For today’s blog, I originally planned to take a look back on the month of April and our activities.

However, I just watched a TED Talk titled “Autism – What We Know (And What We Don’t Know Yet)” by Wendy Chung, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) Director of Clinical Research. Dr. Chung’s presentation is a concise, informative review of what we know about autism, what we don’t know, and what definitely has been proven false.

Dr. Wendy Chung

Some of the information that I found fascinating included:

– Genes play a larger role in autism than they do in cancer, heart disease, or diabetes

–  25% of cases with autism are caused by a genetic mutation that was neither possessed nor transmitted by the parent but occurred in the egg, the sperm, or both

– There is not one gene for autism but 200 to 400 different ones…