A Charleston native and West Virginia University graduate has co-authored a study that links the level of pollutants in a child's blood with the severity of their autism.
Dr. Andrew Boggess, who recently earned his doctorate from Duquesne University, and three other researchers led the study, which was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports. The study focused on the levels of common organic pollutants, including ones found things like in automobile exhaust, pesticides, flame retardants and cleaning solvents, and how those levels, as a whole, impacted a child with autism. The researchers evaluated a total of 60 children - 30 with autism, and another 30 "controls" who were neurotypical (not on the autism spectrum) but shared similar socioeconomic backgrounds with the autistic group - and found that, although there was no link between pollutants present in the blood and an increased risk of autism for the control group, children with autism tended to have more severe symptoms relative to the amount of pollutants in their blood.
"For kids already diagnosed with autism, we found that as the amount of these compounds built up in their bloodstream, their neurological performance worsened, and there were very few outliers in the set with autism," Boggess said.
The study also found that the levels of pollutants in the children's blood was "statistically predictive" of their autism, meaning that if the researchers looked at a blood sample without knowing whether the sample belonged to an autistic child, they could tell with relative certainty whether that child had been diagnosed with the most severe form of autism based on the level of pollutants in the sample.
"I don't mean predictive in the medical sense - we're not going to go out tomorrow and start diagnosing people, but it is a statistically predictive way of telling people their odds of being diagnosed with autism," he said.
Boggess said the study differed from other similar autism studies in that, rather than studying the impact of one particular compound or pollutant on the prevalence of autism, the researchers decided to look at whether a host of common pollutants, in a high concentration, contributed to autism severity.
"As some of these compounds start building up in an individual's system, it doesn't necessarily matter the specific identity of the compound; what matters is that they all have very similar biological effects inside the body," Boggess said. "It doesn't matter if the total amount mainly comes from Benzene or if it mainly comes from (polychlorinated biphenyl) - what matters is the total amount."
Boggess and his fellow researchers believe the focus on pinpointing a particular compound as the culprit behind autism severity is what has produced varying results in existing research, and he hopes this study will help steer the direction of future autism research.
"We think one thing that could be going is, if the only thing that matters is the total amount in their blood - and there's good indication that that's true - then some children with autism may have high levels of one compound may not have high levels of another, and other children who may have a similar amount of these totals in their blood may have it from a different compound," Boggess said. "It may explain why different research groups are coming up with such dramatically different results."
Reach Lydia Nuzum at
lydia.nuzum@wvgazettemail.com,
304-348-5189 or follow
@lydianuzum on Twitter.