Over the past few decades, the diagnosis of autism has gone from being very rare to being frighteningly common: it used to be diagnosed in about one in 2,500 children, now in one in 150. This is partly due to changes in diagnostic criteria and methods, although doctors believe that today's children are indeed more likely to suffer from autism than children of past generations
The causes of this mysterious disease are still unclear, and researchers are looking for its roots in a wide variety of areas. Thus, American scientists have compared data on the frequency of diagnosis of autism in California, Oregon and Washington in children born in 1987-1999 and information on the amount of precipitation that fell during these years in the respective states and cities.
Perhaps the search for a correlation between rains and autism was prompted by the name of the famous film Rain Man, where Dustin Hoffman brilliantly plays a person with autism. Be that as it may, the correlation did show up - it turned out that where it rained more, children were more likely to have autism. In addition, the disease was diagnosed more often in rainy years.
The results of the study are published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, Medical News Today reports. The authors are far from directly linking the development of autism with rain, but they believe that the data they obtained may indicate some factors that can provoke the disease.
So, scientists do not exclude that autism can develop more often in children who spend too much time in four walls in front of the TV. Perhaps the lack of sunlight and vitamin D plays a role in the pathogenesis of the disease. Perhaps the rain itself is “to blame” as such - the researchers are ready to assume that with the rain from the upper layers of the atmosphere, some chemical substances that can affect children.
