 Environmental risk factors, meaning non-genetic risk factors, may play a significant role in autism, given the fact that even identical twins that share the same DNA may not share the disease more than half the time. A variety of risk factors have been proposed, lead, mercury, persistent organic pollutants like PCBs, or birth complications might cause a pro-inflammatory state and oxidative damage in the brain. But what's that base, though? You see a lot of correlational studies like this speculate about the possibility that one of the hidden agents spurring the rise in autism is something within the food supply, especially industrialized meat production, particularly poultry, based on the fact that the rise in poultry consumption, particularly parental poultry consumption, appeared to correlate with the rise in autism. They suggest it's the massive contamination of meat with antibiotics and growth hormones and toxic pollutants, such as dioxin in the meat. There are certainly toxicological issues associated with meat production, not just the pollutants, but the cooked meat carcinogens, leukotoxins. This review in the journal Meat Science came up with a whole list. But if anything, the main chronic toxic response of consuming meat and meat products is cancer, not autism, there's tons of confounding factors that could explain this correlation. Same thing with fish consumption and autism. On a state-by-state level, mercury-related fish advisories were found to be a surprisingly strong predictor of autism rates, suggesting that mercury-contaminated fish was to blame. But how many people tend to even eat the fish from their own state? That in no way proves a cause-and-effect mercury-autism connection. Why would they even think to make that connection? Well, heavy metals like mercury and lead do cause brain damage, and there are some similarities in terms of the symptoms they can cause. But don't really know until you put it to the test. Urine mobilization tests, challenge tests, or provoked urine tests are all terms used to describe the administration of a chelating agent, a heavy metal binding agent to a person prior to the collection of their urine, to test to see the level of heavy metal burden within their bodies. But pediatric, public health, and toxicology authorities recommend against the use of these tests, based on a lack of scientific validation and a lack of demonstrated benefits to the patients. Usually promoted by alternative practitioners is the basis for recommending, promoting, and selling to the patient questionable and often inappropriate therapies supposedly aimed at detoxification. Despite this disapproval, the tests are still commonly used and recommended by some practitioners. This is what the results end up looking like. Uh-oh, looks like mercury is in the red. It's easy for uninformed patients and providers to infer that a result that falls on the yellow or red background signifies heavy metal poisoning, but that's because they're not reading the fine print. Not reference interval. That normal green range is the level under non-provoked conditions, meaning normal urine, not urine from someone who has just given a chelating drug to provoke the response, to intentionally grab onto heavy metals in the body and pull them out into the urine. That's like giving someone a drug that raises their heart rate like a shot of adrenaline, then taking their pulse and being like, wow, you've gotten an abnormally high heart rate. Compared to other people who just got a shot of adrenaline? No, just compared to a regular resting heart rate. Uh, well, duh. See, there's no established reference ranges for provoked urine samples, so they're using the wrong reference range, so we have no idea what the results mean. And given the potential harm of whatever treatment the practitioner then tries to sell you on, these tests should not be utilized. Most commonly that treatment means chronic chelation therapy. A half million people with autism are subjected to chelation therapy in the U.S. every year. Despite no clinical trial evidence suggesting there's any benefit. Why not just give it a try, though? Because there's potential for side effects, like death. They're referring to this case, where doctors were like, oops, they just gave the wrong drug. Should have been given Edite Calcium Dysodium, not just straight Edite Dysodium. But this may have been no accident. That's exactly what's recommended by leading chelation proponents. As such, it would have been surprising only if the practitioner had not chosen it. So this may not just be a simple matter of the wrong medication being administered. That may just be a distraction from the prospect that the killer was quackery. This is not to say that heavy metals aren't toxic. It's just that instead of trying to give people chelation drugs after the fact, we should try to not get exposed in the first place. For example, in this study, they compared the blood mercury levels of physicians who ate no fish, compared to those who ate one or two servings a week, compared to those who ate three or more. Here's where the three or more servings a week group started out. And after a single chelation drug dose, mercury levels dropped down to here. And perhaps better to eat less fish or no fish at all.