There is significant emerging evidence of two related correlations regarding Autism:
a) there appears to be a positive correlation between maternal prenatal exposure to pesticides and autism in the child when there is reason to believe that a genetic predisposition exists (1 or more relative who is either autistic or falls within the broad autistic phenotype), which is higher than that of children with the genetic predisposition alone.
b) there is an almost perfect correlation between autism and a surplus of neuronal synapse pathways in individuals who had autism, died and were studied under autopsy conditions.
Obviously, more research is needed in both of these areas in order to determine what, if any, effect they have on a child developing autism and what, if anything, can be done about it.
connection: most pesticides are acetylcholine esterase inhibitors. acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter that prevents apoptosis (spontaneous death) of a cell. apoptosis is an important element of proper brain development and weeding out unneccesary or ineficient neural pathways.
it would make sense to think that these two correlations may in some way be related therefore. But, as has been clearly pointed out, there is insufficient research to state causation and more research is needed to figure out what is going on here. This is among the latest research that has been published on the topic and, as such, is still in it’s early stages of investigation and development.