Posts Tagged ‘autism’
More stringent definition of autism may exclude many
Proposed changes in the definition of autism would sharply reduce the skyrocketing rate at which the disorder is diagnosed and might make it harder for many people who would no longer meet the criteria to get health, educational and social services…
The definition is now being reassessed by an expert panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association, which is completing work on the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the first major revision in 17 years. The D.S.M., as the manual is known, is the standard reference for mental disorders, driving research, treatment and insurance decisions. Most experts expect that the new manual will narrow the criteria for autism; the question is how sharply.
The results of the new analysis are preliminary, but they offer the most drastic estimate of how tightening the criteria for autism could affect the rate of diagnosis. For years, many experts have privately contended that the vagueness of the current criteria for autism and related disorders like Asperger syndrome was contributing to the increase in the rate of diagnoses — which has ballooned to one child in 100, according to some estimates.
The psychiatrists’ association is wrestling with one of the most agonizing questions in mental health — where to draw the line between unusual and abnormal — and its decisions are sure to be wrenching for some families. At a time when school budgets for special education are stretched, the new diagnosis could herald more pitched battles. Tens of thousands of people receive state-backed services to help offset the disorders’ disabling effects, which include sometimes severe learning and social problems, and the diagnosis is in many ways central to their lives. Close networks of parents have bonded over common experiences with children; and the children, too, may grow to find a sense of their own identity in their struggle with the disorder…
The new analysis, presented Thursday at a meeting of the Icelandic Medical Association, opens a debate about just how many people the proposed diagnosis would affect…
That the qualitative expansion in diagnoses of autism mostly reflects doctors and parents and a culture growing in parallel that found itself able to get federal and public support for difficult behavioral problems – by defining those problems as autism – ain’t new. That quantifying levels of impairment and reviewing the premises of diagnosis is finally happening is the only surprise.
Doesn’t make the needs of parents and offspring any less or diminish society’s responsibility. It’s just that that, too, has become a political question in 21st Century America.
Rejecting vaccines is as dangerous as it is dumb!
Given the success of vaccines in preventing a long list of diseases, why is opposition to vaccination gaining hold? Decision-making expert Valerie Reyna contends that it’s because anti-vaccination messages tell a compelling story compared to official sources, and they meet people’s need to understand rare adverse outcomes.
“In the era of Web 2.0, the contagion of ideas, transmitted rapidly through social media, is as concerning as the contagion of diseases because of their power to reduce vaccination rates, leaving populations vulnerable to preventable death and disability,” said Reyna…
This spring, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the United States is experiencing the highest number of measles cases in more than a decade. According to the alert, measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000 due to a high vaccination rate. This could change should vaccination rates decline…
Since most people don’t understand how vaccines work, the Internet, which facilitates users across the globe to sharing personal experiences and ideas about health care, fills the vacuum.
According to Reyna, anti-vaccination messages are expected when people don’t understand how vaccination works and when adverse events that are difficult to explain appear to be connected. Autism, for example, is diagnosed in children during the same time period that children receive a battery of vaccinations. Despite research to the contrary, anti-vaccination messages have claimed vaccines are to blame. Official sites, on the other hand, tend not to provide a convincing narrative story line that helps people connect the dots.
Under these circumstances, how do people approach the decision to vaccinate? In Reyna’s model, the decision to get a flu shot, for example, could be a seen as a decision between feeling OK (by not getting the vaccine) or taking a chance on not feeling OK (due to a vaccine side effect). Without better information, most people would choose not to get a vaccine.
In a culture as anarchistic as ours here in the United States, the misreading can be deliberate. There is a pundit I know who considers rejecting flu vaccination a point of libertarian ethics – and he stores/replenishes his supply of anti-virals at a cost of hundreds of dollars every flu season as appropriate “protection”. I guess if you can afford such lengths to satisfy rejecting one of medical history’s best solutions to recurrent illness – rock on!.
Rejecting a solution, a methodology – on the basis of the statistically-tiny number of long-term reversals or, worse, products demeaned by sleazy profiteers on occasion [as are all products], is illogical. I don’t mean to sound too much like Mr. Spock; but, the Age of Reason took our species past this sort of rationale a century-and-a-half ago.
I know my choice of words may offend good people; but, I grew up before most childhood vaccines were commonplace. My neighborhood in that New England factory town extended to 3 or 4 elementary schools, public and Catholic. When we finished winter and schoolkids gathered together again for the new season of sandlot baseball, one of the first things we sorted out was who died over the winter. Who had scarlet fever, who had diphtheria, who had whooping cough or mumps, who had measles, who died from the flu – la grippe. The only exception was the summer special, polio.
I know what it feels like to count up who was missing from a smallish community on just one side of a small city. Who died before we had access to vaccines. Those numbers were a hell of a lot more than the fears and trembling of people who don’t really look at statistics. Or have my memories.
Genius at work: 12-year-old is studying at Indiana/Purdue
When Jacob Barnett first learned about the Schrödinger equation for quantum mechanics, he could hardly contain himself. For three straight days, his little brain buzzed with mathematical functions.
From within his 12-year-old, mildly autistic mind, there gradually flowed long strings of pluses, minuses, funky letters and upside-down triangles — a tapestry of complicated symbols that few can understand.
He grabbed his pencil and filled every sheet of paper before grabbing a marker and filling up a dry erase board that hangs in his bedroom. With a single-minded obsession, he kept on, eventually marking up every window in the home…
Entirely normal for Jacob, a child prodigy who used to crunch his cereal while calculating the volume of the cereal box in his head…
Elementary school couldn’t keep Jacob interested. And courses at IUPUI have only served to awaken a sleeping giant.
Just a few weeks shy of his 13th birthday, Jake, as he’s often called, is starting to move beyond the level of what his professors can teach.
In fact, his work is so strong and his ideas so original that he’s being courted by a top-notch East Coast research center. IUPUI is interested in him moving from the classroom into a funded researcher’s position.
“We have told him that after this semester . . . enough of the book work. You are here to do some science,” said IUPUI physics Professor John Ross, who vows to help find some grant funding to support Jake and his work…
This is not what Jake’s parents expected from a child whose first few years were spent in silence.
“Oh my gosh, when he was 2, my fear was that he would never be in our world at all,” said Kristine Barnett, 36, Jake’s mother.
“He would not talk to anyone. He would not even look at us.”
RTFA. A delight. Not just for the tale of young Jacob; but, how his parents adapted and learned, experimented with freeing his latent abilities – sometimes regardless of the directions suggested by professional help more inclined to find the right box to put him into.
Great family story from all sides. And a young person I look forward to seeing in a larger picture someday.
Thanks, Mr. Fusion
Autism/vaccine study was an elaborate fraud
A now-retracted British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was an “elaborate fraud” that has done long-lasting damage to public health, a leading medical publication has reported.
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.
“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”
Britain stripped Wakefield of his medical license in May. “Meanwhile, the damage to public health continues, fueled by unbalanced media reporting and an ineffective response from government, researchers, journals and the medical profession,” BMJ states in an editorial accompanying the work…
The now-discredited paper panicked many parents and led to a sharp drop in the number of children getting the vaccine that prevents measles, mumps and rubella. Vaccination rates dropped sharply in Britain after its publication, falling as low as 80% by 2004. Measles cases have gone up sharply in the ensuing years.
In the United States, more cases of measles were reported in 2008 than in any other year since 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 90% of those infected had not been vaccinated or their vaccination status was unknown, the CDC reported.
“But perhaps as important as the scare’s effect on infectious disease is the energy, emotion and money that have been diverted away from efforts to understand the real causes of autism and how to help children and families who live with it,” the BMJ editorial states.
RTFA for a halfway decent job of explaining this crap study. Here’s a link to one of our previous posts.
Dumb enough that people put their own kids at risk; but, they threaten the health of those too young to vaccinate – with their foolishness.
Simple urine test may identify autistic children for early treatment
Children with autism have a different chemical fingerprint in their urine than non-autistic children, according to new research published in the Journal of Proteome Research. The researchers behind the study, from Imperial College London and the University of South Australia, suggest that their findings could ultimately lead to a simple urine test to determine whether or not a young child has autism.
Autism affects an estimated one in every 100 people in the UK. People with autism have a range of different symptoms, but they commonly experience problems with communication and social skills, such as understanding other people’s emotions and making conversation and eye contact.
People with autism are also known to suffer from gastrointestinal disorders and they have a different makeup of bacteria in their guts from non-autistic people.
Today’s research shows that it is possible to distinguish between autistic and non-autistic children by looking at the by-products of gut bacteria and the body’s metabolic processes in the children’s urine. The exact biological significance of gastrointestinal disorders in the development of autism is unknown…
At present, children are assessed for autism through a lengthy process involving a range of tests that explore the child’s social interaction, communication and imaginative skills. Early intervention can greatly improve the progress of children with autism but it is currently difficult to establish a firm diagnosis when children are under 18 months of age, although it is likely that changes may occur much earlier than this.
Bravo! A new beginning – from a new direction.
Another new affordable test that may lessen the economic burden of health care in many nations.
Popular autism diet = no improvement
A popular belief that specific dietary changes can improve the symptoms of children with autism was not supported by a tightly controlled University of Rochester study, which found that eliminating gluten and casein from the diets of children with autism had no impact on their behavior, sleep or bowel patterns.
The study is the most controlled diet research in autism to date. The researchers took on the difficult yet crucial task of ensuring participants received needed nutrients, as children on gluten-free, casein-free diets may eat inadequate amounts of vitamin D, calcium, iron and high quality protein. Unlike previous studies, they also controlled for other interventions, such as what type of behavioral treatments children received, to ensure all observed changes were due to dietary alterations. Past studies did not control for such factors. And although no improvements were demonstrated, the researchers acknowledged that some subgroups of children, particularly those with significant gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms, might receive some benefit from dietary changes.
“It would have been wonderful for children with autism and their families if we found that the GFCF diet could really help, but this small study didn’t show significant benefits,” said Susan Hyman, M.D….principal investigator of the study. “However, the study didn’t include children with significant gastrointestinal disease. It’s possible those children and other specific groups might see a benefit.”
However, that wasn’t the question being asked.
Journal retracts dishonest paper linking autism to vaccines
The research paper that triggered claims linking autism to the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella was formally retracted by the Lancet, the medical journal that published it more than a decade ago.
Following a ruling last week by the General Medical Council that Dr Andrew Wakefield had breached his professional duties, the Lancet said in a statement on its website that he had made false claims in his 1998 paper and concluded: “We fully retract this paper from the published record.”
With Dr Wakefield until now able to boost his credibility by citing the Lancet paper, the journal’s action marks a symbolic step in the saga, which led many parents to refuse the MMR vaccine for their children and sparked a surge in infections and health problems…
Dr Wakefield’s subsequent calls for separate vaccines for the different infections – including an experimental product under development by a company in which he had an interest – came under sharp scrutiny as MMR vaccination rates fell sharply in some parts of the UK, and infections rose…
“The big flaw is that everyone takes the whole system on trust and if trust breaks down, everything collapses,” he said, adding that the Lancet now imposed much tougher peer review on controversial papers, withholding those judged likely to spark public misinterpretation.
How’s that for a back-asswards admission that publication was less subject to demanding standards and scrutiny in the past.
Meanwhile, we’ve had a decade of nutball non-science spin…based on what looked like approval.
Lessons from the vaccine-autism wars, science vs. ignorance
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
Researchers long ago rejected the theory that vaccines cause autism, yet many parents don’t believe them. Can scientists bridge the gap between evidence and doubt?
This week, the open-access journal PLoS Biology investigates why the debunked vaccine-autism theory won’t go away. Senior science writer/editor Liza Gross talks to medical anthropologists, science historians, vaccine experts, social scientists, and pediatricians to explore the factors keeping the dangerous notion alive—and its proponents so vitriolic.
Pediatrician Paul Offit has made it his mission to set the record straight: vaccines don’t cause autism. But he won’t go on Larry King Live—where he could reach millions of viewers—or anyplace celebrity anti-vaccine crusaders like Jenny McCarthy appear. ”Every story has a hero, victim, and villain,” he explains. ”McCarthy is the hero, her child is the victim—and that leaves one role for you.”
When she read that hecklers were issuing death threats to spokespeople who simply reported studies showing that vaccines were safe, anthropologist Sharon Kaufman dropped her life’s work on aging to study the theory’s grip on public discourse. To Kaufman, a researcher with a keen eye for detecting major cultural shifts, these unsettling events signaled a deeper trend. ”What happens when the facts of bioscience are relayed to the public and there is disbelief, lack of trust?” Kaufman wondered. ”Where does that lead us?”
Silent majority comes out for book on vaccines
Daylife/Reuters Pictures
When the letters and e-mails started to pour in, Dr. Paul Offit braced himself. The pediatrician and vaccine inventor is a prominent defender of childhood vaccines, tackling those who have argued that immunizations can cause autism.
His book, “Autism’s False Prophets,” takes on British researcher Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose now-debunked 1998 study in the prestigious Lancet medical journal linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism. It also criticizes organized groups that advise parents to avoid vaccinating their children for fear the vaccines may cause autism.
The issue is at the center of a vociferous and often vicious debate, despite the preponderance of scientific opinion in favor of vaccination.
Offit has endured hate-filled letters, death threats and even a phone call that menaced his children. However, his book was greeted with an outpouring of support from parents of children with autism who had previously remained silent.
“It’s actually been exactly the opposite of what I would have guessed,” Offit said in an interview…
Last week a special U.S. federal vaccine court ruled against three families who claimed vaccines caused autism in their children. Offit hopes the ruling, on top of dozens of scientific reports, may reassure parents whose fears about vaccines have caused a plunge in vaccination rates in developed countries.
As a result, childhood illnesses like measles are making a comeback. More than 1,300 measles cases were reported in England and Wales in 2008, and 197,000 people died globally from measles in 2007.
These numbers frustrate public health officials, who cite study after study showing no link between vaccination and autism.
Every decade there is a new rationalization against vaccination. I don’t know what possesses this particular tinfoil hat crowd other than the anti-intellectual, anti-science propaganda of fundamentalist religions.
When I was a kid, we waited through every winter’s illness season to see who died from measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough or diphtheria – just as we feared polio in the summertime. Vaccinations allow generations since to live without that fear.
Autism v. vaccines? Courts catch up to science!
The Hollywood Star Brigade will also remain unaffected by science and the court
Daylife/Reuters Pictures
A special court ruled Thursday that parents of autistic children are not entitled to compensation in their contention that certain vaccines caused autism in their children.
“I must decide this case not on sentiment, but by analyzing the evidence,” one of the “special masters” hearing the case said in denying the families’ claims, ruling that the families had not presented sufficient evidence to prove their allegations.
The decisions came in three test cases heard in 2007 involving children with autism that their parents contend was triggered by early childhood vaccinations.
The government argued during the 2007 bench trials that the plaintiffs’ claims linking the vaccines with autism are not supported by “good science.”
Likewise, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the Institute of Medicine have found no credible link between vaccinations and autism.
I realize this doesn’t alleviate the suffering of these families or their children; but, neither would have the accepted practice of suing someone, anyone, because something in your life went wrong.
Sometimes there is a responsible party. Sometimes there is a charlatan like Andrew Wakefield who profits from assigning responsibility. Sometimes you have to realize that we don’t know enough about an ailment – yet – to either prevent or cure it. Striking out at the world won’t change that.
