Quote:I have a question about autism. I know that it usually starts showing up in a child that's around the age when they would be getting vaccinated, but can a perfectly "normal" five or six year old suddenly turn autistic?

 

It's not reasonable to believe that could happen because the basis of Autism is a neurological mutation that occurs in the first 8 weeks of development from conception.

 

Here's the Abstract to the paper where I got my own info on the topic:

 

Autism spectrum disorders affect behaviors that emerge at ages when typically developing children become increasingly social and communicative, but many lines of evidence suggest that the underlying alterations in the brain occur long before the period when symptoms become obvious. Studies of the behavior of children in the first year of life demonstrate that symptoms are often detectable in the first 6 months. The environmental factors known to increase the risk of autism have critical periods of action during embryogenesis. Minor malformations that occur frequently in people with autism are known to arise in the same stages of development. Anomalies reported from histological studies of the brain are consistent with an early alteration of development. Congenital syndromes with high rates of autism include somatic that originate early in the first trimester. In addition, it is possible to duplicate a number of anatomic and behavioral features characteristic of human cases by exposing rat embryos to a teratogenic dose of valproic acid at the time of neural tube closure.

 

<span>Arndt TL, Stodgell CJ, Rodier PM (2005). "The teratology of autism". </span>

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