http://tinyurl.com/y8wjss
WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) -- There was something similarly strange about the children who caught Leo Kanner's attention starting in 1938. He called their behavior "autistic."
There also was something strangely similar about the families they came from.
"There is one other very interesting common denominator in the backgrounds of these children. They all come of highly intelligent families," child psychiatrist Kanner wrote at the end of his historic study of 11 children, published in 1943.
He ticked off the fathers' occupations: four psychiatrists, one "brilliant lawyer," one chemist and law school graduate, one plant pathologist, one professor of forestry, one ad copywriter with a law degree, one mining engineer and one businessman.
"All but three of the families," Kanner wrote, "are represented either in 'Who's Who in America' or in 'American Men of Science,' or both."
Among the first 100 cases Kanner saw, he reported they "almost invariably came from intelligent and sophisticated stock." Of the 100 fathers, 96 were high school grads and, of those, 74 were college grads -- almost twice today's percentage...
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Demographics are always tricky to decipher, and it is easy to make too much of too little, but at some point all sorts of families began having autistic kids, and that ominous pattern may well be visible in the first 100 cases.
The latest research (not from 1938) that I've seen on the causes of autism seems to show at least one link to older fathers.