What causes autism? Environmental risks are hard to identify | Hacker News Reader

What causes autism? Environmental risks are hard to identify

slate.com

5 pointscurtis18 comments

I see so much misinformation about diseases that it makes me sad since the public is so misinformed. Go to the website of Dr Perlmutter to get a list of scientific articles about treatment of autism: http://www.drperlmutter.com/learn/studies/?study_tag=autism In short: it is not genetic and treatments without horrible drugs already exist.

Why was this downvoted? Even if you don't believe in alternative modalities the link is actually quite interesting and so far the content presents some intriguing content.

PepeGomez, the other commenter, has made it clear that you're spouting nonsense. He's made it clear that it's a problem of not talking to children enough.

That's not what I said. I said children not being to exposed to language, that is, other people talking. It's a well known thing that if language isn't acquired within a specific period, the window of opportunity closes and it's no longer possible to (fully) learn it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Linguistics

wikipedia only shows mainstream "common" knowledge. Dr Perlmutter refers to published peer-reviewed scientific articles which say that diet and microbiome are important factors and the articles show large improvements with diet change and probiotics, much larger than with drugs. So think again, or read the scientific articles.

Child abuse and neglect.

Children left alone for lengthy times and not being exposed to enough language to learn it within the critical period = autism.

Being raised by parents who are autistic themselves (which guarrantees extreme emotional neglect and abuse) = aspergers.

You ignore the scientific evidence that Dr Perlmutter gives you. Dr Perlmutter refers to a number of published peer-reviewed scientific articles and you simply say it is otherwise.

And the articles show that the microbiome has an important role, and guess what: children inherit a large portion of their microbiome from the mother.

I think you'll find that the other commenter, mkhool, has made it clear that you're spouting nonsense and it's a diet problem.

Ask anybody who works with autistic children. You won't find an autistic child whose parents aren't either mentally ill or autistic themselves.

I'm sorry. I wasn't clear enough.

The point I was really making was that you, him, and a thousand other misinformed idiots raised on a diet of Ted talks and the belief that complex problems can be solved with some kind of snappy single-action magic solution have no idea what you're talking about.

Everything you come up with will have a counter-example and a means to demonstrate that you're talking nonsense, but we're sick of trying to deal with you. You reached your conclusions through something other than reason, so a reasonable discussion on the subject is impossible.

So what hypotheses so far don't have a counter-example? Who exactly is "we"?

You are VERY VERY WRONG.

Imagine being wrong. You are more wrong than that.

As a brother of a autistic person, I know more people that many of us, and is patently false your assertion.

BTW, I'm a twin with my brother. And I'm not autistic. Think about that implication...

This research suggests a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental factors: https://www.autismspeaks.org/node/110641

Scott Alexander [1] allegedly works with autistic patients and has a different impression. My impression is that autism is an epistemologically unsound category, as if biologists had 'flying animal' as a category encompassing some insects, some birds and bats, with flying squirrels and frogs classified "in the flight spectrum".

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/12/against-against-autism-...

That's surely a possibility as well. But it's impossible to decide until medical science improves. Be it autism, depression, obesity, nearsightedness, and so on, medical research is wandering helplessly with different hypotheses being in vogue at different times while having no way to conclusively prove or disprove any of them.

The problem is that medical science is dominated by a particularly insidious misinterpretation of frequentist statistics which makes most medical research for most practical purposes worthles. It goes as follows: A study that looks at one possible cause is, all things being the same, a hundred timess less likely to produce a false positive than a study that looks at a hundred different causes, so we should make studies as specific as possible to avoid false positives.

The error in this reasoning is that while a study that looks at a hundred possible causes is indeed a hundred times more likely to produce a false positive, it also produces a hundred times more data, so the amount of noise is the same. So in an ideal world, a hundred small studies are perfectly equal to one big study, so it shouldn't be such a big deal after all.

But we don't live in an ideal world and studies that don't produce significant results are often shelved, and studies that report results for one possible cause in fact looked at many and report only the most significant result. This makes it impossible to add up results from different studies to get a clearer picture and you only have separate studies pointing at random directions and leading nowhere, with no hope of getting more certain results untilt the way science is done changes.

> But we don't live in an ideal world

What a funny thing for someone to say after they just finished unironically posting

> You won't find an autistic child whose parents aren't either mentally ill or autistic themselves.

You completely misunderstood the first sentence you quoted then.

I urge you to read of few articles that Dr Perlmutter refers to. Only when you see the hard data you will be able to accept that diet and microbiome play a very important role.

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