Mother's blood test predicts a sub-type of autism
nature.com
nature.com
My nephew is autistic. He is my sister's youngest, and is 10 years younger than his sibling. This isn't a coincidence.
Parents who have their children in their mid 30s and later are orders of magnitude more likely to have an autistic child than people who conceive in their 20s/early 30s. It's a massive increase in probability.
I've found that the topic of delayed parenthood and the very real health impacts it results in are almost taboo amongst the media elites who have driven huge amounts of attention to autism due to so many of them having autistic kids. An additional topic related to this that goes undiscussed is the massive increase in twins (and consequentially premature births) caused by couples who had to use fertility drugs to conceive for the same reason.
I want to emphasize that I'm not criticizing anyone for making the decision to delay having kids until they are older. I just wish it was discussed more because I personally think that corporate structures should be changed to not punish women for having kids. It's a horrible injustice that our most successful citizens are forced to suffer medical side-effects because corporations were designed for men, and sweeping discussion of these side-effects under the rug results in flawed approaches like Sandberg describes in "Lean In", where the solution is to just embrace the existing structure to a ridiculous degree. It's horrifying to me that work culture has impacted human culture to a point where we are forced to step in and correct for biology.
Edit: I am a post-doc at the autism institute at which this research was conducted. While I am not associated with this research, Judy does solid, impactful research, and I know beyond a doubt that she is aware of the association between autism and de novo mutations in older fathers.
https://consumer.healthday.com/disabilities-information-11/c...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/feb/02/doctors-urge...
I thought this was common knowledge? I’ve certainly read this frequently and it’s something that is brought up (anecdotally) by OB/GYNs as women enter their 30’s. My wife and several family members ruefully will tell stories about how their doc let them know that they’ll be considered of “advanced maternal age” when they hit 35. They were then reminded of the increased risk of birth defects, autism, and complications.
I'm old enough (ironically) that I was taught the term as "geriatric pregnancy"
Thee's a strong link to paternal age that seems well established. Maternal age effects seem to be all over the map: I've seen weaker positive correlation with advancing maternal age than paternal age, no correlation with maternal age, and negative correlation with maternal age in different studies (possibly with varying degrees of controlling for other known contributors; e.g., apparently women with autism tend to have first children older, which by itself can create the impression of a maternal age effect of not controlled for.)
That's not just the realm of IVF. My wife and I have fraternal twins. She was 35 when we conceived. It turns out that as women approach menopause they may drop more than one egg during ovulation. This effect is noticed dramatically at age 35. I think I recall reading that your chances of a natural twins birth goes from < 1% to > 4% at age 35...
And, of course, in addition to that, once you have your first multiples pregnancy the odds of any subsequent pregnancy being a multiples also goes up.
The book was the first thing I read after we received the diagnosis for my son - although a friend had recommended it prior to this.
It also helped me as person feel less different and accepting of myself (I do not have an ASD diagnosis).
This seems like a very negative view of autism.
While I respect the message of neurodiversity, it has often come at the expense of individuals with profound autism where one would be hard-pressed to not apply labels like disability, impairment, and such. Profound autism represents a substantial proportion of the autistic spectrum, but they are the least able to represent and advocate for themselves.
I suspect >90% of so called ASD cases have little real clinical basis these days and the entire disorder looks very fishy.
Death redefined as a situation where people continue to have the ability to occupy space and don't require any food or oxygen.
I wouldn't mind a few more of the latter.
There's nothing wrong with preferring that people have the ability to communicate with others (vs them not having that ability).
The moral issue is externally-enforced selection (AKA eugenics), which seems to persistently rear its ugly head as soon as you start talking about disability.
My friend (edit: redacted) chose not to have kids, because every ancestor he could trace on his paternal line had died of cancer around age 40, and he didn't think it was fair to inflict that on somebody else. I think that was a wise and moral choice - but it would not be wise or moral to take the choice away from him.
Then you merely have to marry someone from that same family.
Or just marry a single mother who already has children.
And calling any single person "diverse" is icky.
Many are diagnosed with “autism”, seemingly not for any lack of ability, but præferences the diagnostician does not necessarily agree with.
I also object to “neuro-” morpheme. The diagnosis of these conditions are psychiatric, not neurological, and in many cases where such a diagnosis was made, there is nothing neurologically unusual that could be found, but in some cases there is.
Autism is simply with the current understanding not a neurological, but a psychiatric disorder. — the understanding may grow such that it might become one one day, but that is not the current level of understanding, and such understanding would most likely lead to the realization that all which is currently grouped under “autism”, has many different underlying neurological causes.
Oh, I'm pretty new to this myself, but my understanding was that autism was considered a neurological disorder, not a psychiatric one. [1]
"Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) refers to a group of complex neurodevelopment disorders..."
1. https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Educat...
All psychiatric disorders ARE neurological...i.e. is rooted in the brain and associated systems. Moreover, there are plenty of neurological differences between ASD and TD groups, both at the cellular and morphological levels. However, a lot of the morphological differences are too small, and heterogeneity too large, to be useful as a means of diagnosis.
It's entirely possible that there is nothing neurologically objectively different about an autistic person from a non-autistic person, and that it's simply a cultural quirk that led to it; this has been the case with many historical diagnoses.
In fact, I would argue that this is not simply possible, but likely, given that usually, if such a neurological discriminant exist, it is typically quickly found. That they have searched for so long without being able to find it, is indicative of a nonexistence.
Nevertheless, the biggest claim is trying to claim that some behavior/symptomology/quirk does not involve the brain.
> Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by [...] restricted interests and repetitive behaviors.
as
> ASD is characterized by an ability to focus intently on an area of special interest, developing an unusually detailed level of knowledge of that topic.
There's always a tension with efforts to depathologise things, because some people do need support and the way they get support at the moment is via diagnosis.
However, this is not true. It doesn't apply to all people with ASD. I volunteered with adults with ASD about ten years ago. One person in the group really had a special interest fixation (a person), but he didn't know more than the average person would know after reading a single biography. He was barely able to read or remember complex facts, so I don't think he had the ability to develop an unusually detailed level of knowledge of that topic or any other. The rest didn't have any memorable interests, but I guess it's also possible that it wasn't cultivated in them.
I'm good friends with an autistic man, he's got a special interest for a certain branch of mathematics and swing dance. He's also great with regards to social interaction, he's seemed to keep close connections with every person he comes across when he's traveled.
There's a saying that "if you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism", symptoms present differently in everyone and they're highly responsive to environment. As a trend I'd say special interests are probably a decent contender for a hallmark, probably along with language difficulty and eye contact avoidance.
"Disorder" is a medical term for "badness", especially weird to apply to a condition that is notable for its extreme mental... orderliness.
> "Disorder" is a medical term for "badness", especially weird to apply to a condition that is notable for its extreme mental... orderliness.
I don't see anything weird about that; are you suggesting that there is no extreme of inflexible attachment to order which would be ever be bad?
(You can be extremely orderly and not have autism, for example, if you had Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder which is different from the more familiar OCD.)
Tim Burton – Movie Director / Lewis Carroll – Author of “Alice in Wonderland” / Charles Darwin – Naturalist, Geologist, and Biologist / Emily Dickinson – Poet / Albert Einstein – Scientist & Mathematician / Bobby Fischer – Chess Grandmaster / Bill Gates – Co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation / Temple Grandin – Animal Scientist / Thomas Jefferson – Early American Politician / Steve Jobs – Former CEO of Apple / Stanley Kubrick – Film Director / Barbara McClintock – Scientist and Cytogeneticist / Michelangelo – Sculptor, Painter, Architect, Poet / Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Classical Composer / Sir Isaac Newton – Mathematician, Astronomer, & Physicist / Nikola Tesla – Inventor / Andy Warhol – Artist
https://www.appliedbehavioranalysisprograms.com/historys-30-...
For perspective: Arguing "I know I guy who needs to squint to see things that are far away but he's an amazing pianist" doesn't add to a discussion about early detection of vision impairment and vision loss.
They typically can’t deliberately choose the subject of the focus, but it’s usually the case that any bit of deep knowledge is useful for something.
I cannot agree with your perspective comparison. Vision many help someone learn piano more quickly at first, but is immaterial to their maximum ability as a pianist. A better comparison is early detection of the development of additional fingers or exceptionally large hands (example: Rachmaninoff), both of which directly and permanently affect a person's ability to play difficult piano pieces. This too would be a concerning eugenics issue.
Homosexuality was long considered a psychiatric disorder, so be careful putting blind faith in psychiatric judgements.
With that said, due to my exposure to autism through my sister, I have seen cases that are far worse than hers. Completely non-verbal people with autism, those who experience panic attacks when they see an unfamiliar person, the list goes on.
We tend to focus on the lighter end of the spectrum, where people can lead functional and fulfilling lives. Most people don't see the other side of the spectrum, where autism is devastating to every single person involved.
There's a form of survivorship bias here: the greater the degree of impairment, the less broad social contacts the person is likely to have, so on average most people's experience is going to have people who have less severe impairments overrepresented compared to their relative frequency among those with the diagnosis.
And I'm sure most people that think about the issue recognize that on an intellectual level, but it's still difficult to tune out the effect that has on one’s “gut feeling” about the subject.
His diagnosis didn't feel like a social judgement. The impairment literally killed him even though he wanted to live.
That part is absolutely true.
> ASD should be prevented medically.
But this part (apart from the fact that it's not currently feasible) is just too categoric. I certainly know several autistic people who would prefer to get rid of their autism, if given a choice. But I know plenty on the milder end of the spectrum who would not — e.g. because their distress in social situations is outweighed by the benefits conveyed by an increased ability to focus.
Edit: very interested in feedback on why this either rubbed some people the wrong way or was perceived as a negative contribution to the discussion
Feedback at your request -
This rubbed me the wrong way because homosexuality was classed as a disorder in my lifetime. (And that has an impact on me, still today - and it is still used as justification for criminalisation in 72 countries). So, there is fair reason to equate them.
If we were having this discussion in 1973, would you be saying "it does nobody a service to see homosexuality as normal"? Because a large proportion of psychiatrists and people were saying that.
What makes those people (in the past) wrong to say that, while you (in the present) are right to say this?
Yes, pretty much all of modern psychiatric diagnosis are explicitly diagnosing a combination of inability to succeed in the concrete social conditions one finds oneself in combined with concurrent behavioral or other symptoms, not “biological flaws”. (Which, incidentally, would also be subjective judgments; biological features are objective, that an objective feature is a flaw is a subjective judgement call.)
It's not even about success in society; it's simply about whether the psychiatric authority considers it undesirable, and in want of eradication.
Drapetomania even existed, which had nothing to do with success. The authority simply considered it undesirable that slaves fled.
Many behaviors that correlate very negatively with success are not considered mental disorders, for they the authority considers them desirable.
And of course, it's an entirely circular argument. There are also some disorders that correlate very negatively with success and thus called disorders, but the disorder is more or less “not caring about success”. — there are disorders characterized by the subject's indifference how he is socially perceived.
Saying only 'impairment' implies that all attributes associated with autism are negative compared to some mythical baseline, and creates a circular definition which stigmatises autistic people.
The ones that are diagnostic (except those that are about ruling out other diagnoses) are. If we understood the mechanism enough to identify anything other than observed dysfunction, that might be different.
And, yes, like virtually every mental disease, the negative attributes are defined in reference to the concrete social context in which the individual exists, and could equally be viewed as problems with society. That's a problem for a different domain than the medical though.
A neutral approach would acknowledge that hammers are good at certain tasks, while screwdrivers are good at others.