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Originally Posted by Tiki
Maybe it's some inheritable thing.
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It is, in fact, demonstrably genetic. Siblings of autistic children have a 2-8% chance of being autistic, somewhere between 50 to 200 times the rate of the general population. But the debate rages over whether it is purely genetic, or whether it is the susceptibility which is genetic, and that without the environmental triggers it would remain dormant, so to speak. (As a comparison, diabetes is also known to be genetic, but the rate of diabetes is much higher today than it used to be because of environmental triggers setting off the disease, like poor diet and lack of exercise.) If one acknowledges that the actual rate of autism is rising, mathematically speaking they must acknowledge that there is an environmental factor, because there is no such thing as a genetic epidemic. This is why many institutions are desperate to prove there are not
actually more cases of autism now than there used to be, because if there are, it means there's a cause.
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Originally Posted by Tiki
It seems like the only thing we are arguing here is whether some people with autism have in the past evaded diagnosis. I have posted my reading and my experiences which explain why I am sure they have. Clodfobble disagrees, but instead of posting an actual argument why, I'm getting "she knows better than you, so shut up".
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It's a question of overall prevalence. No doubt
some people with autism have escaped diagnosis in the past, just as some do today, and I acknowledged that earlier. But it is impossible that
all of the people currently diagnosed today would have escaped diagnosis in the past, because there are just too many of them. Far, far too many of them. I have posted my reading on the subject repeatedly--which Undertoad has also agreed to read, as an objective non-parent, and let us know what he thinks--as well as my own personal experience: as I said, I have personally sat in a room
full of local autistic children who are not at a functioning level. They are not the handful of hyper-intelligent ones who manage to get by in school for a few years, they are the non-communicative, self-injurious, classically autistic ones, all diagnosed before the age of three, and they
all live within my school district. This number of them simply could not have abounded in the past like they do now.
These children would have been diagnosed. There are more cases today than there were in the past, and what's more, the rate appears to be accelerating.