Generally, autism is characterized by abnormal immunology, altered oxidative stress and even genetic ab-normality in addition to behavioral problems. Medical research data has shown a fact that vitamin D deficiency is ubiquity in children with autism. Since a long time, autism is always the focus of medical community and mass scientists are dedicated to discover effective therapy for autism treatment.
Vitamin D, except for the role in regulating immunity and glutathione, can largely control genome as well as traditional action on calcium and phosphate regulation. It’s recently reported that vitamin D supplementation could improve the behavioral manifestations in autistic child, which illustrated that vitamin D was involved in the pathogenesis of autism. Vitamin is an necessary organic substance for humans and animals to maintain normal physiological functions, playing an important role in human growth, metabolism, and development process. Compared with other vitamins, main source of vitamin D depends on its own synthesis, that is, the amount of obtained from food is relatively less.
Autism is an inflammatory disease, so vitamin D may play an anti-inflammatory effect through controlling natural immunity and acquiring immunity regulation. The study found children with autism serum could have a higher proinflammatory chemokine MCP-1, indicating the existence of inflammatory changes in autism. More than 160 kinds of autoantibodies exist in human autoimmune diseases and multiple brain-related autoantibodies have been found in children with autism, such as anti-GAD65 antibody, anti-MAG antibody, etc. The level of autoantibodies is connected with autism severity, which shows autoimmune problems also exist in autism patients. Therefore, vitamin D supplement might reduce the autoantibody in autism as well as generate immune tolerance and restore normal function of the brain.
As is seen, autism has been recognized as a hereditary disease for a long time, so geneticists have spared no effort to explore the common genetic mutation that causes autism but they didn’t make it. Although historical genetic condition did not change significantly, vitamin D deficiency within the worldwide has become more serious in recent years; incidence of autism in recent years may be significantly higher. Autism prevalence and ecological studies of the sun’s ultraviolet irradiation amount could be related together, because the amount of solar ultraviolet radiation is negatively correlated to autism prevalence, which may due to vitamin D deficiency during pregnant period especially the late pregnant development period. Point mutations and DNA damage in newborn are likely to be the result of autism, rather than the cause of autism, which could due to existed genetic or environmental factors. These factors show children with autism might be caused by vitamin D deficiency.
In summary, hereditary feature and environmental factors of vitamin D are likely to cause autism. Because of the lack of vitamin D, normal development of early brain has been affected a lot, which could bring inflammation, autoimmunity, oxidative stress and thus change the clinical symptoms of autism. However, newborn’s mutation in autism is often the result of vitamin D deficiency instead of the cause of autism.