Autismo y metales

Little children with autism have more lead and less zinc and manganese than children of the same age without autism. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications and has been carried out by a team from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the United States. The researchers used monozygotic and dizygotic twins to control the influence of genetics and focused on possible environmental aspects related to metals and this disorder. The results suggest that a difference in early exposure to metals or perhaps even more important, in how the child processes them may increase the risk of developing autism.

The differences in the incorporation of metals between children with and without autism were especially noticeable in the months just before and right after birth. And how did they know? The researchers used a registry with excellent possibilities for knowing the prenatal and early postnatal environment: baby teeth. The teeth grow by depositing new layers of dentin from before the children were born and the researchers used lasers to map the growth rings generated during different stages of development in baby teeth that had fallen off. It would be the same as if we study the content of the xylem growth rings of a tree in order to obtain some information about what the environment was like in each of those years.

José Ramón Alonso