Autism, Autoimmune Disease and Gluten
Monday, August 24th, 2009
Last week, I looked at how genetic abnormalities may be linked to autism and today I’m going to take that a bit further and look at the link between the genetic codes, autoimmune diseases, autism and gluten - an interesting recipe!
Some researchers are suggesting that there is a link between parents who suffer with auto-immune diseases like lupus, type 1 diabetes, Graves’ Disease or Hashimoto’s Disease, celiac disease and autoimmune adrenal insufficiency, and children who have autism spectrum disorders. These scientists believe that a parent’s autoimmune deficiency can make their child more susceptible to autism spectrum disorders in the following ways:-
- Toxins or pathogens may be able to damage the developing brain of the developing child.
- A pathogen may trigger an autoimmune response that could interfere with normal brain functioning.
- In utero, the mother’s immune deficiency may allow a pathogen to damage the brain of the fetus directly or by triggering an immune response in the mother that then “creates pathogenesis in the fetal brain” - see Utah State University’s Study “Possible Immunogenetic Basis for Autism” http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/79073/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0.
Two studies - “Familial Clustering of Autoimmune Disorders and Evaluation of Medical Risk Factors in Autism” by J Child Neurol (1999) and “Increased Prevalence of Familial Autoimmunity in Probands with Pervasive Developmental Disorders” T L Sweeten et al. (2003)suggested that there is a link between a family history of autoimmune disorders and autistic children because autistic children are more likely to have a family history of autoimmune disorders than healthy children in a control group. It was found that over 40% of families with an autistic child had two or more close family members with an autoimmune disorder and that those with first-degree relatives, particularly their mothers, were most often affected.
