If autism is genetic, why does it seem to take a long time before it "kicks in?

Question

I've read and seen on t.v. and talked to many parents whose children were completely normal, then one day lapsed into autistic symptoms like stemming.

How does the medical establishment explain this?

Answer 1

They can't, that is why there is still so much confusion surrounding autism. Depends on who you talk to, too - many people believe that certain immunisations are the cause of autism or that items in our food these days contributes. But medically speaking, nothing yet has been proved.

Answer 2

Not all genetic problems show up when a baby is born.  Your genes are not all 'on' all the time.  Some genes are only on in your liver cells, some are only on in your bone marrow.  That is what makes different cells different.  Some genes only turn on when a child reaches puberty.  So there isn't really any reason to feel a genetic disease must be present at birth.

However, there is still a fair amount of uncertainty about what causes autism.  Most scientists agree that we just don't know for certain  yet.  In fact, many feel that maybe not all kids with autism have the same cause.

Answer 3

Dr. don't know for sure that it is genetic. However, there are many things that can go wrong during a woman's pregnancy that can zap magnesium and zinc from a woman's body which seems to be a major key of what's missing from most autistic children. I do also think that some children may be a reaction to the MMR immunizations.

Answer 4

It depends.  The perinatologist had an inclining that my son was autistic inutero because of macrocephaly, and a family hx.  The frontal lobe grows out of control starting in the first trimester and doesn't stop till late childhood.  This is why your average 3 yo autistic child will have the head size of a 7 yo.  My middle son was officially diagnosed by a neurologist at 9 months with PDD.NOS (he is very high functioning and was not vaccinated because our oldest was vaccine injured.

I think that symptoms are there a lot of times, and parents are in denial or don't correlate 1 thing with another.  The stimming and sensory issues is undeniable ages 2-3 when they peak

There has been proven that chromosomes 15 and 16 are implicated

Autism spectrum disorders are autoimmune and overloading the system is risky for those with  an extreme family history

Answer 5

The current thinking is that the tendency to autism may be genetic but it takes some sort of trigger to start it off. If whatever the trigger is does not occur at some unknown point the child may never exhibit symptoms. It's further complicated by the fact that there are so many degrees and types of autism. If there was one cause then every child exposed to that cause, immunizations for instance, would be autistic.

     It's tempting to try and find a simple explanation, but I don't think that's going to happen. At least it's better than the days in the 50's and 60's when autism was supposed to be caused by "refrigerator mothers".Many women were needlessly made to fell guilty with that one.