Autism May Be Linked to Mom's Autoimmune Disease

From Forbes.com (HERE.)

Possible causes of disorder should now include celiac disease, study suggests

MONDAY, July 6 (HealthDay News) -- Children of mothers who have autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and celiac disease have up to a three times greater risk for autism, a new study finds.

Although the association between autism and a maternal history of type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis had been found in earlier research, the researchers behind the new study say that theirs is the first to find a link between autism and celiac disease. People with celiac disease cannot tolerate gluten, a protein in wheat, rye and barley.

"This finding reinforces the suggestion that autoimmune processes are connected somehow with the cause of autism and autism spectrum disorder," said researcher William W. Eaton, chairman of the Department of Mental Health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. "This finding is on the pathway of finding the cause of autism."

 

Comments

[Benedetta Stilwell]

Mistake; Not block keller t cells but I meant a drug that blocks killer T cells

[Benedetta Stilwell]

Just received my August issue of Scientific American in the mail today. They have an article "Surpises from Celiac Disease"

Quoting for Alessio Fasano "Celiac Disease provides an illumintaing example of the way such a triad an environmental trigger, susceptibility genes and a gut abnormality -- may play a role in many autoimmune disorders."

Summing up the rest of it. The disease is 100 times more common than thought. To heal stop eating gluten, a child under one year old should not eat gluten and as the immune system matures they will be able to tolerate it better later in life. Gluten is a trigger for an autoimmune disease and that autoimmmune disease can be turned off and on with this environmental trigger (gluten), so maybe there are other environmental factors that can play a role in other autoimmune diseases,"but so far none have been positivily identified." If certian types of bacteria changes in the gut then it can change the ability of a person to digest gluten. So adults who had been eating wheat and doing fine mignt find they suddenly can no longer digest gluten!

Possible future treatments -6 differnt drugs working on breaking up gluten, vaccinate patients with gluten, block keller t cells degradeing gluetn fragments and even start a hookworm infection to dampen a perons's immune response in the gut.

Hook worms? God did have a reason for making them after all. I read something like this in a magazine at the doctor's office (that is where I spend a lot of time with my family) For the irritable gut syndrome they recommended the whip worm from uncooked pork. If the gut has something to fight it is happy.

[Benedetta Stilwell]

My husband has vitiligo!

[Stagmom]

This is about my friend John Robison's Dad - from a review of Augusten Burroughs book "Wolf at the Table."

"Still, it is his father, John Robison, a shadowy presence in “Running,” who dominates this new book. “He was missing a human component,” said Mr. Burroughs, who changed his name from Christopher Robison. His physical descriptions of his father are grotesque as well. Mr. Robison was plagued by psoriasis so severe that large flakes of skin peeled away, leaving bleeding scabrous sores. In Mr. Burroughs’s telling it is as if what he sees as his father’s inner monstrousness manifested itself outwardly, as in Dorian Gray’s portrait."

FYI, one of the old treatments for psoriasis was ammoniated mercury ointment. I've no idea if Mr. Robison used this treatment.

[mary]

I never heard of psoriasis until I met my husband. My husband, his mother and his brother all have it. Almost every family I have met that has a child with autism also have a family member(hardly ever the mother) with psoriasis. I know about a study showing that mothers with psoriasis have an increased risk of having a child with autism, but no studies done on dad's yet. Anyone else notice this? I've read about Lipopolysaccharides might be implicated in both psoriasis and autism.

[Kathy Blanco]

PS...SWEETIN ET AL, UTAH STATE, stated, motehers of autistic children are more likely to have excema, psoriasis, hashimotos and rhuematic fever...these are all signs of AN INFECTION, which can be handed down to child. Predisposition? YOU BET!

[Kathy Blanco]

This study is right on. I have two with autism. I have VITILIGO, PSORIASIS, HASHIMOTOS THYROIDITIS and possible MS. (by the way, I am on the DAN protocol and my symptoms are ZERO, albeit, vitiligo still presnt, but not spreading). My two children with autism have autoimmune gene problems, complement problems etc. I do believe autoimmunity SHOULD BE, the new contraindication to vaccines. PERIOD.

[cj]

This is what I know for a FACT......

Son diagnosed with PDD-NOS at 3: FACT
Son recovered from PDD-NOS at 5.5: FACT
Son was immunized according to the "schedule": FACT
Daughter diagnosed with Autistic Disorder at 22 months: FACT
Daughter remains with diagnosis at 5: FACT
Daughter was immunized according to the "schedule" up until 2: FACT
No family history of Autism or like disorder: FACT
No genetic findings through testing: FACT
Have not given up hope: FACT
Mother has auto-immune disorder: MAYBE
Does this study help me sleep at night: FALSE

[Sarah]

MOM23,

Go with your intuition..the CDC vaccine schedule is only a recommended schedule. Most people are very naeve about immunizations and blindly trust the CDC schedule on when to vaccinate. That is what I did regrettably. You do not want to be in our boat so I suggest playing it safe and postpone/space out the vaccines as much as possible. My advice:

Don't allow multiple shots in one visit. Kids don't need all their shots until they enter school which could be by age 5.
Only go with what shots are required. For example they don't need the flu shots (my son had 3)
The threat of disease really hasn't changed so don't give into the fear mongering.

He may not realize it now but maybe one day when the autism rates soar even higher your husband will thank you for it especially given your family history. Your wise to play it safe.

[is eczema after vaccines a red flag?]

Gail C, I found your comment about eczema very interesting. I had noticed a similar pattern with my daughter.

The ONLY time my daughter had eczema patches was about a week after being vaccinated. I quit vaccinating for other reasons, and she hasn't had a single patch of eczema since.

We also have a family history of autoimmune disorders and immune system deficiencies. I believe that autism is triggered by vaccines and if immune function is one susceptibility factor, I'm concerned my children may have that susceptibility.

[MotherofPossibility]

Its great that this is being recognized. Once again, mothers have also been vaccinated and therefore their autoimmune systems may be compromised. We seem to be replacing infectious diseases with chronic diseases and now weakening the next generation enough so that when they get the vaccines its an even greater assault. So my hypothesis is that this rise in chronic disease will continue to increase in number and severity over the next generations. Read Barbara Loe Fisher's book Vaccines, Autism & Chronic Inflammation: The New Epidemic. (2008)

[Mom23]

Most people look at their family trees for geneological purposes. I look at mine and worry about the health of my (as yet) un-vaccinated NT baby -- Bi-polar great grandfather, OCD and Alzheimer's grandmother, ADHD grandfather, Uncles with Crohn's and IBS, Father with Psoriasis, Mother with Food Allergies.... and my husband fights with me to vaccinate this baby!

[Mike]

This quote from the article said it all for me:

"These findings are not going to change anything anyone does," Brosco said.

Money well spent nimrods.

[Sunny]

Very well said, Jack R.

[Gail C.]

Our DAN doctor told me about the autoimmune link at our first visit many years ago. This breakthrough is about as spectacular as Yale learning that children on the spectrum do not make normal eye contact. WE ALL KNOW THIS!!!!

We too have autoimmune on both sides. My typical daughter has eczema. And, who knows why, but I'd be prepared to testify in a court of law that her eczema patches were noticeably more inflamed for several days after receiving her measles shot.

[Benedetta Stilwell]

Very good Anne Dauche, very good summary. Years ago doctors would remove a child's spleen in a heart beat, and then wonder why the child would die suddenly a few years later! A child's immune system is a delicate thing, just at the beginning of its development, just at the beginnning of it's entire life. Now, the answer to a question I worry about is; Does Everyone, not just a small subset have a certain point they will develop autoimmune disorders brought on by vaccines. Every since Kuwait Desert Storm's vaccination program my guess would be, YES!

[Jack R.]

The comments here make me think back to another post a couple weeks ago. For this reason, I think it is important to understand and recognize that there are different "autisms" and research dollars spent to do that are well spent.

My kids autoimmune triggered autism (if that is what it is- which by the way will likely come from my host of autoimmune problems so I don't know why they aren't studying the dads too) may be distinctly different from your kid's heavy metal toxic induced autism.

To say, well, that isn't my story, so it can't be true. Or that intervention didn't work for my kid, so it must be false hope is the same kind of fallacy in thinking that we hear all the time from the people that say, "my kid got 7 vaccines at once and is fine, so that can't be why your kid has autism."

[Jack R.]

I don't think this is a "blame the moms" kind of theory. I think the real message of this is that when you are looking for subsets of kids that are vulnerable to vaccine injury, or toxic overload, these are some of the kids we need to look at closely. Personally, when I see the moms with horrible allergies or a grandmother with MS, these are the ones I worry about.

This is an absolute acknowledgement of our understanding of autism as a medical problem and not a brain wiring behavorial disorder.

And give our generation a few more years and I'm sadly confident that you'll see the correspending epidemic in autoimmune disorders amongst us.

[Gatogorra]

This only proves what we've all been saying all along.

What's not legitimate about the Danish study is the context. The Danes haven't exactly been paragons of integrity when it comes to pharmaceutical pressure, so of course they're going to downplay the environment as much as possible.

*Our* scientists already figured out the increased susceptibility to autism when a family history of certain autoimmune disorders is present, but it all hinges on prenatal and infant exposures interacting with that susceptibility. Mom's autoimmune history mostly shows that mom and infant may simply be reacting differently to the same toxins. That "family history" might only go back as far as parents, not even grandparents.

Autoimmune family history isn't necessary to develop autism anyway-- it's just a facilitator. I'm convinced that a large and intense enough toxic assault may be sufficient to push some infants over the edge without the "need" for preexisting sensitivity.

[Anne Dachel]

This is what Dr. Peter Fletcher, outspoken critic of the British govt. on the MMR debate,http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-376203/Former-science-chief-MMR-fears-coming-true.html
....wrote about autoimmune disease and genetically susceptible kids.....

Causal hypothesis dated August 2003 in respect of children suffering ASD/IBD abnormalities

Let us consider the following statements.

1. Some event initiates the development of a state of autoimmunity in a certain subset of children

2. In this subset of cases the autoimmune state causes -

a) The development of an ASD

b) Lymphocytic infiltration of ileum and colon with persistence of vaccine strain virus.

c) Idiopathic diabetes insipidus (lymphocytic infundibulohypophysitis)

d) Other pathology of the hypothalamus resulting in loss of body temperature control and, possibly, growth hormone dysfunction.

3. Diabetes mellitus and Guillain-Barre syndrome are both autoimmune diseases and are both listed as adverse drug reactions to vaccination with MMRII in the US Package Insert and other official literature.

The hypothesis is that MMR initiates an autoimmune state in a subset of children which is then responsible for the developmentof one or more of the conditions referred to in 2 (a) - (d) above and, possibly, diabetes mellitus, Guillain-Barre syndrome or other autoimmune diseases.

Supporting evidence for the several elements involved in this hypothesis and the links between them and a relationship with MMR vaccination (and probably other vaccines) may be summarised as follows.

An autoimmune state may be initiated in many different ways which include genetic factors, viral infections and medicinal products. The coexistence of more than one autoimmune disease in the same individual is quite possible and is exemplified by autoimmune polyendocrinopathy candidiasis ectodermal dystrophy (APECED) which is caused by a deficiency of the AIRE (autoimmune regulator) protein which is required by the thymus to distinguish ‘self’ from ‘not-self’ antigens. The thymus is most active in early childhood and is responsible for the development of many normally required immune functions. Its activity declines with approaching puberty and essentially ceases in adolescence. The occurrence of APECED is strong evidence for the concept that an agent adversely effecting normal function of the thymus can be the causative factor in the development of multiple autoimmune diseases.

The claim that some cases of ASD may be the result of an autoimmune reaction may not be fully fully accepted but it is supported by the demonstration of several different autoantibodies to brain proteins in some children with autism. There are numerous papers in the scientific and medical literature which confirm these findings although the pathological process by which such antibodies cause autism is not understood. The belief that ASD is, at least in some cases, an autoimmune condition is compatible with existing evidence.

Peter Fletcher MB BS MSc PhD FFPM