Hayden Christensen

Jackie Burr, Instructor

English 2010

May 8, 2018

Autism and Air Pollution

In “Air Toxics in Relation to Autism Diagnosis, Phenotype, and Severity in a U.S.

Family-Based Study” author Amy E. Kalkbrenner states that there is a relation between

air pollution and autism. She claims that especially the gases carbon disulfide and

chlorobenzene have a positive correlation with autism. I say that the claim of air

pollution causing autism is not true. According to the research I conducted, air pollution

only correlates with respiratory problems. Respiratory symptoms such as coughing,

difficulty breathing, and respiratory damage are all results of air pollution. The only

exception is when lead gets into the air. The Environmental Protection Agency states

that when a child is exposed to lead pollution, the worst that can happen is a learning

deficit, but the learning deficit does not go as far as autism. Wendee Nicole also

conducted a study on whether prenatal exposure to air pollution can cause autism, and

she concluded “no associations were found between presence of autistic traits and

prenatal exposure to any of the air pollutants.”

It is difficult to determine that air pollution is the cause of autism, mainly because

it is a hard variable to isolate, and is only an observational study. You can’t place a

group of pregnant women in a polluted room for 9 months and another group of

pregnant women in a controlled room with clean air for 9 months and compare the

results of the two groups. That type of experiment would be one of the only ways to get
accurate data on this topic, but it is inhumane to stick a group of women into a room for

that extended period of time. Kalkbrenner may have gotten results that showed

correlation between autism and air pollution, but those results may be inaccurate

because of the inability to isolate variables.