My presentation is called “Evidence indicates a plausible link between autism and radio frequency radiation exposure”, and my name is Martha Herbert. I am a board-certified neurologist with special competency in child neurology and a specialization in neurodevelopmental disorders. I am a research neuroscientist.

I am on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, on staff at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and an affiliate of the Harvard MGH/MIT Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. I have an extensive history of research and clinical practice in neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly autism spectrum disorders, and I have published research papers on brain imaging, physiological abnormalities in autism spectrum disorders, and environmental influences on neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, as well as on brain development and function.

I'll start with the increasing prevalence of autism, the numbers from the U.S.A., and its high costs. Autism spectrum disorder diagnoses are increasing rapidly in North America, as well as elsewhere, with profound effects on those affected, as well as parents, families, caregivers, communities, and societies at large. In the U.S., the rates have gone from three to four in 10,000, 20 years ago, to over one in 68 today.

Annual costs for treatment of an affected child can reach between $40,000 and $60,000 U.S., with lifetime support for an individual costs topping $1.2 million to $3.2 million U.S. per affected individual. This translates into approximately $240 billion annually in the U.S. The graph shows a striking prevalence over the last 10 to 15 years. Those are CDC figures.

In the next slide, you see there are many factors associated with autism spectrum disorder numbers, including parental age, greater awareness, increased diagnosis, and spatial clustering, but there is a large proportion in this graph, 46%—in another paper, from the University of California, Davis, it was 65%—unaccounted for by these other factors. Potentially, at least, some of that may be associated with environmental influences.

What is autism? It is difficult for many to imagine how autism could be influenced by environmental factors, but this difficulty comes from holding assumptions, particularly that autism is genetically hard-wired into the brain from birth or conception. While this assumption is referred to and utilized by many scientists in interpreting their data, the actual assumption is not proven scientifically, and probably cannot be.

More and more scientific and clinical observations suggest that we need to think about autism differently. Autism is not a broken brain. Many with autism are highly gifted, albeit with issues that are often dyspraxic, that is to say, problems with expression and coordination, not lack of capability, not purely genetic. Hundreds of genes by now are associated with autism. They are also common in healthy people. The environment plays a big role.

Autism is not a life sentence. It is variable and changeable. It can get worse and better in a day or even in moments. It is treatable, and some people lose their diagnosis. High intelligence is common. The assumption, now out of date, that low intelligence is by far predominant was never proven and is now not consistent with the facts.

Autism may be centrally about brain function, which is pertinent to the comments about electromagnetic fields and RFR, and it may turn out to be more about impaired or altered function than about altered brain anatomy, since the anatomical differences are subtle, while the functional differences are more striking.

Autism involves not just the brain. Multiple systems are involved. While it is defined psychologically by a set of neurocognitive symptoms, much research has identified many underlying systemic physiological disturbances at the molecular, cellular, organ, and brain nervous system levels. Researchers are starting to study the way these physiological functional disturbances alter brain function.

Particularly important is the electrophysiology, the brainwaves and other electrical properties of the central and autonomic nervous system. The underlying chemistry and health of the cells in the brain and nervous system set the terms within which the brain can function.

As it turns out, the alterations in cell chemistry and physiology that have been identified in autism have virtually all been documented as affective electromagnetic frequencies including radio frequency radiation. Other environmental exposures and genetic vulnerabilities may also contribute to this impairment of cell function, but the cumulative effect, the total load of these environmental stressors, is likely to be what causes autism and triggers or exacerbates its challenging behaviours, and we can do something about the contribution of electromagnetic fields.

So might EMF contribute to the development or worsening of autism spectrum disorders or conditions? My co-author, Cindy Sage, and I wrote a paper called “Autism and EMF? Plausibility of a pathophysiological link”, which is published in the peer-review journal Pathophysiology as parts I and II in June of 2013. I also posted it on my personal website marthaherbert.org, and a short summary for a lay audience was recently published online in the Autism Notebook.

In this longer paper and in the shorter one, we delineate parallels between observed dysfunctions in autism and the biological effects of electromagnetic radiation. The damage induced and seen in autism spectrum disorders includes oxidative and cellular stress, lipid peroxidation in membranes and other lipid substances, stress protein responses, genetic alterations and de novo mutations, altered membrane and barrier structure and function, calcium channel disturbances, and altered function at cell junctions. There's a slide schematically illustrating the different types of damage at the cellular level that are found in autism spectrum disorders and that overlap just about entirely with cellular functional problems that are inducible by EMF or RFR.

At a higher level of organization, there's a degradation of functional systems both caused by EMF and RFR and present in autism spectrum disorders or conditions that include dysfunction in energy and metabolism seen in the mitochondria and in altered brain glucose metabolism, alteration of important functions in the perinatal infancy period, brain cell structure alteration and damage, and melatonin dysregulation. Conversely melatonin can attenuate the impacts of EMF and RFR, immune dysfunction, and electrophysiological alterations.

It is very notable that these physiological disturbances are mirrored in many other common and costly chronic diseases. These include diabetes, cancer, obesity, hypertension, neurodegenerative disorders, and more. The cumulative cost of these conditions is enormous to the point of straining our health care systems and economics beyond tolerance.

Electrophysiological perturbations are central to autism spectrum disorders and are also significant and overall effects of EMF and RFR. Altered molecular, cellular, and physiological function in the brain and body, along with altered immunity in turn, impact the electrical signalling activities of the brain and nervous system. Electrophysiological perturbations are seen in many conditions including seizures and epilepsy, sleep disturbances, sensory processing, diminutions of cognitive efficiency, and autonomic dysregulations such as elevated heart rate and stress reactivity. These features are all present in many or even most people with autism spectrum disorders. Moreover, these effects, when induced by EMF and RFR, occur at exposure levels substantially below Safety Code 6.

Let's talk about children's vulnerabilities. Children are not little adults. They are developing, and perturbations during windows of development may have lifelong repercussions.

In August of 2013, the American Academy of Pediatrics addressed their concerns in a letter to the U.S. FCC about the need for re-evaluating EMF and RFR, given that exposure has skyrocketed while regulations in place in the U.S. date back to 1996, way before this exposure acceleration occurred. The AAP expressed particular concern about the use of devices like cellphones and laptops in pregnant and nursing mothers and children. Safety Code 6, it should be noted, has seen only minor modifications since being introduced in 1979.

Radiation from cellphones and other sources penetrates deeper into the heads of children, which leads to persistent stress on the cells in the brain, and over time, more and more serious problems can develop. Certain tissues...and there's a slide. It shows, from left to right, the greater penetration of cellphone exposure in the brain of a child, less in an older child, and still less in an adult.

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