A comparative study of opinions of U.S.A. and European professionals on the etiology of infantile autism.

The general finding of this cross-national survey is that, contrary to expectation, professionals in the United States, irrespective of discipline, are more convinced that infantile autism is caused primarily by genetic/organic factors when compared to European professionals. Psychiatrists in the U.S.A. give priority to organic factors (97%), followed by constitutional factors (84%), genetic factors (77%), and metabolic disorders (58%). With psychologists and other professionals in the U.S.A. the trend is about the same. An analysis of the differences in responses to items on environmental factors, such as birth complications, viral infection, pollution and receptive language problems, again shows that professionals in the United States tend to attribute more importance to these factors than their European counterparts. In general, half of the Europeans believe in the importance of these factors as compared to professionals in the U.S.A. It is only when we deal with parental psychopathology that we find a reversal in trends. If we combine the "somewhat important" and "highly important," 35% of psychiatrists in the United States and 54% of psychiatrists in Europe indicate that parental psychopathology may be a factor in infantile autism. For psychologists, the percentages were 26% and 50% respectively. No difference was found when "other professionals" in the U.S.A. and Europe were compared. There are some contradictions in the findings. While the responses of 97% of the psychiatrists in the U.S.A. point to organic factors as being "somewhat" and "highly important" in the causation of infantile autism, 36% of them indicate that parental psychopathology might have some influence on the illness. Thus, while almost 100% of psychiatrists subscribe to an organic origin of the illness, about one third of them are still not willing to completely discount parental contribution. The 12th etiology which was added, "cultural factors," was considered to be of least importance. It is assumed that the respondents might have missed the implications of the question. For a discussion of the sociocultural aspects of infantile autism, the reader is referred to a number of papers published in this area (Sanua, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985). As an analogy, there is still some controversy about the universality of the existence of schizophrenia. In a review of the literature on the subject, Torrey (1973) concluded that "process" schizophrenia is found in all cultures which have been exposed to Western technology. He points out the need to conduct well-planned field surveys of the prevalence among groups that are in varying stages of exposure to Western technology.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)