Vitamin D deficiency in pregnancy is linked to autism traits in the child | Hacker News Reader

Vitamin D deficiency in pregnancy is linked to autism traits in the child

qbi.uq.edu.au

91 pointsclumsysmurf51 comments

Looks like it's at stage two in the science hype cycle. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1174 I'll pay attention when a randomized control study shows that supplementing vitamin D lowers rates of autism.

Be aware that this study is about vitamin D deficiency. It's not start for some crazy health trend. You can go and check you vitamin D levels and if you don't get enough, use supplements to correct the situation.

Can any HNers recommend a cheap and accurate vitamin D test I can do at home? I asked my doctor for a vitamin D test at my last checkup and he warned me that my insurance probably wouldn't pay for it since "many people are asking for one these days without any symptoms of deficiency". Since I had no idea what the lab might end up charging me for it (in the U.S.) I decided against getting the test.

I asked for a vitamin D test on the NHS in the UK. I was not offered one, but I was offered a blood calcium test. Because I had been supplementing already for several months, when I tested normal blood calcium (with normal diet including dairy), this ruled out vitamin D overdose, and I was recommended to continue supplementing. This might be a cheaper option.

If you don't have symptom of illness, it's cheaper to buy a lifetime supply of supplements than worry about getting tested.

Would they cover it if you did have symptoms? If so, here are some vague symptoms to "have" for your doctor: difficulty thinking clearly, bone pain, unexplained fatigue.

In my experience, no. When I was first tested for Vit-D deficiency the test was not covered, period. I had every symptom in the book (largely because I was extremely Vit-D deficient). My insurance even went so far as to relabel it as emergency bloodwork and tried to charge/fine upwards of $3,000 for it. The doctor's office then retracted the claim and just ate the cost, so I ended up paying nothing. The whole affair was absurd.

3k for just a single test? wow glad I am in the UK

The test my doctor recommends is the 25-hydroxy Vitamin D test and I think is under $100 the last time I had one done however a blood sample is needed. I think only a physician can order it for you.

https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003569.htm (25-hydroxy vitamin D test information) http://www.questdiagnostics.com/home/physicians/testing-serv...

Vitamin D deficiency is no joke and as we spend more time indoors we need to pay attention to this. If you search for "Vitamin D deficiency cancer" you will find many sources linking deficiency to cancer and other diseases.

Last time I checked my vitamin D levels (or some precursors/metabolites of) the test was pretty expensive and not covered by my insurance. I asked about the price and was told that the test needs to detect those substances in very low concentrations and thus requires more precise and expensive reagents & equipment.

I recently came across an article discussing the relationship between vitamin D, K, A, magnesium, and calcium levels. I can't vouch for it's accuracy but it does provide a number of references if you want to go further down the rabbit hole.

[1] http://www.precisionnutrition.com/stop-vitamin-d

its accuracy

Just take it.

You need to consciously take a very high dose to have an excess Vit. D amount

"according to some research, the tolerable upper intake level (UL) is 4,000 IU/day for ages 9–71,[51] while other research concludes that, in healthy adults, sustained intake of more than 1250 μg/day (50,000 IU) can produce overt toxicity after several months"

Common supplements are 5ug/10ug per day

You can also take cod-liver oil, like people did in the old days.

That will give you vitamins A and D, and the essential omega-3 fatty acids DHA and EPA.

Yeah, but the utility of taking those other supplements is not well substantiated. That's not to say that the utility of taking vitamin D is very well substantiated either, but at least there is some good evidence that suggests that it is.

Well, as the article shows, we don't know everything about nutrition yet. So, the wisest thing to do might just be to eat what our ancestors ate (if science does not tell us it is harmful of course).

Hope this isn't considered spammy by anyone, I certainly have no incentive (financial or otherwise) to recommend it, but there's a company called "Life Extension" that allows you to order blood tests online.

They email you paperwork, you take that to a local lab and then get your results online. It looks like Vitamin D is $47.

I used it for a while when I was suffering from a health issue that required regular blood tests, since it ended up being cheaper than a doctors visit + co-insurance for the lab fees.

The biggest downside is there's nobody to explain the results to you, although the report they provide does show if you are outside the normal range of whatever they are testing.

http://www.lifeextension.com/vitamins-supplements/blood-test...

I second this. I use Life Extension. However, I've been paying out of pocket. I'm interested if there's a way to get it covered at all.

By the way, this is really just using LabCorp, and you can order similar tests directly via LabCorp. Might be worth price shopping between them, and checking out their different test options.

I've used WellnessFX and been very happy with it. Not sure what cheap means to you but the Baseline Diagnostics only is $198.

https://www.wellnessfx.com/baseline

Here in Canada it is not covered either. I pay $30 each time I want to have it tested.

www.directlabs.com has it for $59 They also run promos time to time. I have no affiliation. Though I would expect this test to be covered as part of your physical but check your insurance etc.

In certain parts of the world (but I would guess not Australia), huge segments of thr population are Vit D deficient

Hypotheses are interesting by themselves. They allow us to collect more evidence to justify expensive randomized control studies in the first place.

It'd be interesting to see if there's a seasonal correlation here - since most of our vitamin D comes from the sun, expectant moms are probably more deficient in the winter. Wonder if third trimester during those months, when there's rapid neurogenesis, leads to an even higher incidence of these traits.

There is correlation at least in Northern countries in Europe.

Somalian children living in Minnesota have a higher rate of autism compared to whites and non whites. They have also noticed this in Stockhom as they also have a lot of Somalian immigrants. Researches have found "The increased prevalence remained and was now between four and five times higher in children of Somali background. A clinical observation was that more than 80%, in addition to autism and learning disability, had a profound hyperactivity." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8749.2010.... People have hypothesized vitamin D could be contributing to this as having darker pigmentation makes it harder to absorb sunlight.

Do they have higher rates of autism than Somalis in Somalia?

likely hard to get good data on that.

Wouldn't we be seeing "hot spots" in darker northern climates and trouble-free zones in sunnier southern locations?

The most compelling linkages I have seen are to certain pesticide / herbicide exposures and pollution exposures.

I live in Washington state and Vitamin D (with Calcium) pills are the norm, routinely prescribed by doctors.

>"hot spots" in darker northern climates

like Europe, Russia, etc. ? In this countries people are bigger (thermodynamics) with bones to carry that weight so the issue with vitamin D seems to be solved somehow there - one obvious solution Nature came up with is color of skin, ie. receptivity to Sun.

Now, if you take people from sunnier location and put them into darker northern one you'll get a "hot spot":

https://www.vitamindcouncil.org/new-research-somali-immigran...

https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2008/07/mysterious-...

Btw, notice that in Minnesota they blame it on the bunch of immunizations:

"Harrington suggested that differences in the genetic make-up of Africans put them more at risk for developing autism than other immigrant groups, and noted that refugee women and children must undergo numerous immunizations.

(According to school data, the percentage of Hmong children and Latino children in Minneapolis public schools with autism is not as high as Somali children with autism.)"

while in Sweden :

"A Swedish newspaper published an article last week about that country's Somali population and its high prevalence of autism. The story described a autism study that focused on Somalis. Doctors hypothesized that the high rates of autism in Somali children born in Sweden is due to the lower levels of sunlight and vitamin D immigrants get in Sweden compared with Somalia, a country near the equator. Dark skin that's covered up and a diet that doesn't include fatty fish limits absorption of vitamin D as well, according to the doctors. "

In Minnesota, the Somali immigrants allegedly never saw autism until they came here, and they get a lot of it now.

They call it the "Minnesota Disease".

I also once read that Cable television penetration rates were correlated with autism as well...

Well, to be perfectly fair, we never "saw" it before 1943, either. I'm not trying to be flippant, our society is set up in a way to diagnose cases of autism, and it is reasonable to suspect that the increased rates of diagnosis are not all caused by increased rates of the condition.

I read somewhere a while back that said that the reason for rising autism rates in the 90's/00's was because we broadened the definition of autism.

There's also a lot of denial of autism in the Somali immigrant community, with traditional supernatural explanations of autistic behaviors.

"New research states that 330,000 lives could be saved by optimizing vitamin D levels through sun exposure.[1] That compares to 450,000 deaths linked to tobacco. This is to be expected, since a Swedish study demonstrated that over a 20- year period, women who avoided the sun were TWICE AS LIKELY TO DIE OF ANY CAUSE, as women who were sun-seekers,and the researchers stated the following: “Nonsmokers who avoided sun exposure had a life expectancy similar to smokers in the highest sun exposure group, indicating that avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for death of a similar magnitude as smoking.”

Citing: Lindqvist PG, Epstein E, Landin-Olsson M, Ingvar C, Nielsen K, Stenbeck M, Olsson H. Avoidance of sun exposure is a risk factor for all-cause mortality: results from the Melanoma in Southern Sweden cohort. J Intern Med. 2014 Jul;276(1):77-86

So why aren't we replacing window glass (especially in hospitals!) with UV transmitting OP4 plastics?

Correlation is not causation.

Autism is genetic and an autistic parent is more likely to stay inside most of the time.

Staying inside most of the time can lead to vitamin D deficiency.

If one biological parent is autistic, there is a 50% chance their child will also be autistic.

From my quick skim of the article, I think this is the key part:

> These results imply that, after correcting for confounding variables (see notes under Table 3), those who were deficient at time of birth had on average 0.06 point higher gender-weighted SRS score, which corresponds to an increase of approximately one fourth of the s.d. (s.d. of the SRS in the total sample=0.23). When treating SRS as a dichotomous outcome, that is, comparing children with SRS scores above the suggested cutoff with children below the suggested cutoff, those who were vitamin D deficient at mid-gestation were 3.8 times more likely to be screened positive than those who were vitamin D sufficient at mid-gestation (see also Supplementary Table 4).

(SRS is the Social Responsiveness Scale)

> We would not recommend more sun exposure, because of the increased risk of skin cancer.

Broad spectrum lamps could be useful here. Exercising your body's natural ability to produce vitamin D seems like a good idea. There are also other well documented psychological benefits to controlled fullspectrum light exposure.

* http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/seasonal-affective-disord...

* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181775/

I though vitamin D was produced via UVB rays? How would a lamp without UV allow the body to produce vitamin d?

https://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=uvb

Ironically, the thing we've been told to cut out of our diet for the last 50 years might be what we've needed all along.

Vitamin D is fat soluble and generated by sunlight. Lard from a factory raised hog is going to have almost 0 IUs of Vitamin D. However, if you raise hogs on pasture with access to regular sunlight, their lard becomes highly enriched with Vitamin D.

We raise hogs and render our own lard and use it to cook with instead of fruit or seed oils. I've no empirical data as to the efficacy of such cooking, but I will say no one in our family has ever struggled with anything remotely resembling SAD, even living north of the 45 parallel.

What does 'linked' word mean here?

I see that verb in biological/medical articles very often and it always makes me think that researchers are very unsure about the results. It is like 'We believe there is a correlation, but we don't know for sure'.

Am I wrong?

I agree with you, the effect size is relatively small, here's the main table:

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/mp201...

Beta is the effect size here, which ranges from 0.07 to 0.03, not exactly high. The p-values may be tiny but that's just a measure of the likelihood of getting these effect sizes by chance.

Now is 0.06 a large growth for SRS? Let's have a look at the scale of that value:

>The SRS-A mean total score was highest in the ASD sample [autism disorder] (M = 78.5, SD = 13.7), intermediate in the CLIN [other disorders] (M = 63.4, SD = 15.4), and lowest in the TD [typically developing, 'normal ] (M = 55.5, SD = 9.9)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3425739/

So you have about 10 points on average between these groups, an effect size of 0.06 doesn't seem extreme to me (but it is nevertheless linked!)

it's a measured correlation.

To extrapolate a bit too far; Basement dwellers beget basement dwellers.

Serious thought: Can these traits be considered (de)evolutionary after 2 generations? Will more wealthy bloodlines become better due to improved diet and care? Do we need to start incentivising going outside more often? Or just scale back the demonization of sunlight exposure? Or do we just start a social program mailing out sunlamps as a preventitive measure?

No, Vitamin D supplements are cheap and plentiful.

Too far indeed. Please don't include these things in your comments here, they violate the guidelines for being uncivil.

http://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not sure that mentioning epigenetics, etc, is really going "too far." It's not unlikely, and epigenetics isn't exactly speculative science anymore. Yes, the comment is flip, and eschews the proper (but quite recent) scientific terms but it is very closely aligned with the science. There's no shortage of evidence of better longevity for the privileged, and better health, for example, although better nutrition from higher-value foods is a more usual speculative cause of this mentioned by researchers.

I am from Southern India (typically darker skin) and have noticed 6 cases of ASD (non-verbal and very basic or non-existent social interaction) amongst friends and relatives. 3 of these cases come from the same family (mine) and the other 3 are unrelated. All 6 were born either in the US or UK. All 4 families don't have previous occurrence of ASD or similar symptoms (non-verbal or awkward social skills would be easy to pick up).

Since reading/experiencing a family member with ASD, I do see some ASD characteristics and behaviors in some other family members residing in India but they somehow have been able to overcome that and lead a typical life. Can't explain why there aren't more severe cases (in which case, they would've been reported) and if more sunlight or exposure to a lot more people/social situations is helping correct it.

There was an Indian news article that reported a higher incidence of ASD in NRIs (non-resident Indians). With Desk jobs becoming more prevalent, Vitamin D deficiency is showing up in India as well. Given my small #samples, it does seem like something is triggering more severe ASD in people with dark-skin in countries with less sunlight. Increase in incidences of ASD, can be attributed to its broadened definition but there seem to be other minor reasons (Vitamin D being one) which need more research instead of dismissal. Current incidence levels of 1 in 68 (boys - 1 in 42, girls - 1 in 189) is plain crazy and needs more attention.

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