http://jme.endocrinology-journals.org/content/49/2/R61.long
Endocrine systems can be altered epigenetically by substances that don’t even bind to the endocrine receptors themselves.
This paper specifically discusses the issues WRT DES and other epigenetic disruptors.
And low, and slow, seem to work even better. Lead works this way:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3555228/
I’ve tried to find full length articles.
Your friend is stepping on a third rail wrt autism and the environment. Hopefully that works out for her. Anyone who suggests it’s anything other than parental (you need to spank that kid!) or genetic (parents were geeky of course their kid will be a head banging diaper wearing teen, what were they expecting?!) is usually run out of town with tar and feathers of some sort.
Black Agnes, sorry I can’t reply to your emails, apparently I’m “too new” to use that feature! To briefly answer your questions, I’m one of a family of six (3 brothers, 3 sisters). I’m the odd one out, physically I look quite different from them (very feminine-looking when I was younger, and I have a “eunuchoid habitus”, a type of body structure that’s often seen in cases of intersex, which makes you look a bit like a cross between a man and a woman). I don’t identify as a woman, however I’ve always had some weird female thing going on in the background, which I now think is because part of my brain development went down the female pathway instead of the male one. The rest of my family are very average-looking people who’ve gone on to live uneventful lives.
My fertility was OK when I was younger and I had two children of my own, however I’ve since developed acute secondary hypogonadism (my hypothalamus, the brain region that controls hormones, has stopped sending the signal that tells my testicles to produce testosterone). This seems to be one of the things that quite commonly goes wrong with DES sons, judging by some of the personal stories I’ve read.
Basically I’ve got some of the symptoms of being intersexed, but my genitals are fully male (apart from being born with a hydrocele), and I score as quite strongly male in most brain sex tests too. When I was trying to figure all this out in 2011, the conclusion I eventually reached was that something happened partway through the second trimester of an otherwise normal pregnancy, that catastropically disrupted my endocrine system so that for a few weeks I stopped producing any testosterone. Since the default developmental pathway is female and male development only occurs if there’s testosterone present, I developed as male for most of the pregnancy but had a few weeks where I developed as female instead. Those few weeks appear to have coincided with the early stages of building the permanent structure of my brain (something which doesn’t start until about 16 weeks after conception).
There’s no way any conventional intersex condition can cause total suppression of testosterone for a short period and otherwise normal male testosterone. I feel horrible for saying this, but it does look a lot like my mother took an overdose of something (probably birth control pills), at around the time she’d have first felt me moving inside her. I’m unlikely to ever know for sure if that’s what happened, but it does tie in with what I remember of her behaviour when I was young, and there is something that happened later in my childhood that makes me think she was hiding a guilty secret along those lines.
I’ve got a lot in common with DES sons, but it seems like less of my psychology is female than is typically the case for them, and there was absolutely no medical reason why my mother would have been prescribed DES either. I feel quite bad even talking about it in public, but I think it’s important that people know what happened with DES, and that the synthetic female hormones in contraceptive pills appear to have similar effects on male development too. One of the people in an online hypogonadism group I belong to is quite severely intersexed (and presumably hypogonadal), and his mother told him that she’d taken contraceptive pills while she was pregnant with him, so it’s not just me.