I don’t know how many times I have watched documentaries or read articles about autism that reported that “we just don’t know what causes it”. When there exists a frightening statistic that 1 out of 150 children are being diagnosed with some type of autism today, there should be alarm bells going off. I am disgusted by our government’s current lack of attention to this urgent health care crisis. What limited research that is being done today is just beginning to unravel the mysteries of this daunting childhood affliction now termed “Autism Spectrum Disorder”. Scientists are just beginning to find out that there may be a link between autism and a number of immune and neurological disorders to environmental toxins. This would account for the wide spectrum of autism symptoms that children exhibit due to the array of molecular dialogue that occurs between our genes and the environment. This to me is pretty frightening considering the vast amount of pollution that exists in our environment. Just what exactly is going on between our genes and the never ending exposure to environmental toxins?

Being that I am one of those individuals who have been personally affected by heavy metals in our environment, I pay close attention to articles that discuss scientific research into areas of environmental pollution. Knowing first hand how devastating neurological toxins are on the brain and immune system, I easily can see the correlation between our environment and our genes. An article from alternet.org regarding environmental toxins and genes is a fascinating discussion about the current advancements in science regarding the “gene chip” or “DNA microarray” in which researchers can study the effects of environmental chemicals on DNA.

This powerful new tool for studying our genes came about through the marriage of molecular biology and computer science. These gene chips are no larger than a typical laboratory slide, yet can hold many thousands of genes at a time. What is fascinating about this chip is that human genes are synthesized and bound to the surface of it such that a single copy of each gene and up to the entire organisms genome is affixed in a grid pattern. This DNA microarray “allows scientists to take a molecular snapshot of the activity of every gene in a cell at a given moment in time”. What scientists are capable of studying with this gene chip is a chemical’s genetic fingerprint that can alter the pattern of gene activity in specific ways.

This new young field of study is called “toxicogenomics” and “has already begun to challenge more fundamental assumptions about the origins of disease and the mechanisms through which chemicals and various environmental exposures affect our bodies”. One such study by Jennifer Sass, a neurotoxicologist and senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), who as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, used microarrays to figure out how, exactly, mercury was interfering with both our nervous and immune systems. What she found was that mercury exposed RNA caused unusual activity in the gene which both responds to infection and directs the development of neurons.

Interestingly, I was diagnosed with high levels of mercury and lead throughout my body. This was after I was diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder called Hashimoto’s disease in which my own immune system attacked and destroyed my thyroid gland. My doctor, suspecting a possible link between auto-immune diseases and heavy metal poisoning, recommended that I be tested. Thank God he did because after 40 treatments of IV chelation, I am back to my old self…no more memory problems, tingling extremities, food allergies, and chronic fatigue. If this test had not been done I would still be struggling with these bizarre and debilitating symptoms in which it was as though my entire system had gone haywire.

This is what is interesting about autism is that there is also an array of bizarre symptoms that children with the disease exhibit. Autism patients, aside from the obvious brain developmental disorders, include symptoms such as inexplicable collections of infections, allergies, intestinal diseases and autoimmune disorders that can’t be explained. Scientists are challenged with studying these complex associations and commonalites of autism patients. This is what is leading scientists to look to the environment of children to broad exposure to chemicals and toxins. Being that there exists a complex web of genetic predispositions and a multitude of this vast array of environmental variants and exposures to chemicals, much work has yet to be done. Here is a portion of the article that points to the challenges that face scientists today in understanding these complexities.

To unravel the underlying biological mechanisms of these seemingly intractable ailments requires that scientists understand the precise molecular dialogue that occurs between our genes and the environment — where we live and work, what we eat, drink, breathe, and put on our skin.

Consider for a moment that humans have some 30,000 genes, which interact in any number of ways with one or more of the 85,000 synthetic, commercially produced chemicals, as well as heavy metals, foods, drugs, myriad pollutants in the air and water, and anything else our bodies absorb from the environment.

One thing that is certain is that more research encompassing more children over a longer period of time has to be done in order to get a handle on this highly complex and pressing threat to the health of our most vulnerable citizens. What we need is for scientists to be able to study children as they grow up, and develop diseases in which they will have complete records to analyze key commonalities and differences. In other words, scientists need to figure out which genes sick children have in common and which chemical exposures were most meaningful.

During Clinton’s administration in response to the concern that environmental exposures were affecting children’s health, he launched the National Children’s Study. This was a very positive and encouraging move toward extensive government funding. However, unfortunately it was axed in the 2007 Bush budget proposal. This study was proposed to be the largest such undertaking in the U.S. under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health. The goal was to enroll 100,000 children in a genetic biobanking system for further study. Fortunately though with the pressure that autism groups have been putting on Congress, it was reinstated in February of 2007.

What we need are studies like this and more in order to get to the bottom of this frightening epidemic. However, the answers will be slow in coming because it takes decades to extract meaningful data from hundreds of thousands of records of children. But we have to start sometime and there is no time like the present. It is important for our children and for all of us to support these types of federal funding. Our future depends on it.