I constantly tell my patients that if their illness were so simple to have one simple “cause” then someone else would have already “fixed” it for them. We have all grown up in a world of medicine where the one-cause-one-disease model has prevailed leading us to all stumble when real life and its illnesses are not that simple.
Rather than waste time debating whether or not Autism has increased or is just more frequently reported, more fruit will result from studies like this one by researchers at Kanazawa University in Japan. As the numbers of children diagnosed with autism rises faster and faster, Kyung-min et al chase a non-invasive test for diagnosing this debilitating childhood developmental disorder.
Why can’t we find the one cause of autism? Because… we are searching for what does not exist, the “one” cause. Autism remains a mysterious complexity and much of that complexity may lie in the fact that multiple causes may lead to it. Furthermore, multiple processes interact to produce what we see in children.
Okay, I have to admit when I am wrong. Many times I have said that there seems to be no ill health issue that mold cannot cause. In digging for any new information on mold toxicity, I ran across this article from 2016. While even the authors admit that more research could be done to confirm their finding,
I know I will hear from a number of my patient’s parents when this leaks out. I suspect that many will begin with “I knew it all along”. In this article, researchers describe their process for using 24 different metabolite markers in an algorithm to separate autism from non-autistic children. These markers primarily focus on methylation and transulfuration.