Second hand driving: Study: Living Near a Highway May Contribute to Autism Risk

[The Straight Story]

Study: Living Near a Highway May Contribute to Autism Risk

There are many reasons why living near a highway is undesirable — the noise, the poor air quality, the endless stream of lost tourists using your driveway to turn around. But a new study published in Environmental Health Perspectives offers another: children who lived near highways at birth had twice the risk of autism as those who live farther way.

Researchers interviewed and examined 304 children with autism and, as a control, 259 typically developing children in the Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento metropolitan areas. Researchers found that children whose families lived within 1,000 feet from a freeway at birth — about 10% of the children in the study — were twice as likely to have autism as those who lived farther from a highway. (More on Time.com: Study: Some Autistic Brains Really Are Wired Differently)


The link held up after controlling for other variables such as maternal age, parental education and smoking. Interestingly, however, the same effect did not apply to kids who lived near other heavily trafficked streets. The researchers theorized that the type and sheer quantity of chemicals distributed on highways are different from those on even the busiest city roadways.

"This study isn't saying exposure to air pollution or exposure to traffic causes autism," lead author Heather Volk, researcher at the Saban Research Institute of Children's Hospital Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times. "But it could be one of the factors that are contributing to its increase."


http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/17/study-living-near-a-highway-may-contribute-to-autism-risk/?hpt=Sbin

[KT2000]

1. watch for this to be trashed

the oil industry is implicated here - they have the troops to get this buried, as in "there are flaws in this reseaech."
Another case of cost shifting - the people pay the price and the corporations reap the profits.
Just think how much better it would be right now if they had not spent all that money fighting tighter pollution standards.
(The oil industry includes pharmaceuticals, manufacturers, food producers, - just about every business interest)

[Uben]

2. All roadways within 200' ft of a home should be moved

That should cost a gabillion dollars and put millions to work! OMG! This is the big one! not

[pnwmom]

3. It seems more and more likely that ultimately

autism will turn out to have multiple environmental and/or biological causes or triggers which, interacting with each other and combined with a person's genetic susceptibility, produce the syndrome. This is why it's been so hard to discover a single "cause" for the collection of symptoms we label "autism" -- it's different in different people.

[The Straight Story]

4. And more likely that many things have multiple causes

And trying to blame just one won't ever work.