A NEW study claims to have found “strong support” for the theory that too much television for small children may trigger autism.

The study — which has sparked an angry debate in America, where it was carried out — found a correlation between the number of hours that children younger than three spend watching television and the rates of autism in a county-by-county analysis of four states.

The study provides the latest controversial theory to explain the estimated 10-fold rise in reported cases of autism over the past 30 years. There are now approximately 90,000 British children with autistic disorders.

Other hypotheses have included a largely discredited claim by Dr Andrew Wakefield, a British researcher, that the onset of autism may be caused by the measles, mumps and rubella vaccination.

The American researchers — led by Michael Waldman, an economics professor at Cornell University — admit that their findings are not “definitive evidence” because they could find only indirect evidence of the amount of time that autistic children spend viewing television.

In the report Does Television Cause Autism? the researchers claim to have found a significant link between rates of rainfall, which is presumed to have kept children indoors, the spread of cable television networks with round-the-clock children’s programming and the level of autism diagnoses.

The researchers say their figures are so closely correlated that they “indicate that just under 40% of autism diagnoses in the three states studied (California, Oregon and Washington) is the result of television watching due to precipitation”.

They also found that 17% of the growth in autism cases in two of the states in the 1970s and 1980s might be due to television watching.

While television has long been regarded as potentially harmful for under-threes, most research has found only limited links between viewing and child development problems. However, many parents have reported that the behaviour of autistic children is affected adversely by television.

Lisa Jo Rudy, mother of a nine-year-old autistic boy and a consultant on child behaviour, was critical of the Cornell theory, saying the “really bad science” was likely to “dig ever deeper into the morass of guilt that seems to surround the diagnosis of autism”.

Meanwhile, a study by Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, of 743 families, in which 1,200 members were diagnosed with autism, has found evidence of a mutated gene that is involved in brain development, the immune system and the gastro-intestinal system — all of which may be damaged in autistic children.

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