The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance--and the Cutting-Edge Science that Promises Hope (No Series) by Nakazawa Donna Jackson

Author:Nakazawa, Donna Jackson [Nakazawa, Donna Jackson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2008-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

THE AUTISM-AUTOIMMUNE CONNECTION

Although we are a long way from understanding the interplay of these triggers in the rapidly rising rates of autism across the industrialized world—including the United States, Japan, England, Sweden, Denmark, and France—one of the more stunning recent findings about the syndrome is that autism may in fact have an autoimmune component. In what researchers believe is a major new discovery about the origins of autism, scientists recently detected aberrant antibodies in the blood of kids in families with a pattern of autism and in mothers with more than one autistic child. The working hypothesis is that these antibodies are actually raised against proteins in the fetal brain; indeed, researchers have found that autistic brains have chronic inflammation, a sign of immune activity. A number of scientists are now investigating whether autism might conceivably be attributed to the formation of autoantibodies against the central nervous system in genetically susceptible individuals. All of which begs the question: Are researchers about to determine that autism is also—at least in some cases—autoimmune in nature? If so, are the triggers similar to those with other autoimmune diseases? Would it then seem at all surprising if mercury were one of them, given what we know about mercury as a trigger for autoimmunity in general?

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