November 15th, 2021
The Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network is a CDC funded data mining program designed to estimate the number of children with autism spectrum disorders or ASD's.
The network has discovered an estimated prevalence of ASD at 36 out of 1,000 children in most New Jersey regions, but greater than 70 out of 1,000 children in multiple school districts. The national average of ASD is thought to be less than 2 percent.
The authors stated: “When we focused on the district level, we recognized that many communities in our region —approximately one in five, including some of the largest
— had ASD rates between 5 percent and 10 percent,” said study co-author Josephine Shenouda, a project coordinator at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. “These variations may reflect differences in use of services or access to care. Larger districts may provide more services from a greater number of professionals or have additional resources for detection or care of ASD. It is also possible that parents of children with learning or developmental disorders relocate from small districts to large districts to maximize their children’s educational attainment.”
The network data also noted that one in five NJ school districts had ASD estimates 5 percent or greater and that ethnicity played a role with Hispanic children being less likely to be identified with ASD, as compared to white and black classmates. Why this is the case remains to be figured out.
Whether it is 2 or 5%, we have a problem of massive proportions as the ASD incidence is skyrocketing and is set to maximally tax therapeutic services moving forward unless we stem the trend. In our practice, we are struggling to find access to ABA therapy which is the only truly beneficial and validated ASD behavioral service. These issues are only going to worsen unless we add more therapists as well as find a reversal of the ASD trend.
Remember that a full 20% of ASD children are seemingly the result of maternal autoimmune antibodies directed against the developing brain. Thus, we need to pour research dollars into the field of autoimmunity prevention and specifically that of women's disease. The study in Molecular Psychiatryfrom January 2021 found that through machine learning they could identify autoantibody biomarkers that were 100% associated with autism when found in a specific pattern. In other words, the mothers of autistic children with autoimmune antibodies targeted against certain proteins in the infant's developing brain in utero were noted in 100%
For a look at autoimmune avoidance see the three part series in this newsletter. The link has all of the autoimmunity newsletters. #5,4,3 in that order are the most important.
I am going to audio record it in the near future.
Dr. M
