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I keep asking for ideas and there are none. They only say what it isn't. It's something, what? If this condition were not getting more prevalent and perhaps was like when I was a child, there wouldn't be the urgency but that is not the case.

To be honest, I never heard of a person who had it until recently and now it's everywhere.

I know of not one person during my childhood who had these kinds of symptoms--not one.

I have wondered if there could be a relationship with difficult births and especially doctors using so many drugs during delivery now? My grandson had a very difficult birth. Coincidence? I have no idea.

I think what you're doing here is mistaking anecdotal/experiential observations for evidence or for a statistical trend.

The people that any one person happens to meet doesn't prove anything. When I was growing up in the 60s, I knew two kids who, looking back, clearly were autistic. Their parents were urged, but refused, to institutionalize them. That was a little unusual - most autistic kids were institutionalized in those days. At that time, it was believed to be a psychiatric problem at least in part, created by a 'cold' mother. August Derleth wrote a novel about it, The Boy Who Could Make Himself Disappear.

But the fact that you didn't see these persons in the past but see them now has to do in part with the fact that they aren't 'put away' any more.

The condition is not becoming more prevalent, if you apply the original diagnostic criteria. It's just like ADD -- once you change the criteria, you instantly get more cases. The fact that federal funding is available upon diagnosis also drives the numbers.

So the 'urgency' you describe just isn't there if you look at the actual numbers.

That of course does not mean that patients with serious developmental problems should be ignored or abandoned. But it does them actual harm to get fixated on a theory that has been disproved, because money that could be used to explore alternative causes is being wasted going over the same ground over and over again.

My personal opinion is that the diagnostic criteria need to be reviewed thoroughly and tightened back up. Right now they are so diffuse that many different developmental defects with many different causes (genetic, fetal abnormality, environmental, anoxia, etc.) are lumped together under one diagnosis.

I wouldn't think drugs during delivery would have a lot to do with it (which drugs? most folks have an epidural and sometimes pitocin. I went natural.) I lean towards a genetic predisposition myself, read somewhere there's a very high rate of autism in Silicon Valley, which some attribute to "geek on geek marriages". My husband and I could both be described as geeks, so maybe there's something in it.