This can affect the health of the unborn child.
Doctors constantly tell expectant mothers: you need to walk more, breathe more air. Advice, as it turned out, is very controversial, because walking can cause serious illness.
Recent studies have shown that children whose mothers lived in cities with polluted air during pregnancy are more likely than others to develop autism. These conclusions were made by Canadian scientists. They examined more than 132 thousand children under 5 years of age. It turned out that those babies whose mothers breathed dirty air more often than others suffer from autism.
The risk of developing the disorder in a child increases with each trimester in the womb of a mother who lives in a contaminated area.
One of the key chemicals that scientists believe affects the health of an unborn baby is nitric oxide. It is formed when fuel is burned. Therefore, vehicle exhaust gases are the main source of toxic substances, the concentration of which is especially high in cities and along highways.
Boys’ risk of autism rises 9 percent when airborne nitric oxide increases by just one millionth of a percent. As a result, about one in XNUMX babies develops autism. However, parents do not know about this immediately, the symptoms usually do not appear until the second year of life.
Among girls, scientists did not find such a connection as the influence of the environment on the development of autism. But this is not surprising: the disorder is four times more common among boys, so girls would make up a relatively small proportion of the sample.
Autism often becomes a serious problem for a child in communication with other people. Someone subsequently learns to live with this diagnosis and perceives it as a variant of the norm, a different way of thinking. For others, doing everyday tasks and any contact with people becomes simply unbearable.
However, without knowing the reasons that lead to such a diagnosis, we will not know how to treat or prevent autism. Scientists believe that the development of the disorder is associated with both environmental and genetic factors.
More and more autists are born every year. In the United States, it was calculated: in 2000, there was one child with such a disorder for every 150 babies there. And after 12 years, the number of autistic people has tripled.
In the United States, one in three adults with autism has never had a job or received a high school diploma. It is unlikely that in Russia the situation with such a diagnosis is better. And if autism continues to spread at such a pace, then in the future it threatens with serious problems for the country’s economy.
However, new research has shown that by lowering our exhaust emissions, we can curb the spread of this serious disease.