Article Source: msnbc.com
from:msnbc.comRisk factors for autism remain elusive: study
Seeded on Mon Jul 11, 2011 4:47 PM EDT (msnbc.com)
— Filed under: health
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Here is a scary thought: there may not be any discernible risk factors for autism.
Autism may be simply an extreme presentation of NORMAL human variation. Some one I work with joked, when referring to Asperger's Syndrome, "It make you Germans good at mechanical stuff." Thinking about certain Asperger traits, such as the ability to focus for long periods of time on what others see as insignificant details, often to the exclusion of social interaction to get the dang job done, maybe there is a germ of truth in what he said.
Well... any sort of brain functioning is a combination of genetic/environmental/cognitive factors, so there is little doubt that SOMETHING increases the odds of getting it beyond genetics. Risk factors will eventually be quite discernible, problem is that doesn't at all mean anything is THE cause.
However, as for presentation of normal... you may be correct or not, rather hard to prove :P . But, as a comparison, evolutionary psychology attempts to tie together various older schools of psychology. One way to do so (don't let the school name fool you, not the ONLY way) is attempting to explain adaptive values of certain traits. One is ADD, which is hypothesized by many to be the results of a certain segment of people paying attention to nigh everything at once/in rapid sequence as perhaps being a very useful "alarm system" for our ancestors. Neither can really be proven, but both statements are interesting explanations, not really scary :P
Who knows. It may be totally genetic and the rapid increase may simply be an increase in diagnosis.
Let's see, we go from 1 in 10,000 children on the spectrum to one in 70 boys on the spectrum. If that's an example of better diagnosis, doctors and teachers were incredibly stupid not to spot it until now. Mild Asperger's might be normal, but anything more severe would interfere with survival in the past. In other words, autism genes, if they exist, would take themselves out of the gene pool. This is also true today. Most individuals with autism and many with Asperger's don't have children. To keep the supply of autism up, the logical conclusion would be that most of the rise in autism is due to environmental factors. That includes vaccines (read the inserts to see just how complicated this is), antibiotics (can damage the gut, which in turn causes problems for the brain), drugs to prevent miscarriage, mercury in the mother's teeth, boozing, pot, and all the things we intentionally and unintentionally put into our bodies. We live in a dangerously polluted world. How well you handle toxins is a genetic variable, and there's very little science devoted to that subject. After all, we don't want to interfere with business profits. And that's why taxpayers will hand over something like $3.2 million over the course of lifetime for someone with autism. Enjoy paying while you play with theories.
The definition of the spectrum has widened greatly catching more patients in that definition.
All I know is that my son was talking coherantly at age 3,,, then he got his immunizations and his progress halted immediately. he has since been diagnosed with autism. I dont care what "empirical data" I have been reading about immunizations not being the genesis for autism. I know what i experienced and somthing isnt right
Are you a scientist, doctor, or researcher? Sir, I'm a parent too, and I understand your frustration, but if you don't understand "empirical data", don't knock it. Spectral disorders start from birth, not from vaccines. Most likely you were told by other parents or a health care professional to be vigilant about the appearance of such disorder and were aware of it at the time your son got vaccinated. It's coincidence, not correlation. I had an uncle die of polio, and I got measles before the age of 5, which almost killed me. Guess what? No vaccine, and I still have Asperger's. My kids all have their vaccines because autism is still better than dead. Don't buy into this "logic" of vaccines cause autism. It makes zero scientific sense whatsoever. Are there some bad things in some of the vaccines? Probably. Are they way too expensive? Yes. But check out places like Southeast Asia and Africa and see there's just too many people dying of malaria to keep this myth up. Autism is rough- no doubt about it- but early detection is the saving grace, not the dead sentence. Consider your son lucky. I didn't get diagnosed til I graduated high school.
While I agree with your post, there is no vaccine for malaria. Malaria could be greatly diminished in Africa with simply things like mosquito netting and minor housing improvements. Has nothing to do with vaccines.
One of the difficulties of meta-analyses is that the various studies impose varying controls, varying qualifications of subject (patient) enrollment, varying qualifications of controls (normal subjects) enrollment, etc. The impact is to increase inherent noise in the form of those uncontrolled variables, against the hope and expectation that increased #'s of samples would reduce variance (improve signal to noise). In this case, a null result is not a statement that there is no relationship, just that with this collection of data analyzed the way it was, the response to environmental factors (exposure variables) were to weak to be significant. Unfortunately (as noted in the article), most interactions are rather weak in multifactorial diseases because there are multiple distinct ways for disease to emerge, and any one of those pathways may respond to various exposures differently than the rest. The signal gets washed out.
In other words, this is a tough problem to unravel using epidemiological methods.
Dan
Yeah, not complicated,....you just cant isolate variables/conditions enough to identify a causal relationship. Also, "autism" cannot be considered as a single discrete disorder.
But I liked your post because it was very long, wordy, and repetitive.
Not sure where on my post where it would be determined by you that i ahve no understanding of empirical data. Ill take my first hand experience over any analysis on what has been stated or will be presented in the future. No I am not a scientist, doctor nor reseracher, Im just a father who has to worry about who will take care of my child when his mother and I pass on. Lucky? As he enters adulthood and will not be able to take care of himself I find no luck in that at all. As for "heresay" from others, I can interpret inconsistancies all by myself.
Nick
I wish you and your family the best.
I'm not exactly sure if low birth weight is linked with autism, but I'm an Aspie and when I burst out of my mother's womb, I was about two weeks premature and my birth weight was totally fine. As for other risk factors, I probably got Asperger's syndrome from my first immunization shot---but of course, that has not been proven as of yet. However, since this article said that autism can be genetic, my Asperger's MAY BE caused by my father's alcoholism prior to my conception. He stopped drinking eventually, but it still caused him (now deceased) and my mother to divorce from each other when I was 2 1/2. (My memories of my father were up until I was 11 years old, when he died of hepatitis B.) My Asperger's syndrome is both a gift---because I'm super smart and I have photographic memory---and a curse---because a few people in my family and circle of friends understand me, and I have difficulty with making time to hang out with my friends.