Nah, it was aspartame.
There’s not anything else - the rate of autism hasn’t increased substantially in this time period. It’s all in the diagnosis. We now classify more disorders as autism spectrum disorders, and we now are far more likely to diagnose borderline cases as having an autistic spectrum disorder.
If you apply today’s criteria to older people who would meet the criteria, you’d see a similar rate of autism diagnosis amongst all age groups - there’s no sudden recent surge in autism that we need to find a cause for.
Got a study for that? I’m very interested to see if the new diagnostic procedures would indeed show every 100 people having autism.
I’m headed out the door, but a quick search provided this page on science based medicine. Skimming over it, it seemed to talk about the diagnostic criteria issue.
I don’t have the url in front of me, but there have been recent studies that show as the rate of autism has “gone up” the rate of children being labeled as retarded has gone down at the almost the same rate. The rationale is that autistic people used to be labeled has having subnormal IQs because they weren’t properly diagnosed.
It is very unclear as to whether or not there really has been a true increase in autism or instead an increase in the rate of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses. This study out of Australia gives you a flavor of where things are at.
Thing is that there is no clear line between black and white (autistic and normal), but instead a whole host of grays from frankly autistic to odd to normal with some unusual characteristics or even normal with just some characteristics that are actually useful especially in today’s world (better at rules based analysis, math, etc. … often referred to as “the broad autistic phenotype”) and all points in between. The increased awareness of autism, the understanding that early identification can lead to services that make a real difference, and the availability of services for those so identified, all lead to more labeling, and most of it not inappropriate. We’ll draw the line more to one side than the other if we believe it will possibly help some people and that missing the chance to label it early may cause harm. Senor Beef’s link explains this in clear detail and does a good job presenting the case that there probably are not really more cases of autism, just more placing kids under that particular diagnostic umbrella. Still, it is hard to say as a matter of established fact that there is no true increase at all, even if one can fairly confidently state there is no real “epidemic”.
If there is a true increase of any degree, and there may be some degree of one, then an intriguing hypothesis is Baron-Cohen’s assortative mating hypothesis (pdf) which basically notes that men and women who have the broad autistic phenotype are finding each other more often in today’s world - through connections on-line and in work environments, and having children together who have a higher chance of getting a critical mass of at-risk genes that in lower doses only predispose to becoming a financial analyst or programmer or engineer …
Another one is a speculation that lower prenatal levels of Vitamin D play a role in those genetically at risk.
There are lots of speculative ideas. The speculation that has been disproven the most conclusively however is the blaming the vaccines. As has been pointed out: multiple big studies all showing the same thing - it aint the shots.
This is true.
Here’s the study referenced:
So basically most states have seen a corresponding decline in the diagnosis of mental retardation and learning disabilities just as they’re seeing vastly increased numbers of kids being diagnosed as autistic.
Makes sense, right? Broaden the diagnostic criteria and you get more cases of an illness.
It’s a pity this study has not been given the kind of worldwide attention that one saw from Andrew Wakefield’s far shoddier research.
“Research”? To associate that word with the fiction that he created as a paid consultant does the word a significant disservice, even when coupled with the modifier. Faking data cannot count as even shoddy research. “Manslaughter”, that word I can accept.
There’s also some concern (or at least was - my info is probably outdated, since it’s anecdotal) about the DPT vaccine. There can, apparently, be a genetic predisposition that leads to serious illness/death associated with it. I know a family who lost a child because of this. I won’t identify them for confidentiality purposes, but I would recommend anyone interested checking out A Shot in the Dark ( book) in which their particular situation was described.
I’m not an anti-vax - but I do perform risk management for a living. Just taking everything into account. Vaccinate your damned kids unless there’s a good reason not to.
Here’s a URL with charts for MR and ASD prevalence in California - as the second goes up, the first goes down http://photoninthedarkness.com/?p=158
A Shot in the Dark was co-written by Barbara Loe Fisher. Ms. Fisher’s website is full of bad information. Her organization actively lobbies against vaccines and provides misleading information on vaccine side effects to the public. I wouldn’t trust anything she writes.
Vaccines are not (and never will be) risk free despite Ms. Fisher’s demands.
They’re spoiled. If they’d seen children die of polio and measles, they’d be lining up so fast you’d think they had new iPhones in the vaccination clinic.
What breaks my heart is seeing people like Oprah give Jenny McCarthy a platform, considering poor black children in places like Mississippi benefited so much from the celebrities of the day like Elvis throwing his weight behind vaccination outreach.
Penn and Teller’s take. Two parter, recent “Bullshit” episode, watch to the end.
My theory is that it’s a brain disease. Something that strikes very randomly, affects a certain age range usually (onset at about the same time…) and sometimes seems mildly hereditary, like it could be passed on in families…
There are dozens of problems like this, affecting the brain - Parkinsons, Alzheimers, Autism and Aspergers, maybe even Type I Diabetes as an infection. Remember the early days of AIDS? When they knew what they were looking for, it still took 6 months and 2 competing teams to find a virus specimen. Maybe what we are looking for is sufficiently rare that it’s hard to find.
Descriptions of some autism onset I read said “he was perfectly fine happy alert baby until X months and then suddenly he stopped responding.”
Similarly, there were a statistically anomolous significant number of people (5 or 8 IIRC) who worked on the same set in Vancouver as Michael J Fox in his early years, who also had early-onset Parkinsons. Sounds like something somewhat contagious.
Nice to have a theory … thing is theories should have something to do with the facts. Autism is primarily genetic, not something that “seems mildly hereditary” and not “random”.
The best way to determine this is through twin studies, comparing the rates of autism and of the “broad autistic phenotype” in monozygotic (“identical”) and dizygotic (“fraternal”) twins. Sample sets of results:
From Britain:
And this one from America that showed how the broader phenotype is within the gene pool.
No not contagious. You can’t “catch teh Autism”.
This was stated last year by the European Medicines Agency
The CHMP decided that, based on the information obtained with the mock-up vaccine and the information provided on the strain change, the benefits of Pandemrix are greater than its risks for the prophylaxis of influenza in the officially declared H1N1 pandemic situation. The Committee recommended that Pandemrix be given marketing authorisation.
Pandemrix has been authorised under ‘Exceptional Circumstances’. This means that it has not been possible to obtain full information about the pandemic vaccine. Every year, the European Medicines Agency will review any new information that may become available and this summary will be updated as necessary.
What information is still awaited for Pandemrix?The company that makes Pandemrix will collect information on the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, and submit this to the CHMP for evaluation.
And after today’s meeting
I still think that you cannot go on vaccinating the whole continent after a brief test (4 months).
Is there also a distinction made between “autism” where a child/adult is virtually non-responsive, and Aspergers where the person may be high-functioning but unable to pick up on social/interpersonal cues?
I think at this point vaccines and their effects are as close to a known thing in medicine as we’re likely to get (and yup, still not 100% effective or 100% safe - neither is walking out your front door).
I think that’s one of the hallmarks of junk science - giving the opinions of someone like Jenny McCarthy a comparable weight to hundreds of thousands of actual scientists, doctors, and researchers. Yes, there is a con side to this debate, but Jenny McCarthy isn’t it. And if no legitimate researchers and doctors are willing to take the con position, maybe there’s a good reason for that.
Yes.
But as alluded to in the last of my cites, there is a very wide range of severity and the spread is not “discrete” or quantum if you will, you cannot draw clean lines between one and the other - there is a gradient all the way from from severe dysfunction to just not being “neurotypical”, whether that is Asperger or other mild variants that do not handicap in any significant way (and may even have some positive aspects for function in some circumstances). And there are different sorts of social dysfunction - from aloofness and indifference, really not desiring social interactions, to those who hunger for social contact and are frustrated as a result of their having no ability to meet that need effectively and fall apart when they try and fail, to those who will be interested enough to allow themselves to be approached, to those who make odd approaches, to those who have learned how to make approaches as a memorized item and more or less mimic natural social skills. Lorna Wing did a good job discussing the range here. She, years ago, tried to classify the social dysfunction more or less according to those types:
Her typology never really seemed to take off into common use, perhaps make the types seem more discrete than they are, and misses the group that really wants to interact but falls apart because they can’t do it, who don’t understand even what that unmet need is, just that it hurts to not have it met … but the more interesting bit is that at the time she created it, in the late 70s, the “most common” type was the “aloof” one - which of course is the more classic autism - currently that is not the case among those labelled - by far the biggest group is the “active but odd” one, and of course the “over formal” commonly among the self and arm chair diagnosed. Very few currently labelled are that “aloof” type.
Nope, at least not for the “one in X kids have autism” numbers.
The commericials that talk about how many kids have autism are done by Autism Speaks, which on their website says
Which doesn’t answer your question, BUT if you look up articles about the 2007 study, you find the director of mental health speaking about the numbers in several articles like this one
So, the numbers obviously include classical autism, high functioning autism, PDD, and Asperger’s, and there is a wide range of functionality between them.