• Question: What is your opinion regarding what causes autism?

    Asked by anon-184157 to Lorna on 8 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Lorna Camus

      Lorna Camus answered on 8 Nov 2018:


      Good question!
      I’ll start with what we know definitely doesn’t cause autism, and that’s vaccines! The reason people believe this is because of one paper published two decades ago. However it turns out this study was bad science, partly because the researcher’s experiment was not of very good quality (among other things, he only used 12 participants to get his results – that’s not enough to make conclusions like that!) and had financial conflicts of interest (he had been given money by lawyers who worked with parents in lawsuits against vaccine-producing companies). In the end, his paper was removed from the journal he published in, and he lost his medical license.

      Regarding things that cause autism, the truth is that we don’t really know. Some people are looking for genetic causes, others are looking for prenatal/perinatal risk factors (things like infections during pregnancy or at birth/in early years). However there is no definite answer for this at the moment!

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