Dr. Karen Parker: The Causes & Treatments for Autism

We're getting better at detecting autism. In the past, we were diagnosing kids at 9 or 10 years of age, and now clinicians are able to reliably diagnose kids at 2-3 years of age. So there's more people.

The rates have increased to now 1 in 36 US children have a diagnosis of autism ... Two years ago, it was 1 in 44.

There are some studies where, because autism is highly heritable, you can have one child with autism, and if you have subsequent children, you're at an increased risk of having subsequent children with autism. These are called baby sibling studies.

Individuals that are in intense STEM fields, like engineering, physics, and math have a greater burden of autistic traits, even if they don't have an autism diagnosis.

Autism is highly heritable ... About 40-80% of autism is genetic ... The common thinking is that the majority, about 50%, of autism is is associated with common genetic variants.

The way I think about the autism world is there's so little we don't know. So think about being in a dark room, and you have a flashlight, and you only see where you shine the light.

Being social is actually one of the one of the core characteristics of our species ... I think it's not an accident that the way we think about disorder in our species is many disorders are disorders because of lack of social connectedness.

Different studies show that about for everyone 1 girl, there's 3-4 boys that are impacted by autism.

In a lot of cases, autism has lifelong impact. But there are people who outgrow their diagnosis ... The diagnosis occurs in childhood, and it, for most people, will then be present across the lifespan.