Austim affects one in every 100 people, but does your college or where you work have an effect?
A surprising new study at Cambridge University is conducting the first ever ‘clear test’ to determine if marrying someone from work or the type of job increases the chances of children developing autism! But why?
As more and more women take on once male-dominated roles, more spouses are meeting in the workplace. Director of the university’s Autism Research Centre, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, said that there’s several clues that parents in the engineering, science and math fields might have a higher risk of having a child with autism.
Professor Baron-Cohen told the Daily Mail Online: “A clear test of the hypothesis will enable us to test if couples who are both strong systemisers, for example those who studied and worked in STEM subjects [science, technology, engineering and maths] and other fields related to systemising, are more likely to have a child with an autism spectrum diagnosis than couples where only one is a strong systemiser, or where neither is.”
It’s not entirely a strange association: Mothers and fathers of kids with autism have been shown to display excellent attention to detail, and these ‘systemisers’ can often make sense of complex topics, but have difficulty with social relationships.
Professor Baron-Cohen thinks being a ‘systemiser’ might be a symptom of high levels of testosterone in the brain. But unfortunately, the results of these tests won’t be done for another 12 months!
So what do YOU think HollyMoms? Can this be true or is it just a myth?
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