New Calif. Center to Investigate Link Between Autism, Environment

There is ample suspicion among parents of children with autism, as well as among some physicians, that heavy metals or other environmental contaminants may play a causative role in autism (Psychiatric News, September 7, 2001).

Thus it should come as good news to them that a research center is being established expressly to probe such contaminants’ possible contributions to autism. It is the University of California at Davis Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research.

The center is being bankrolled by a $5-million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and by another $4 million from the University of California, Davis, and the university’s M.I.N.D. Institute over the next four years. The center’s staff will include researchers in environmental toxicology, epidemiology, immunology, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

The first project that the center will undertake is an environmental epidemiological study of 2,000 California children from 2 to 5 years of age. The study group will include 600 mentally normal children, 700 children with mental retardation but without autism, and 700 children with autism but not mental retardation.

Clinicians will measure the children’s cognitive and social skills, take family histories as well as histories of exposure to environmental toxins, and obtain blood and other biological samples. Clinicians in the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles will assist in the evaluations of potential subjects so that a geographically diverse group of urban, rural, and minority children will be included.

“This study will be the first major epidemiological, case-controlled study to examine autism in relation to a broad array of environmental exposures and endogenous susceptibility factors,” David Amaral, Ph.D., a neuroscientist and co-principal investigator at the center, said in a press release.

More information about the research center can be found at the Web site http://news.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/environment_autism.html. ▪