Ellie Wilson

Sometimes the presentation of autism can be obscured, not only by a person's individual profile skills, but frankly, by a number of biases that I would love to talk to you about, as a matter of fact.

Yeah, let's talk a little bit about cause for a minute to the greatest extent we can.

And we want to be really responsible about knowing the limitations of this part of the conversation.

But many, many people, especially because the prevalence of autism continues to sort of grow and therefore present a public health phenomenon.

I think there are many, many people on a societal and on an individual basis that are hungry to know why does autism happen?

and there are things that we actually do understand about this let's start at the basics which is even though autism is technically a medical diagnosis and something that certainly can be diagnosed by a medical provider it's different from many other disabilities because there is no like single gene or characteristic let's say in your blood that we can test for many other disability profiles have

you know, sort of crystal clear biological evidence where we can say, yes, we've confirmed that you have this genetic difference or this, you know, characteristic of your profile that earns you a diagnosis.

In autism, we're really looking at people's behavior.

And behavior, of course, is a lot more complex of a thing to measure.

That being said, we do know, we are certain that autism does have a hereditary component.

And we can study the heritability of autism without necessarily being able to single out

one specific autism gene.

We are quite certain that there is no one autism gene.

But what we do see are very clear patterns of autism and other neurodiversities, let's call them, across generations of families.

And we also know for certain that if you have one autistic child, there's some likelihood that you have another autistic or otherwise neurodivergent child.

So we do believe there are genetic components

And that's part of why we understand that autism is part of your life from the time you're born, because you already got those genes inside you by the time you're born.

Now, others are looking at things like vaccines.

And here's what's really interesting about vaccines.

Much of the sort of child vaccine schedule, the cadence at which children are given routine vaccines in order to prevent communicable illness,