Jaundice One Of The First Signs Of Autism?

A recent Danish study suggests that jaundice may be one of the first signs of autism, a developmental disorder which is becoming increasingly common.  If that’s the case, it may shed some light on the mechanism of how this all-too-common condition develops in children.

I’ve discussed autism before in this article about theanine as an autism supplement.  This condition affects somewhere around 6 out of 1000 kids, and appears to be getting more prevalent as the years go by.  In fact, there’s even a TV commercial out now showing a man getting older and saying how first it was a remote relative who’s son had autism, then a closer relative, and now his son has autism.

It sure does seem like more and more kids are being diagnosed with autism.  While some people think that it’s just because of more aggressive use of the diagnosis (and that those cases were out there all along, we just hadn’t labeled them as autism), I find it unlikely that we’ve been missing 6 out of a 1000 cases for this long.

A lot of people want to blame vaccines.  I don’t want to get into that debate in this article, because I haven’t really seen any evidence that convinces me one way or another (maybe I’ll get into that in another post).

In any case, this new study really caught my eye because if you can correlate one condition with another, you might be able to find a common causative link.  Plus, pretty much any condition responds a lot better if you catch it early, so finding reliable first signs of autism could lead to earlier and more effective intervention.  So let’s talk about the study.

FIRST SIGN OF AUTISM OR COINCIDENCE?

The first link between jaundice in babies and autism came out years ago, but in a small study.  When the number of subjects in a study is limited, the odds that your findings are simply coincidence are stronger.

If I say hi to a person in a red shirt, and they punch me in the face, I may be tempted to assume that all people wearing red shirts want to punch me in the face.  Really, though, if I say hi to a hundred people in red shirts, and only two or three punch me in the face, I can start to see that the red shirt part of it probably isn’t all that connected to the face-punching.  Probably has more to do with my cutting in front of them in line at the fruit stand, or some other variable.

Anywho, the point is, this new study was done with over 700,000 kids.  THAT’S a pretty good sample size.  So now the researchers can speak with more confidence about the connection between jaundice and autism.

What they found was, if a baby was treated for jaundice, it had a five percent chance of developing a psychological condition (including autism).  If a baby wasn’t treated for jaundice, the chances were lower… one tenth of one percent.

Now, that’s all psychological disorders.  When you tease out the numbers specifically for autism alone, it boils down to this:  babies treated for jaundice had a 67% greater chance of developing autism than those babies who didn’t require treatment.

JAUNDICE AND BABIES

First off, let me make something clear.  Those statistics were for infants who required treatment for jaundice, not just had a bit of jaundice around the edges.

Lots of babies develop a bit of jaundice- better than half, actually, during the first few days out of the womb and hanging out with the rest of us.   It’s basically thought to be a metabolic adjusting periods for those little tykes, and it typically resolves within a week or so.

So just what is jaundice, anyway?  Most simply put, it’s too much bilirubin floating around inside of you, and since bilirubin has a yellowish pigmentation, if you have a ton of it inside of you, you (meaning your skin, your eyes, etc) start to look yellowish.

Bilirubin, by the way, is a breakdown product of heme (think hemoglobin, a big part of red blood cells).  So jaundice is a piling up of some breakdown products of red blood cells.  It can happen due to liver problems, or problems in the bile ducts (think pancreas, gallbladder, that sort of thing), or even malaria.

The liver part is why jaundice is often associated with alcoholism.  Bad liver= problems with clearing out bilirubin = yellowish looking person.

SEVERE NEONATAL JAUNDICE AND A LINK TO AUTISM?

So little babies often need to adjust their metabolisms, and can get a little jaundiced for a bit.  But it normally resolves, especially once the little tyke starts pooping away (bilirubin is excreted in urine and feces), so what’s the problem?

Well, first off, jaundice in children can be slightly more complicated than I’ve described.  That whole adjustment-period thing is a non-pathological type; there are also pathological increases in bilirubin that can lead to serious complications.  It isn’t just about being a shade of yellow.

There’s a lot of potential causes for pathological jaundice in kids, and frankly, that’s a little technical and beyond the scope of our discussion here.  But the consequence of these dangerously high levels of bilirubin could explain why jaundice might very well be one of the first signs of autism.  That consequence is called kernicterus.

I know, I know, it’s a big ugly medical word and it’s giving you flashbacks to seventh grade Latin class.  But it’s important to our discussion, because kernicterus is damage to the brain centers of infants caused by excessive bilirubin.

Are alarm bells going off?  Considering that, in the Danish study, jaundice in infants was linked with not only autism, but other psychological disorders? Maybe, just maybe, the brain damage from this excessive bilirubin is what is causing the inital steps in the formation of these disorders.

I’ll take a firmer stance.  It’s very likely, considering that in children, mild forms of kernicterus are often misdiagnosed as autism, since they look so similar.  Given all this information, it seems likely that damage to the brain caused by excessive bilirubin (which we see as jaundice) is a strong component of developing autism.

Of course, that still leaves a lot to be determined about autism.  What is causing the excessive bilirubin in these kids?  Why does it affect particular areas of the brain and not others?  And most importantly, what can we do about it?

Still, it’s a step in the right direction.  For now, well done to the Danish researchers who seem to have discovered one of the first signs of autism in infants.

Stay healthy!

Source article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39580262/ns/health-kids_and_parenting