Is Autism a Genetic Disease? 65After a period of normal development, usually between 2 years and 4 years
old, a child with CDD rapidly loses multiple areas of function. Social and lan-
guage skills are lost, as well as intellectual abilities. Often, the child develops a
seizure disorder. Children with CDD are severely impaired and do not recover
their lost function.
Fewer than two children per 100,000 with an ASD meet the criteria for CDD.
Boys are affected by CDD more often than girls. Some of these cases may be
“regressive autism” (see Chapter 9).
Is Autism a Genetic Disease?
One of the biggest ironies of ASD is that it is considered primarily a genetic
or inherited disease. We believe that this is based on an incorrect assump-
tion and it has become part of a dogma, the paradigm. It is very similar to
the AIDS dogma that became established in at the early years of the tragic
pandemic that it was a “gay disease” or a Haitian disease [19]. These are
dogmas that need to be reassessed and revisited. Because of this incorrect
dogma, scientists still desperately want to believe that some “gene” or
“genes” will be linked to ASD or autism and will explain all the issues related
to autism. We believe that classical autism results from environmental
exposure to chemicals that humans are evolutionarily unfamiliar with [5–
15,24–31]. Let us explain this further. All the life forms on this earth have
coevolved with hundreds of thousands or even millions of natural chemi-
cals that can cause mutations in our genes. This is a more than 4 billion year
long adaptation and evolutionary process. Two decades ago, Bruce Ames
and his team of scientists tested thousands of natural and synthetic chemi-
cals for their mutagenic and carcinogenic potential [32]. They catalogued
cancer causing agents and showed that that cigarette smoke was mutagenic,
as was tris‐BP, a flame retardant used in children’s pajamas. Using that
database, the still‐active Carcinogenic Potency Database, Ames and Gold
showed that nearly half of the chemicals tested, whether natural or syn-
thetic, in the standard assay at the maximum tolerated dose, were carcino-
gens or mutagenic [33]. That made them suspicious, and they argued that
the huge dose, not the chemical formulation itself, was responsible for
inflammation, cell death, and cell proliferation. They concluded that ani-
mal cancer tests do not provide a good assessment of low‐dose cancer risk
[34]. They also determined that many plant chemicals have higher carcino-
genic capacity than synthetic chemicals [35,36]. However, we believe that
Ames and Gold have missed one fundamental fact –coevolution of all life
forms and their metabolic pathways that can neutralize the adverse carci-
nogenic effects of natural products – with one caveat. The dose of any
chemical that may be considered tolerable can turn toxic if delivered in