he's at Boston College now. And he publishes about five or six chemicals in the environment, which if you're exposed to for long periods of time during early pregnancy, your child will be born with some features that resemble autism. Do you know what those chemicals are? So I have to remember, I talk about them in the book. One of them is Depakote, valproic acid, which is a psychiatric medicine used as a mood stabilizer or an antidepressant. So prolonged use of Depakote during pregnancy has been linked to something that resembles autism. Is that a common medication? It's a common medication. But now that we know this information, we don't use it anymore. And so one of the things that I've been saying to people like Bobby Kennedy and everything else, if you really think there's some environmental link to autism, we've got a list of at least six chemicals during early exposure in pregnancy that are probably causing mutations and things like that that are leading to autism. Why isn't anybody looking into that? It's just crazy. All the focus goes into vaccines and it kind of sucks all the oxygen out of the room so that really understanding the search for autism gets delayed or in some cases doesn't get pursued at all. Or the other thing that happens in many state legislatures and things like that, the focus is so much about vaccines that we don't talk about what autism parents really need. I mean, what do I need for Rachel? We need employment counseling and help. We need mental health counseling. What do we do after we're gone? And Rachel right now is living with us. I turned 60, my wife is 58. What happens to us 10, 15, 20 years from now? There's no roadmap. So all of that gets shunted aside because of these phony, baloney anti-vaccine arguments. That's why I get angry. That's when I start to realize these guys, in addition to affecting public health, are actually hurting autism families as well. Well, that makes sense. And I can completely understand why this would upset you, especially as a scientist. Now, when you're talking about these various chemicals that you think do contribute to or possibly cause autism, maybe we should really concentrate on that and publish something about this. Is there something that, is there an article that people can go to that says something about this? There is. I talk about it in the book. If I open up the book, I could provide it for you. Is there anything that people can read online about this without going to your book? Probably. One of the problems that we face in this country is that we put a lot of scientific articles behind paywalls, which is a real source of frustration for me. Why do they do that? Well, one of the things that I've done now is I founded an open access journal called the Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases so that anybody with a computer, an internet connection, and a printer can download the articles free to charge. And we need more of that.