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:
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)