Autism detectable in brain long before symptoms appear
bbc.com
bbc.com
I first suspected he was different because he didn't locked eyes with my wife when she was breastfeeding (I have 3 older kids to compare). He learned to walk in time, but he was not pointing to the things he wanted (instead used to grab me by the arm and use it like a tool), and he was unwilling to look at something we were pointing like a neurotipical kid does. I saw many other signs, but my wife was always in denial until he was 2.5 and I showed her some videos of autistic behavior on Youtube.
Long story short, it almost ruined my marriage (my wife felt like I was torturing her by sending her material about autism). I don't know why I knew more about autism than the pediatrician, but the subject always interested me.
My advice is: if you are suspicious, get your son diagnosed by a specialized neuropediatrician (do not waste time with someone who is not well prepared to diagnose autism).
Son was diagnosed at age seven, daughter at age fifteen. Generally it can be harder to pick up with girls. They tend to be better mimics and it can present much more subtly. I really wish we had figured it out sooner with our daughter – she has had a lot of issues with anxiety and school refusal for the last few years, and I wonder if had had the necessary information earlier like we did with our son, how much of a difference it would have made. (Although both are autistic, they present so differently it was not obvious.)
So I reiterate scardine’s exhortation to seek a diagnosis and early treatment if you suspect there may be autism at play. There’s a steep learning curve to getting your head around it and figuring out how to best help yourself and/or your loved ones, but you read hacker news, so you’re up for the challenge. Find (or start) a local community support group – it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to hack it alone.
Someone asked me then to share if I had experiences with AIT - and I replied here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657973
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_integration_training#...
But the page advocates for a bunch of other things, from useless (Homeopathy) to harmful (claiming that Autism is related to Heavy Metal Toxicity, although the link is broken).
It's unfortunate that autism is a field where quackery of all kinds is widespread.
Did you read my comment with my experience? What were your thoughts on my experience and explanation?
Just took a quick look at on Wikipedia link you made to the section "Insufficient efficacy and evidence basis" - they likely should update that with links to the other clinical trials.
The other part to AIT is that in order for it to have a greater impact you have to also remove/fix other factors that could be overwhelming the body - food sensitivities, unknown allergies, digestive problems, etc - which people then of course can not then 100% claim that the sound therapy aspect had an impact. For me, I know it did because the result was dramatic - it wasn't placebo. That's my qualitative data to add to the mix. I'm not sure what process or protocol that research reference in the Wiki page on AIT used, don't have time to thoroughly review it and I'm not an audiologist or trained in all aspects of AIT either; my audiologist is also a naturopathic and homeopathic doctor - so his breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding of health systems of the body would give him better insight into what's important and what isn't. I welcome the skepticism though.
Did this work for you or someone you know? Their intro video only states that it "strengthens and balances your hearing system", which is too fuzzy for me to reason about. Thanks!
Here's one such link: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...
I'm still interested in hearing your experiences, but I'm more skeptical.
AIT lists 28+ clinical trails on their website - http://www.aitinstitute.org/ait_clinical_studies.htm
Anyway, I replied to your original comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657973
It helped me in part with hyperacusis - hypersensitivity to sound. One theory relating to how problems can start is from painful ear infections. Sound causes pain and then the mechanism in the brain that wants to keep track of and avoid pain starts to abnormally develop associating pain with sound - so you can avoid it. ADD/ADHD, depression ... all seems reasonable to stem from this - if you're constantly focusing on sound or attention drawn by sound then you can't concentrate on thought or other, likewise, that prolonged state could lead to depression. There's quite the spectrum of what can come from it, also depending when the developmental delay occurs.
The training/therapy is 10 days over 2 weeks (5 days per week), 2 sessions per day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, each session being 28 to 33 minutes long - using specially modified oscillating sound based on your audiogram.
The first time I did AIT was in my early 20s. The audiologist I went to, who is also a naturopath and homeopath, set me up across from a ~7 year old boy with his mother. He had the 'zombie' autistic look - no expression on his face, arms fixed by his. His mother would point to the chair and tell him to sit, and he'd go and sit - so he could understand. In the boy's case, I had asked the audiologist - he explained to me that the boy was able to receive input but he was blocked from outputting. What I observed over that initial week, along with the benefit I personally had from doing the sessions, sold me completely on the subtle power and benefit of it. At one point within the first week the boy start saying single words and then a few words together. He wasn't just saying the words though, he was YELLING them. Why? He had never spoken before so he hadn't learned volume control yet. The second week on the Monday he was so excited for the session that he ran into the living room and his seat without taking his shoes off. He sat quietly, with a huge smile on his face, just flipping through a kid's book - I presume reading it.
AIT should be mainstream and helping that happen is part of my life's work - that I at least hope I'll eventually be able to integrate into my plans.
You can actually do an audiogram to check for an imbalance in hearing as a diagnostic tool - it's a good way to verify if someone is likely to benefit from AIT.
Currently audiologists during a hearing test just check to make sure you can hear well-enough. Can you hear at 15 decibels in both ears? Great. It is simple however to check for an imbalance in hearing. You check instead of how LOW of a decibel you can hear in each ear. For example, if in your right ear you can hear the 1000 Hz frequency at 15 dBs and in your left ear you can hear at 12 dBs, then there's an imbalance of 3 dBs. Your brain and body is a system wanting to find homeostasis - so it should correct for this and there shouldn't be a difference. That can tell us that something is going on. In fact, at certain frequencies if there is an imbalance you can accurately predict the behaviour of people -- if there is an imbalance at 1000 Hz then that person will 100% of the time be depressed, medication won't help them, nor will talk therapy -- they are stuck in a fixed state. There are at least a handful of other frequencies that if there's an imbalance showing then there are the predictable behaviours, and that can be used as a guide for talk therapy - along with doing AIT to help the brain become unlocked/malleable again. It's quite fascinating.
There's another sound therapy method called the Tomatis Method. The difference between the two is simple. If the developmental delay or problem occurred while the child was in the mother's womb, then Tomatis method is needed -- it focuses on frequencies that the body/ears/brain hears while in the womb. If it's anytime after birth then AIT is supposedly sufficient. The Tomatis method is a much longer period of time listening - I believe something like a minimum of 3 hours of listening per week over 3 months. There is a book that's out of print that I've never read, though I've been meaning to for a decade now - called Hearing Equals Behaviour - the audiologist told me about it.
The audiologist also had told me to stop eating wheat, as he had seen the progression of what I was dealing with caused by wheat; interestingly enough wheat is linked to childhood ear infections as well - I'm not sure if it's related to that there's an opiate in wheat, however I am very affected by wheat and have avoided it since then.
Here's a provider's website that has a simplified pre-care questionnaire, for both children and for how symptoms present for adults:
For children - http://www.aithelps.com/auditory_care.php For adults - http://www.aithelps.com/auditory_care_adults.php
I hope this helps fill in some gaps to the vague marketing speak of "strengthens and balances your hearing system" - although apparently it does help the ear muscles flex more properly - I suppose like helping get it out of a spasm state. That seems to be easier for people to grasp as a concept, though you're right it doesn't really explain the value of it.
Feel free to email if you have any questions: matt - at - engn - com
So many of the studies (http://www.aitinstitute.org/ait_clinical_studies.htm) seem to have small sample sizes or other issues (e.g. some have no control group). I'd love to see a large, well designed study to convincingly show the scientific validity or lack thereof of AIT, at least for people on the Autism Spectrum.
Draw your own conclusions from the studies that exist and the reviews. Based on those, to me, it doesn't sound promising.
Edit: typo, small content changes
Did you read my comment explaining my experience and what I know about AIT? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that qualitative data.
What I'd be curious about is having someone who's experienced with AIT, a practitioner and has deep domain knowledge, to see how they would counteract the information in articles like the one you posted.
I also always have questions for professionals/audiologists and organizations that are skeptical of AIT. I wonder if they have a sound (pun intended) explanation for why some people can have a diagnosable imbalance in their hearing, whereas others don't; I explain what I mean by hearing imbalance if you read my longer comment I linked to above.
Edit: Added and changed a few things.
No one, when they got older, would think they have been diagnosed with it. My oldest still walks on his tip toes at 24, but he is a senior in college and is in the National Guard. They both had nightmare of a childhood prior to coming to my house.
I have worked for several years as a TSS as a second job and the earlier you can get therapy started the better the 18+ outcomes will be. Don't wait till they are older to see if they will grow out of it.
PS - If you have had a bad TSS experience or any other worker with your child just request a new one and learn what approach you are using. Parents are the number on expert on their own child and make yourself into the best expert you can be.
It's not a problem, of course, I'm just curious (and secretly annoyed, but that's my problem)
It was the pediatric dentist saying something at age 4 that made us realize we need to get him checked out (even thought my mother-in-law had been mentioning the lack of eye contact for some time), and he gave the exact same advice you did. Go to someone who knows autism.
We went to a development psychologist and that was when we both realized. My son is now in a PAC (preschool autism class) and getting the help he needs, and we are learning a lot too.
I cannot imagine this will see widespread adoption outside of research. MRI scans remain expensive and many MRIs have waiting lists at hospitals. Even today, they regularly use less safe technology (e.g. CTs) because they're less expensive and there will be more available.
There's no safety reason why you shouldn't do this. MRIs are darn near harmless. It is just an economic issue with gaining time on an MRI to discover information which may not change the overall outcome for the child (pediatricians are getting better and better at detecting early signs of autism).
Heck, if MRIs were readily available they'd quickly replace ultrasound during pregnancy (since MRIs are likely safer and superior given that they better represent depth). But alas, a MRI costs up to $1m for a "basic" one and up to $3m for a fMRI, and that's ignoring the space/training/power utilisation issues.
> they'd quickly replace ultrasound during pregnancy
Since scan time goes up with detail, and babies are really squirmy, it would be interesting to see how a quick-scan (low resolution) MRI compares with ultrasound quality.
But ultrasound destroys MRI in terms of portability, availability, and cost: just wheel in the cart, apply some goo, and there's the baby.
Perhaps more serious situations should use MRI more often instead of diagnostic ultrasound.
Motion in general is harder.
So we think that we can get to that future where people pick MRI based on application and not cost or availability.
I'm not in the medical field, but I really believe the future of cancer medicine will strongly lean towards prevention and early detection, as opposed to just cure.
After a bit of reseach I discovered it's a false promise. A lot of people have benign lumps and growths they can carry around for a lifetime without any trouble, and while MRIs are quite safe biopsies are not. If you don't have a reason to think you might have cancer, i.e. the MRI is a screening tool and not being used for a diagnosis, the very small chance you'll die of complications from unnecessary biopsies outweighs the very small chance you'll save your life by discovering a treatable malignant growth.
At least, that was the state of the art 7-8 years ago.
This always seemed to me a terrible indictment of how medicine is practiced. Knowing that, do you have to chase down every lump your screening finds? Can you not consider the benefits of investigating further based on the dangers of doing so, the risk factors the patient has, maybe even what you see in successive scans over time?
I am not a doctor, but there seems something unhealthy about a system in which you are advised to avoid learning information about yourself in order to avoid treatment.
One dilemma I've been thinking about recently is that there's an unfortunate burden put on care providers due to litigation that results in increased cost - the provider or radiologist that sees a "maybe" or a "shadow" on an image has to order a biopsy just to protect themselves from being sued on the off 1% chance that the thing becomes a serious health concern. In an environment where consumers evaluated their medicine based on value/$ they would be further dissuaded from a biopsy, but in America the nature of medical insurance disincentives this sort of cost analysis skepticism.
It's hard to resolve becuse it's not even about money. It may be the doctor who is blaming himself.
So it's not that they can't act with sense and restraint with respect to risk. They clearly can.
With respect to breast cancer specifically, they told me in school that finding it early improved your odds, and the earlier the better, and if you really wanted to do the right thing, you'd physically examine yourself looking for lumps on a monthly basis. That didn't seem unreasonable - and yet when something more accurate and objective is available, it's to be avoided out of a fear of unnecessary biopsies?
Something strange is going on.
That's not the current advice. Current advice is that women become aware of what's normal for their breasts, and look for certain specific changes and not the vaguely described "lumps".
http://www.nhs.uk/chq/pages/1740.aspx?CategoryID=60&SubCateg...
> and yet when something more accurate and objective is available
Is it more accurate? Mammograms are sensitive, but have a high false positive rate, especially for younger women.
(All the sites I can find report sensitivity and false positive rates as percentages, which is a terrible way to report this information.)
https://ww5.komen.org/BreastCancer/AccuracyofMammograms.html
> Overall, the sensitivity of mammography is about 84 percent [9]. This means mammography correctly identifies about 84 percent of women who truly have breast cancer.
> The more mammograms a woman has, the more likely she will have a false positive result that will require follow-up tests. The chance of having a false positive result after 10 yearly mammograms is about 50-60 percent [22-24].
http://www.breastcancer.org/symptoms/understand_bc/statistic...
> In 2017, an estimated 255,180 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S., along with 63,410 new cases of non-invasive (in situ) breast cancer.
Ann, a 45 year old woman, goes for a mammogram. It returns a positive result. What are the chances that Ann has breast cancer? (Scarily lots of doctors can't answer this question if the information is presented as percentages. See Gerd Gigerenzer's book Reckoning with risk for many examples.)
https://www.cancer.gov/types/breast/hp/breast-screening-pdq
> Magnitude of Effect: In the randomized controlled trials (RCTs), for women aged 40 to 74 years, screening with mammography has been associated with a 15% to 20% relative reduction in mortality from breast cancer.[1] Absolute mortality benefit for women screened annually for 10 years is approximately 1% overall, ranging from 4 per 10,000 women who start screening at age 40 years to 50 per 10,000 women who start at age 50 years.[2] Based on the 25-year follow-up from the Canadian National Breast Screening Study (CNBSS), an RCT of breast cancer screening,[3] there is some uncertainty about the magnitude of benefit of mammography in the present day.
The problem is this: How do you when to investigate further and when not to? Unless you can come up with a way to make that choice without just rolling dice, you're not really doing any better.
> ... the risk factors the patient has, maybe even what you see in successive scans over time?
Aside from perverse incentives as mentioned by someone else, there may also be a risk from the scan itself (as in breast cancer screening, e.g.). There's also secondary effects from a positive scan like anxiety before being able to confirm or reject a diagnosis -- this has known health effects. The confirmation itself may have associated risks, etc.
It's far from clear that the benefits outweigh the risks[1], so it seems like overkill to call this an indictment of medicine.
(I should also add that in e.g. breast cancer women who are known to be at risk -- there's specific genes which carry very high risk (BRCA1, BRCA2) and other genetic factors with high penetrance.)
[1] This is also something that many in the medical profession acknowledge, see for example [2] where there's a load of material on breast cancer, specifically.
We do a lot of research scans on healthy volunteers. You scan certain areas with some trepidation. Scanning the liver of a 50 year old is a great way to find yourself in a world of 'incidental finding' paperwork.
I'm imagining new technology here.
You'd take the first scan as a baseline. Whatever lumps you have are assumed harmless. Then you track the diffs from there on.
I assume that, at least after collecting experience, we can learn to tell the bad growths from the ignorable.
It seems only logical that occasionally there would be something detected which is unambiguously cancer. The ones that are ambiguous, we could simply monitor without taking action on.
If having more information about the state of your health is putting you in danger, then the medical system is broken. It's as simple as that.
I've wondered why there are no MRIs using high temperature super conductors yet, it seems like such an obvious way to cut costs (as you don't need the extreme cryogenics).
High T super conductors will be very interesting in the next decade, I think, but right now there are a few issues that I'm aware of:
1) The high T super conductors are almost all crystals, not ductile metals. This means it can be very difficult to form coils or other structures out of them.
2) High T super conductors generally can't withstand as high a magnetic field as the lower T super conductors. I'm not sure how practical a concern this is for MRI.
The benefit of High T super conductors is that you switch from using liquid helium as your cryogen to liquid nitrogen. This is a major simplification, but we're not all the way to room temp yet, unfortunately.
It's not exactly $20, but I'd hardly call it prohibitive.
"It also does not require intravenous contrast material (dye) or sedation."
http://www.utswmedicine.org/stories/articles/year-2016/fetal...
Infants are harder:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/499273_11
My daughter had to have a second, sedated MRI because she moved too much during her first one.
My 1 yo son needs a scan every 3 months and the hospital had to figure a better way to scan him so as to avoid sedation. They finally settled on ultrasound: faster, risk free and precise enough once you know what you are looking for.
When you have seen a few done wrong you disagree with this. They have an inherent potential for death and injury and incidents are frequent, unlike US. Then there is the whole implant safety and contrast safety side of things.
People won't be replacing pregnancy scans with MR any time soon, and the cost of the machine is not the primary reason for this. They scan too slowly and pregnant women aren't that keen on lying still for ages. It's sometimes even unsafe to encourage extended periods of lying supine. US is just too cheap and readily available.
Source: I do MR scans.
My broad conclusion from this is that ASD is a condition caused by lots of different factors with common symptoms.
This makes treatments tough as ASD caused by oxidative stress would respond badly to treatments that work great on ASD caused by reductive stress for example (eg ASD symptoms that seem to get 'better' when taking paracetamol vs ASD made worse by it).
Thus when treatments are tried across the population you get odd results if you're not sub-dividing the groups into likely etiology, I've tried to look for statistically significant sets taking this into account.
The key dysfunctional system in most ASD seems to be the balance between the excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters GABA and Glutamate.
The two broad groups for this appear to reflect 'classical' autism, ie same from birth vs 'regressive' ASD, for example secondary to mitochondrial dysfunction where there is a sudden loss of ability.
For the former, a common cause appears to be GABA dysfunction, which the blog epiphanyasd.blogspot.com does a great job pulling together the research on.
In this case GABA doesn't flip to inhibitory from excitatory at birth and this could show up in brain scans for this subset of children with ASD..
The treatment options are interesting in this regard, but the 'safest' trial to check this dysfunction I've found is micro-dosage clonazepam (40mcg), which is already prescribed to children with anxiety (at 500-1000mcg doses). At this subclinical dosage, it should have no impact unless there is a dysfunction, but if it does (which it has in several families I know), then the research into other drugs that could treat this dysfunction becomes far more interesting (eg current trials in France by Ben Ari and Lemmonier on bumetanide).
I remember reading in 'The Brain the Changes Itself' that brain scan studies have observed that the brains of people with ASD do not differentiate between different auditory frequencies well. The way it is described in the book is that as infants develop, the part of the brain that processes sound starts to more selectively 'light up' as we 'learn' different frequencies, like someone becoming more precise when playing a single note on a piano-keyboard. However, it was apparently observed that the entire 'keyboard' lights up for people with ASD, regardless of the (audible) frequency.
I've always wondered about this. The author put forward an interesting theory about sensory over-stimulation in ASD sufferers, but it sounded kinda speculative to me. Did you come across this in your research? And if you did, do you think there's anything to?
"I don't remember much from before I could talk. The memories I do have are brief and disconnected from one another. I remember focusing intently on an object, such as a crayon or a piece of wire (you know mom, those twisties you use for the garbage) and being able to focus intently on that item, to the exclusion of everything else. I remember thinking that people could read my mind, thinking that they knew exactly what I wanted. I can even remember hearing and understanding some words but not understanding that they were an attempt to communicate. Hearing a sound from an air conditioning vent means the air conditioner is on, but it does not mean the air conditioner wants to engage me socially. It was not that I did not care about what they said, but rather that I did not know that they were trying to say anything to me. I vaguely recall interpreting human words, from family and teachers alike, in a similar manner. "
(from Triumphs in Early Autism Treatment )
Full disclosure - the mom mentioned above is also the founder of an Autism-related business; http://www.oaiautism.com/.
I don't recall a particular "aha" moment, but then, I'm only two years older than her, so I might simply not have been paying attention.
Part of the issue was that this was in the late 80's, and diagnoses were much, much less common then.
If you're curious, the book I referenced, which includes a chapter written by my mother, is at https://www.amazon.com/Triumphs-Early-Autism-Treatment-Cipan... .
You can find my email address if my profile if you'd like to contact me that way. Also, your English was good; you've no need to apologize.
In high school, I used to complain to my mum that I couldn't hear my school friends when we chatted on the bus home. So naturally she took me to have a hearing test. It turns out that I have unusually acute hearing (and this was confirmed later in life when I took another hearing test; when I came out of the booth the tech actually said to me 'I can't believe you heard some of those tones!').
In hindsight it's pretty obvious what was happening: I could hear my friends just fine but I couldn't comprehend what they were saying, probably due to the background noise and activity in the bus. In other words, it was an auditory processing deficit (which is fairly typical in ADHD sufferers). It's also interesting when you consider that around 50% of ADHD sufferers also stutter during their earlier years (I did).
The fact that one potentially effective treatment is 'delayed auditory feedback' (basically the stutter has a walkman-type thingie that records what they say and plays it back with a split-second delay), it's not too much of a leap to suppose stuttering might also be caused by an underlying auditory processing deficit (in this case, the processing of one's own speech).
I wonder if ASD and ADHD are related in some way, maybe sharing some common causes. I don't know what the current scientific thinking is, but I'm convinced that both are ultimately neurological disorders. Even the GABA-Glutamate theory is consistent with some other typical features of ADHD: super-high co-morbidity with anxiety/panic disorders and 'night-terrors' in early childhood (again, I had these and they were awful).
It feels like we're very close to understanding these conditions via direct observation of their (immediate) causes. Neuroimaging is getting cheaper and cheaper, and will eventually result in neurology and psychiatry merging into a single field. At that point we'll have practitioners capable of really understanding causes (neuro) and determining appropriate treatments (psychopharmachology, and maybe neuro-physical treatments).
I was intrigued when my son had paradoxical reactions to GABA analogues so dug more into this (also has paradoxical reactions to benadryl, which is a different can of worms).
I think ASD, ADHD etc are all linked in terms of neurotransmitters and ion channel imbalance that causes overload on various pathways.
On interesting element on auditory processing is the similarities between ASD auditory sensitivity and hypokalemic sensory overload. Anecdotally I have seen dosing potassium reducing auditory sensitivity short term for possibly this reason.
On the paradoxical reaction to benadryl, and this is completely amateur speculation on my part, I wonder if it's because of benadryls anticholinergic effects (combined with a greater sensitivity, lower threshold etc.) resulting in a pseudo-anticholineric toxicity? And thereby outweighing the more typical effects of H1 anti-histamines? (disclaimer: I am very not a doctor, and this stuff is mostly beyond me)
The anticholinergic effects of benadryl have wider implications.
You can see this discussed by Dr Catterral here https://epiphanyasd.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/low-dose-clonazep... based on the research he did supported by the excellent Simon's foundation (hedge fund manager behind Renaissance)
Above a 50mcg dose, the inhibitory effects disappear.
A nice explanation of why this happens can be found here: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/01/treating_insomnia_wit..., really interesting readable read
A deep-learning algorithm that primarily uses surface area
information from magnetic resonance imaging of the brain of
6–12-month-old individuals predicted the diagnosis of autism
in individual high-risk children at 24 months (with a
positive predictive value of 81% and a sensitivity of 88%).3 major factors that are highly correlated: 1) Using a particular drug 2) Age of father 3) Being male
Majority is genetics though, so if the two parents are both highly intelligent and/or on the spectrum, good chances the child will be as well.
Autism is principally caused by the brain neurons developing too quickly during development, and then not reaching the same levels in fully developed adults. One theory thrown around is it's the rapid neuron development, so having intelligent parents means you have a chance of overshooting the threshold of "safe" development resulting in Autism.
I presume this study has better, more-up-to-date metrics though.
One example for this might be the Somali community in Minneapolis [0] but at the moment I can't find any up-to-date article
[0] https://www.autismspeaks.org/science/science-news/study-find...
So with that, I wish future parents will have it better and maybe some autism detection will help with early diagnostics. I can list so many things that my son cant do, that other children can. But at the same time, he sees things very uniquely and any groundbreaking invention will come from a boy like my son and not from my other "normal" children. Autism can be terrible , I wish that I could spare him all his troubles, but in some way the Autism is also a gift.
I cant help but wonder if some of our brightest minds all had some diagnose and was just strong enough to survive the "normal" life.
Best wishes to any person with autism and even parents struggling out on the interwebs.
But here in CA, if you have Kaiser, apparently they have a gold medal autism treatment program, according to a doctor that deals with child developmental disorders. It's because they got sued several years ago, and the result was they now put every child in a top autism treatment program.
How does that work?
My son doesn't have classic autism but he has developmental delays, sensory issues, etc. Trying to find providers here in the bay area can be extremely frustrating with extremely long wait times and we have great insurance. Our prior plan was Kaiser and it was just as much of a hassle but in a different way (having to go through a special office to get approval for therapists, etc).
Someone asked me then to share if I had experiences with AIT - and I replied here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13657973
And the IBIS Network who drove the study:
Found you all the way down at the bottom here and I decided to have a quick look at the abstract to see if I could find something to put your mind at ease. I couldn't.
In fact the language "prospective neuroimaging study" suggests it's more like a pilot study than anything conclusive.
The sample population "of 106 infants at high familial risk of ASD and 42 low-risk infants" is used, and while it seems like the 42 is a control-group I think that's misleading. Surely a "control group" would be one where the infants didn't exhibit this brain enlargement?
There's reference to a "A deep-learning algorithm" rather than any well-understood approach for determining correlation e.g. a simple T-test.
Finally the language "Brain volume overgrowth was linked to the emergence and severity of autistic social deficits" suggests an actual causal link is suggested, which doesn't seem to be the case. Just that a correlation has been discovered.
There could be more to it but it costs £22 to look at the actual paper.
But it does seem to me as though this is another case of incomplete science being presented as fait accompli. It doesn't contradict any scientific consensus so extraordinary evidence not required, but the BBC's interpretation of this as "Autism detectable in brain long before symptoms appear" does seem like a bit of a leap ...
* Single study, not replicated. Wait for replications and systematic reviews before believing anything in it.
* MRI studies aren't exactly known for high quality science.
* Autism studies aren't exactly known for high quality standards.
* I don't have access to the full text, but the summary shows no sign this study has been preregistered. Means risk of publication bias.
(67 minute podcast) http://www.artofmanliness.com/2017/01/12/podcast-269-forgott...
or may be it is connected to less and less exposure to Sun (office work and sunscreen usage), i.e. vitamin D deficiency. High correlation between vitamin D deficiency and increased autism rate is very visible in the case of Somali immigrant communities in Sweden and Minnesota (less sunshine, dark skin plus significantly bigger cloth coverage of the body results in the observed severe vitamin D deficiency in the Somali immigrants there). Such correlation is also present, while less pronounced, for Sweden children for whom 3rd trimester happened in winter.
A huge part of that was that symptoms started to show after a big vaccine dose you get around 2 years old.
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into" ~ Jonathan Swift (paraphrased)
Which does sound like Swift. The rewrite doesn't, and attributing it to him in that form is misleading.
I searched "How to attribute a fake quote" and nothing useful came up. Maybe:
"– Apocryphal quote incorrectly attributed to Jonathan Swift"
But that's not very satisfying, or short.
In which case, "Jonathan Swift once said something like...."
to paraphrase Jonathan Swift, "quote goes here"
"Paraphrased" typically has a somewhat different connotation, especially when you're using a direct quote.
Trouble is in today's world, you get to filter your data sources to things that you already believe in.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...
Unless you regress into severe Autism, it's very difficult for parents or even doctors to recognize Autism until they are atleast 2 years.
Also according to the schedule, there is no big dose around 2 years. After 18 months, there are not many doses on schedule until children are again 4 years.
Most parents complain about MMR vaccination that is scheduled at 15 months. My son regressed into Autism after MMR. It is true. I hope the world realizes it before more children get effected.
> My son regressed into Autism after MMR. It is true. I hope the world realizes it before more children get effected.
"The world" does not dispute that your son started showing signs of autism right after getting the MMR vaccine. Since there is no scientific causal explanation, and since study after study after study have shown that children who get the MMR vaccine do not develop autism at higher rates than those who did not get the vaccine, the best explanation is that the timing of the onset of your son's condition is a coincidence. I understand why parents dealing with their own personal sample size of one jump to that conclusion, but the link is just not there.
> the link is just not there.
[1] http://1337x.to/torrent/1789192/Vaxxed-From-Cover-Up-To-Cata...
I gather from summaries I've just now seen that this film claims there is a global conspiracy to suppress the truth. If you're interested in reality, you can start reading about all the many reasons Wakefield has been discredited here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield
When a double-digit percentage fraction of the subjects in your "seminal" work cry foul about that work, you either have to give up that story, or admit that you're just making shit up.
He was invested in a company developing a new vaccine preservative and the study was purely a scare tactic to get vaccine makers to switch from a cheap patent-free preservative (thimerosal) to an expensive patented one.
Vaccines in the western world have completely dumped thimerosal out of an extreme abundance of caution. Many of the vaccines don't even use a preservative or use a trace amount since we have good refrigeration and fast transportation networks. Despite all that the rate of autism diagnosis has continued to increase completely unchanged. In fact rates of autism diagnosis hasn't been affected by anti-vax parents refusing vaccines either. If you properly control for induced bias there is no difference in autism rates among anti-vax parents and rational parents.
When you hypothesize a causal relationship, remove the causal factor, and the outcomes are unaffected we call that hypothesis <i>disproven</i>. There is no link between vaccines and autism. Period. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
It seems like this research (if it's proven to be accurate consistently) could be instrumental in either putting that idea to rest or validating it.
Science still doesn't know how food gets digested and becomes poop. Will you stop eating, because science doesn't know what really happens during digestion?
You're going to really need to provide some kind of evidence for this, because I'm pretty certain that scientists do have a pretty good idea how this process works.
For that matter, I could give you a layman's explanation that, while it may not be 100% accurate, probably would come really close to a real explanation...
Choose your X:
Stop breastfeeding
Start walking
Start playing in the park
Start eating solids
Start throwing tantrums
P: If my belief is false, I have no explanation for my experience.
P: Losing the explanation that I've used to validate my experience would be deeply uncomfortable.
C: My belief is true.
P: This scientific study agrees with my belief.
C: This scientific study is true.
Following is vaccination schedule.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/hcp/imz/child-adolesc...
We know it because children who didn't get the vaccine show Autism symptoms around the same time.
> We know it because children who didn't get the vaccine
> show Autism symptoms around the same time.
Finding that took 15 seconds on Google.
Does a study with an N of > 95k, including vaccinated and unvaccinated children with autistic siblings, count?
Everyone says that so-called "anti-vaxxers" can't be pursuaded by reason. You're on HN so you must have some attraction to reason, and here two people responded with exactly the study you asked for.
I'm curious whether "everyone" is correct that you are not at all pursuaded by this evidence, as well as the evidence presented elsewhere against Wakefield?
My wife had a doctor once assure her when my eldest was getting her MMR something to the effect of "our shots are safe because we don't use the preservative that can cause autism," and now she's scared stiff of vaccines and requires my assurances that all data points to that doctor saying a lot of nonsense, probably with good intentions. My wife doesn't know how to read scientific studies or to distinguish between a sample size of 12 or 90,000, so it falls on me to provide the not-so-reassuring fact that our children will or will not be diagnosed with autism based on factors that are, at this point, not within our control, and that avoiding vaccines is only comtributing a net-negative to our children's health (and the health of our community). But again, my wife also doesn't frequent sites like HN as you do.
I like to think that we shouldn't give up on the idea of trying to find the proven truth about worries like vaccine-autism links, and spread that beyond our usual insular sphere of people who already agree with us. I appreciate that you're willing to share your (obviously unpopular-here, given the downblvoted) beliefs on HN. But I also hope that everyone's efforts to provide factual, scientifically valid data points about the very real lack of any vaccine-autism connection is not for naught. Is my hope at all justified, or is "everyone" else right?
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/andrew-wakefields-vaxxed-an...
Though I appreciate your optimism, there's no amount of evidence that could convince anti-vaxxers at this point.
This opinion isn't based on any concrete facts, so feel free to change it.
Autism and schizophrenia are so horrible because they are not on the affect spectrum. So in a historic view autism is indeed a new and a modern madness.
I would recommend the book "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db232.htm
I can't find similar data for age of the father at birth (or rather conception), but the human clinical geneticist I know always emphasizes that age of the father is just as important.
http://www.parents.com/health/autism/history-of-autism/
As a disorder, it's quite new, so it's quite natural that the increase of diagnoses increased in the past few decades.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, the research behind genetics of brain issues is quite straightforward. It's thanks to twins - we analyse occurrence in monozygotic and dizygotic twins. If there is far higher correlation of the disease in monozygotic compared to dizygotic, we know it's genetic.
http://theautismblog.seattlechildrens.org/twins-autism/
"Concordance in ASD diagnosis ... is observed in monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs at rates of 60-90%, whereas rates among dizygotic (DZ) twins are estimated at 3-31%."
However, the prevailing genetic explanation for increases in autism prevalence rate is that mutations appear de novo (out of the blue) in a parent, and then are passed down to the proband with the disease. The de novo mutations in each case are different, more or less.
The reason that prevalence is increasing under this model is because there is is something that is increasing the rate with which the de novo mutations are passed onto offspring.
This reason is age: de novo mutations occur increasingly with age in germ cells, and if germ cells become offspring at later ages, you will see an increase in prevalence.
Studies suggest that spontaneous mutations in sperm become more common as fathers age, because of age-related issues, and these sperm with mutations are more likely to lead to autism. Because fathers are having offspring at later ages, autism is increasing in prevalence.
Maternal age is less strongly related because egg cells are formed earlier in development.
FWIW, I agree there's probably lots of environmental influences, but I don't think that's the only thing.
>Low iron intake significantly interacted with advanced maternal age and metabolic conditions; combined exposures were associated with a 5-fold increased ASD risk.
Maternal age and iron intake aren't genes. Neither is folate:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
and if I'm reading this odds ratio (0.26) correctly, maternal folate supplementation may prevent or ameliorate up to 74% of cases of autism:
https://www.ted.com/talks/wendy_chung_autism_what_we_know_an...