It doesn’t help that doctors have long struggled to explain what exactly causes autism if vaccines don’t — many medical theories have been debunked and then replaced by new ones.
The medical community is getting closer and closer to finally zeroing in on the cause. I recently talked to half a dozen researchers on the cutting edge of this work to find out what they see as the latest and best evidence for what might trigger autism. They were excited about their new understandings of the genetic basis for autism — what they view as the most promising area of research on the disorder right now. They also talked about recent advances in grasping how particular genetic mutations change the biology of the brain in ways that cause autism symptoms.
More blurry is their research on the non-genetic (or environmental) contributors to autism, like pollution or medications. Here’s a quick rundown of what we know about the causes of autism — from most well-established to least well-established.
The strongest evidence of a cause: genetics
