Autism Is a National Emergency—And It’s Time We Treat It Like One For decades, autism has been misunderstood to be a static lifelong condition with no known cause and no cure. What if the current genes-behavior framework still falls short - just as it was not cold “refrigerator”

Picture all cancer—colon, lung, breast, leukemia, stage 1 or 4, metastatic or primary—shoved into one bucket: ‘cancer.’ No subtypes, no staging, no tailored drugs, no research—just a dead-end label. Treatments flop, progress stops. That’s autism today. No multi-omic lens -

Leading Report This is not the CDC HansHeinrich Schuler🇩🇪🇺🇦🇮🇱🇹🇼🇬🇱 Instead of asking “Do vaccines cause autism?", investigate: In which biologically vulnerable infants could vaccines contribute neurodevelopmental regression? What biomarkers can identify those infants before adverse effects occur? Could MIA activation predispose an

We must move beyond treating autism as a single entity in research. A systems biology approach demands that we get precise and cohort and subcohort, recognizing distinct biological signatures. Autism’s origins are multifactorial, shaped by genetic and prenatal predispositions

Karoline Leavitt About 40% of autism cases are regressive, children lose skills they once had, revealing a biologically vulnerable subgroup. That means some kids are more biologically fragile than others. For these exceptionally vulnerable kids, big stressors like a high fever, illness, surgery,

Autism isn’t one thing. It helps to think in terms of a city with unique neighborhoods. The trajectory to development consists of a convergence of various primers, triggers, and amplifiers. Primers are built-in vulnerabilities — genetics, prenatal factors, or immune fragility —

Triggers are the hits or stressors: infections, toxins, metabolic strain, clustered immune challenges. For a child with strong resilience, triggers may not matter. For a child with primers, even a small trigger can start the cascade. 🧵

Amplifiers are what keep the system stuck — chronic inflammation, mitochondrial stress, redox imbalance, gut dysbiosis. These loops explain why autism looks so different across individuals: different primers drive susceptibility, different triggers, different amplifiers. Each

Calley Means It’s worse than that, they continue to deny the epidemic. From a policy standpoint, it’s a disaster we can’t sustain. Demand for HCBS for state/federal waivers is resulting in decades long waiting lists in some states. School districts are overwhelmed by the costs of providing

The President’s comments on autism sparked backlash, but here’s why we should listen: For the past six months, I have had the privilege of working alongside a team of distinguished autism scientists. These are individuals whose papers I studied for years and whose work shaped

Glad to see strong interest in the newly constituted IACC. However, concerns about “balance” would carry more weight if the past decades had delivered meaningful progress in causality, treatment, or lifespan supports—especially for individuals with the highest support needs. As

The Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee includes three autistic self-advocates and a dozen members who are parents of children with autism, including many with high support needs. This lived experience brings urgency and purpose to the Committee’s statutory mandate under

I wholeheartedly agree that “working together is better than splintering” and that “keeping the autism community together”—as stated by Dr. Joshua Gordon, former NIMH Director and former IACC Chair—should be a priority. Which makes it difficult to reconcile Dr. Gordon’s