update - trial completed Autism rate in siblings reduced 4X by vitamin D: 5,000 IU during pregnancy, 1,000 IU to infants – Feb 2016
Autism Professor Needs Help 5/26/10
Professor Gene Stubbs of the University of Oregon needs help with his study about vitamin D and autism. He is testing the theory that a mother with one child with autism will not have another if the mother takes vitamin D during her pregnancy. Women no longer need to come to the University of Oregon but can participate at a distance. Professor Stubbs writes:
However, we need more research families to participate. We have recruited other doctors to help us recruit and we have recruited doctors on the Vitamin D Council sites to help us recruit. We still need more families to participate to make our results significant. The families no longer have to come to our site to participate. If you know of any families who potentially might be eligible for our research, please give them my research assistant's phone number, 503-351-9255."
Thank you, John Cannell, MD
Autism rate is less than 1%, but is growing about 10% per year (perhaps due to over-diagnosis).
One of my 5 criteria criteria that a disease is related to vitamin D is that the rate be growing recently.
There are many people who have the same hypothesis - that lack of vitamin D increases the chance of being autistic
CDC says that about 17% of the children have some form of developmental disability - such as ADHD
Austism is slightly more prevalent than type 1 diabetes - Finland reduced the rate of type 1 by half by giving pregnant mothers 4,000 IU daily
from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Handbook_of_Genetic_Counseling/Autism-1
If a child has autism, each of the parent's later children has a 3% to 9% chance of having autism.
This is 100 to 200 times greater than in the general population.
The next few lines are clipped from http://www.thetech.org/genetics/news.php?id=49
Autism (and its entire spectrum of disorders) is actually pretty common: 1 in 166 people have it.
If you have one child with autism, the risk for the next child is only 2-6%.
If autism were due to a single gene, we might expect numbers like 25% or 50%.
And then, if you have two children with autism, the chances that the third will be autistic are around 35%.
This is usually interpreted as meaning that lots of different genes are involved.
http://www.awares.org/static_docs/about_autism.asp?docSection=4 has a very interesting description of Autism and genetics
Attached to this page is a table of studies of the rates of Autism and ASD
Clipped from comment on web April 2011
"The Vitamin D Theory of Autism is the ONLY research which has successfully predicted EVERY new development in the understanding of the disease. "
"See the Somali women of Minnesota and the Ugandan mothers of northern Germany for reference.
Their rates of autism are 20,000% (200 X) the country norms.
Their circulating vitamin D is often so low as to be undetectable."