Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Gupta

If we look at some of these things like hypertension or infections, as our medical system actually gets better, there were a lot of children who may have just passed away that may have resulted in abortion.

We may not have been able to save that kid.

And now we are able to save that kid who had a brain bleed during birth, who had a ruptured placenta right before they were born.

And since there's some of these weird cytotoxic, anoxic kind of injuries to the brain, we see this house that should have been put together in this way.

Remember, it's a neurodevelopmental disorder, which means that now the brain is not growing in the way that it should.

And what we end up with is something like autism spectrum disorder.

So these are two huge things that I really want to focus on, which is that part of the reason we're seeing more autism is that we're getting better at diagnosing it.

There are a ton of people who have high functioning autism who 50 years ago would have just been odd, but we wouldn't have diagnosed them with anything.

The second thing is that we are able to keep people who are sick, especially pregnant mothers and children in the perinatal period and postnatal period, healthier.

This, combined with things like paternal and maternal age increasing, as well as a host of different medications that have an association with autism, I think all of these things put together explain why autism spectrum disorder is on the rise.

And there are a couple of other risk factors that we understand.

One is that there are certain genes that are associated with an increased risk of autism.

We also know that certain environmental exposures like phthalates or nitrogen dioxide are associated with increased risk of autism.

Basically, there's all kinds of stuff that goes into building a typical house.

And if you look at all of the ways that you can interfere with that house ending up typical, all of those things can contribute to autism spectrum disorder.

Earlier, I said a 20 to 30 percent increase in risk for autism spectrum disorder that acetaminophen gives is actually not that big of a deal.

Now, this is where things are going to get really, really weird.

OK, so there are other medications that increase the risk of autism and actually increase them way more than acetaminophen.

And these are medications that I think the current administration isn't a huge fan of.

And at the top of the list are SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.