Prenatal Environment
The risk of autism is associated with several prenatal risk factors, including advanced age in either parent, diabetes, bleeding, and use of psychiatric drugs in the mother during pregnancy. Autism has been linked to birth defect agents acting during the first eight weeks from conception, though these cases are rare.
A child's risk of developing autism is associated with the age of his or her mother and father at birth. The biological reasons for this are unknown: possible explanations include increased risk of pregnancy complications; maternal autoimmunity; increased risk of chromosomal abnormalities or unstable trinucleotide repeats in the egg; and imprinted genes, spontaneous mutations, and confounding sociocultural factors in the sperm. Since ages of the father and mother are correlated, it is possible that only the mother's age, or only the father's age, or both, contribute to the risk.
Read more about this topic: Causes Of Autism
Famous quotes containing the word environment:
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)