Welcome to a very special podcast – the IMFAR 2016 edition with highlights from this year’s International Meeting for Autism Research in Baltimore, Maryland. As you may notice, my voice is different. I was talking so much that I actually developed laryngitis. I’m not proud of myself for talking so much at a meeting where I should have been listening, but I will make sure the text is somewhere on the web so you can read it.

This year, ASF got a lot of help in reporting the findings back to you from our IMFAR travel grantees. ASF provides scholarships for families, students and people with autism to attend IMFAR. They attended the sessions they were interested in, and were nice enough to report back on what they learned. We will be including their reports here.

The meeting started with an IMFAR preconference organized by Dr. Becky Landa at KKI and hosted by Towson University. Next year when the meeting is in San Francisco, and if you live in the Bay Area you should try to attend. The topics covered included: behavioral interventions, feeding issues, medical comorbidities in people with autism and sensory problems. It included the most recent findings by some of the most respected scientists and highlighted applicable findings for parents and teachers. We heard Dr. Peter Gerhardt talk about how people with autism don’t need a community – they need communities. That can be the communities of the grocery store, the bus route, the library, as well as family and clinical communities. But it isn’t just one.

While just about every topic under the spectrum was covered at IMFAR, I can’t remember a meeting that highlighted gene/environment interactions as much. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an investigator who launched one of the very first studies on the environmental factors in autism for most cases of autism, gave one of the keynotes. She emphasized that the word “causes” in most cases is not scientifically accurate. In fact, the causes are actually a mix of multiple genetic factors and multiple environmental risk factors. And while her examples of environment included toxic chemicals, it’s important to think of environment as the whole of “non-genetic” factors. This can be psychological factors, medical, pharmacological and sociological. There is no single environmental cause, and most cases of autism are not caused by one single genetic cause either (but sometimes they are and I’ll get to that later). People trying to understand the research should know that just because an environmental factor is involved in the causes of autism, that is completely different than the causes of the rises of prevalence. So when you see a graph showing an increase in prevalence on one side and the increase in a risk factor on the other – just ignore it. There are more environmental factors than there are genes and when they are studied individually, just like the effects of individual genes, the effects are small. Looking at the combined effect of multiple genes certainly leads to higher risk factors than individual risk factors. For example, studying the genetic component of autism risk in siblings finds a 20 fold increase but the increased risk because of pesticide exposure is like a 1 ½ fold risk. Over the past 15 years, scientists have been able to narrow down the period of exposure to be during pregnancy, and possibly prior to pregnancy. Everyone thinks about pregnancy but exposures actually affect the sperm and the egg too. It might be hard to realize how much progress has been made in the field, but Dr. Hertz-Picciotto pointed out in her final sentence: “in 2000 scientists knew enough about g x e in autism to put 5 bullet points on one slide. Now it can fill a full hour long talk”.

In addition to Dr. Herz-Picciotto, other environmental health scientists presented in this special panel. Dr. Bruce Lanphear, who is a world respected researcher in lead and IQ in children,