Autistic children linked to same sperm donor

[progressoid]

He's only 5½ years old, and yet he's practically memorized the entire New York subway grid. He reads at the fourth-grade level, plays two-handed piano compositions and is better versed than most adults about the Fibonacci code, a complex mathematics sequence.

Dylan loves Italian music and draws pictures that artist Jackson Pollock would be proud of. He also happens to be autistic.

Gwenyth Jackaway, Dylan's mother, is a professor at New York's Fordham University. She's single but had always wanted to have a child. So she contacted California Cryobank, one of the largest sperm donor banks in the country.

...

Through a Web site called Donor Sibling Registry, she reached out to other women who used Donor X. She found six families who had used the same donor.

...

In six families Jackaway contacted that had used Donor X, three of the children are autistic, and one is showing signs of autism...

More & a video at: http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/04/02/autism.sperm.donor/index.html#cnnSTCText

[texastoast]

1. Wow

What a heartbreaking tradeoff. A genius child with such a "disability."

Future Donor X's perhaps should go through serious gene examination. Hmm, no, then we wouldn't have had Dylan to come into the world and freak out adults with Fibonacci.

Who knows by whom the big problems will be solved and the next big discoveries made.

[karab]

2. What?

You don't know what you're talking about. I'm autistic and I wonldn't be any other way. I couldn't stand to be one of you lying, talk all the time NTs. Don't look at me as disabled - I am superior.

[texastoast]

3. Sorry to offend

That's why I put the term "disability" in quotes. I think a lot of autistic people I know (and am related to) are quite magic. Different, and to me, magic.

[seabeyond]

4. different. lol lol. yup. lol. oh, i love my boy. wouldnt want him any other way either

doesnt mean he doesnt have challenges because.... he does. dont do superior bullshit. but he is pretty amazing.

special

lol

son and i have talked about this often, a lot, on and on and .... ya ya. the thing, even when he is at his lowest because of his oddity, he always bottom lines it to how he likes who he is and wouldnt change anything.

so, it is all interesting.

i should would like for the doctors to figure out what is happening with our kids.

[SoCalDem]

6. I think that someday when most of us are long gone, scientists

will lay a LOT of our medical problems at the feet of plastics & polymers...and food additives & chemicals in general..

Children's bodies absorb stuff differently, and as their brains & nervous systems are maturing, who know what a "safe level" of anything, is?

There is a bombardment of "unnatural" substances in our lives now, that were NOT there prior to WWII.. Humans do not evolve quickly..

Theproblem is that the preponderance of "stuff" makes it hard (legally) to blame any one or even a few combinations..

Basically we are destroying ourselves in exchange for tasty foods & $2 flip-flops..

[Tesha]

8. When it's all done, most autism will be understood to be a genetic disorder.

And the reason we hear so much about vaccines, plastics,
environmental pollution, and all the other hypothetical
causes is that it is an attempt for parents to deflect
the (improper) guilt they would otherwise impose on
themselves if they accepted that the answer is genetics.

Tesha

[TZ]

dupe

[TZ]

9. Yep.

We know that Down's syndrome is caused by a genetic disorder that older mothers are prone to. I would like to see a study done to see if the age of mothers at birth of autistic children is at all correlated.

[shanti]

5. and there are

different levels of autism, i.e., asperger's.

[eridani]

7. Married to an Aspie, myself

He's taken to saying "neurotypical" the way a Hell's Angel says "citizen."