14 DAY TRIAL // IT-rich regions appear to have a much higher incidence of autism that areas where technology has not yet penetrated so deeply. These are the conclusions of a new study by Cambridge University experts, who are the first ever to look for this connection.
Before the beginning of the study, the team predicted that autism spectrum conditions (ASC) would be more prevalent in areas where IT presence was higher than average. The actual study was conducted in the Netherlands, together with experts at The Open University.
The Cambridge team leader, professor Simon Baron-Cohen, is also the director of the Autism Research Center (ARC) at the university. He says that the new conclusions have important implications for the 'hyper-systemizing' theory of autism.
In the new research, which was funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) of the United Kingdom, the experts focused on populations enriched for “systemizing.” This is a so-called drive people have of analyzing how systems work, and to predict, control and build systems.
Skills such as these ones are required in precise fields of science, such as for example engineering, physics, computing and mathematics. Previously, the team had proposed that a talent for “systemizing” in fathers was linked with a higher risk of autism for heir children.
The work revealed that students in the natural and technological sciences, mathematics included, tended to exhibit a higher-than-normal number of autistic traits, while mathematicians were found to be very likely to have at least one sibling with autism or ASC.
“These results are in line with the idea that in regions where parents gravitate towards jobs that involve strong 'systemizing', such as the IT sector, there will be a higher rate of autism among their children, because the genes for autism may be expressed in first degree relatives as a talent in systemizing,” Baron-Cohen explains.
“The results also have implications for explaining how genes for autism may have persisted in the population gene pool, as some of these genes appear linked to adaptive, advantageous traits,” he adds.
Rosa Hoekstra, the Open University scientists who co-led the research, says that “we need to conduct a follow-up study to validate the diagnoses and to test the alternative explanations for the elevated rate of autism in Eindhoven, including the possibility that children with autism may more often remain undetected in the two other regions.”
“ These results are important findings in the field of autism epidemiology, since they suggest regional variation in autism prevalence. In our follow-up study we plan to study the causes of this variation in more detail,” she concludes.