Causes Of Autism

There has been a hullabaloo regarding the origin and medical reasons of autism.
Still there is no agreement on this, as the researchers are looking for multiple causes and trying to identify what actually is the origin of autism?
Since, the autistics are also different from each other, there may be several reasons, which intervene with each other in a restrained and multifaceted ways, which consequently offers multiple results with each individual.
Since it cannot be claimed with firm belief that both the high- functioning Asperger’s Syndrome and low-functioning autism occur because of the same reasons, it further confuses the situation. Some people even asume that Asperger’s Syndrome and Autism are two different illnesses.
Because of wrong identification of signs and sypmtoms (such as ADHD instead of autism spectrum disorder), there are chances of more difficulties in recognizing the causes of autism.

Some of the theories jotted down are more closely related to Asperger’ syndrome than Autism and vice versa.

Brain size: A large number of autistic people have larger brain size in comparison to the normal people. The famous journal Neurology Today (Volume 2,8: August 2002) stated that "Although it is accepted that autistic individuals have, on average, an enlarged brain size, the nature of this abnormality remains unknown.".

The extreme male brain theory: In 2003, Professor Simon Baron of Austism Research Centre explained in his book “The Essential Difference” about the extreme male brain theory.
This theory advocates that Asperger’s Syndrome and autism characterize an acute form in which male brains vary from that of female.
As a consequence, the people with Asperger Syndrome are generally very systematic, but they are not good at understanding other people’s feeling.

This hypothesis is tied up with Baron-Cohen’s theory of "empathizing/systemizing (E-S)", which declares that men are more systematic than women and on the contrary, female are better empathizers than males because of difference in the brain sizes.
Actually the theory of conflicting intelligence in male and female is divisive and basically provisional.

The preoperational-autism theory: This theory reveals that mental decay of autistic people normally starts in their early childhood. At this age,
the information processing to a larger extent is at a visual level and it is also non-verbal.
This also deals with the “Theory of Mind”.

Under connectivity theory: This theory states that autism is the chaos of mind, which restricts the management and integration among the diverse areas of brain.
With the help of MRI, it has been observed that the white matter, which links up various parts of brain, has irregularities in the autistic barin.
This phenomenon can also be associated with the theory of "lack of central coherence” by Uta Frith, which states that autistic children normally pay attention to the details, but lack the ability to integrate the information collected from various sources.

Mind blindness theory: In this theory, the autistic person has “mind blindness” on an inability to recognize other people’s feelings.
The most common example of this type is the Sally-Anne test, where the subjects had to decide about the third party’s action.
Nonetheless, some autistic people do not fall under this definition.

Faulty mirror neuron theory: In few cases, those brain areas which react during the hand movement, don’t respond in people with autism.
This motion is distinctly better in non-autistic people. Hence, the social lacking in autistic people may be because of a faulty mirror neuron system that thwarts the maturity of feelings for others.

Blanket term: The researchers have widespread doubts that autism does not occur because of a single reason, but there are numerous unknown situations with various causes which lead to autism.

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