Researchers find link between plastic additive and autism, ADHD
today.rowan.edu
today.rowan.edu
This is a small study that doesn't earn such a big subject line.
> BPA is about 10 percent less than that of control children. For a significant proportion of children with ADHD, it’s about 17 percent less.
The percentages are confusing me, BPA intake can vary greatly - if there was a stronger link shouldn't this be much obvious just in folks with higher BPA exposure?
Also there are bunch of metabolic conditions/disorders linked with autism already.
I don't understand what you would learn from such research other than "more research needed", certainly not what the headline implies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_autism#Metabolic_dis...
Presumably it’s much easier to measure someone’s ability to eliminate BPA from the bloodstream than it is to calculate how much they consumed in uteri and throughout their life.
At least _some_ humans with "ADHD" and "ASD" (and many others) are highly sensitive. This includes their bodies and brains - and subconsciousness.
This is a very misleading first paragraph. It’s likely that ADHD and Autism prevalence has not changed at all and it’s just cultural awareness that leads to the increased incidence. 30 years ago, most doctors believed that women could not have ADHD or Autism.
So yeah, it is “environmental factors” but the environmental factor is awareness - not plastic.
Any evidence? Autism risk increases with paternal age and maternal diabetes status, so I find it hard to believe that prevalence is unchanged from 30 years ago.
For autism, the correlation on age and diabetes status is real, but weak.
The counterfactual is that autism in minority populations is growing much faster than it is in the non-minority population. The only good correlation is health care coverage and the correlation is very strong. That tends to suggest that the "increase" is mostly increased diagnosis and treatment.
And, in my personal experience, "weak" ADHD is being HUGELY over diagnosed (for various reasons--some of which are non-medical) while "stronger" ADHD is being significantly underdiagnosed (because dealing with it is expensive on multiple fronts).
However, note that none of these things are absolutes. Weak correlations do exist. The human organism is highly variable--some things work for some of the people some of the time. The problem is figuring out which things work for which individuals most of the time.
The diagnostic overlap the two is quite striking and I’ve heard people seriously suggest that not only should the two be conflated, but that the two are the same thing. Realistically ADHD and Autism are arbitrary social constructs only loosely linked to biological reality popularized by the ICD and DSM and behaviourism, and I don’t find the unquestionable biological reality of ADHD -or- Autism all that convincing. One of the more interesting attempts at rethinking how we categorize people is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Domain_Criteria
>weak ADHD overdiagnosis
ADHD diagnosis is used to gatekeep methylphenidate and amphetamine access, and I think making those drugs more freely available would be helpful, so I have little issue with rising ADHD diagnosis. I do question the wisdom of forcing people to go to a doctor and convincing them to label them as “disordered” if they want access to drugs they find helpful, but that’s the system we have.
Autism overdiagnosis I take more issue with because there are limited effacious treatments or accommodations for it. Diagnosis to me seems driven to me quite bluntly more by entitlements being connected to Autism than anything else and I find the rising diagnosis more perverse. Generally my support for a diagnosis hinges on my perception that being diagnosed helps the person diagnosed and the collective good.
There was some research out of Texas after they passed a law forcing Sped enrollment to be capped at 8.5% with an allowed racial discrepancy of more than 1%. BOTH the GenEd and SpEd started graduating less, but the black students who were the most likely to be put in SpEd classes before the legal changes graduated more. To me this shows we have either already passed the point of overtreatment in the black population and are likely just above or below the line of an “optimal level of treatment” for the rest of the population.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/special-education-benefic...
And so older parents will have higher likelihood of having kids with autism?
Or maybe it is hereditary and fathers prone to autism are less likely to get children earlier in their life. It makes sense if you consider social awkwardness part of autism.
Everytime I see research on those subjects it seems like those correlations could be explained away by also 1000 different factors.
To me intuitively it feels like ADHD and Autism in many cases are largely just natural variance because of evolutionary process, seen as something wrong due to environment having been changed. And a lot of the research seems to make claims on just correlation.
I have ADHD diagnosis and I almost got Autism diagnosis and multiple doctors have noted I have autistic tendencies, but I think it is just trade offs. It is where you direct your limited mental resources to. Sometimes it is acceptable to current society, sometimes not.
To sum up both diagnosis for me seem to be because I have easier time to focus on other things that most other people can't while I have harder time focusing on what is easy for most.
> To sum up both diagnosis for me seem to be because I have easier time to focus on other things that most other people can't while I have harder time focusing on what is easy for most.
If you read the criteria for both diagnosis’s, they both have nothing to do with you having positive traits, even if you do have positive traits which come hand in hand with positive ones, it’s simply not considered. I find it entirely ridiculous really and it’s comical how often Autism in particular is portrayed alongside savant traits. There is something deeply distorted about considering somebody disordered or not based on the sum of their weaknesses.
So no, I don't have evidence, and neither do you.
As someone who spent many years in medical biology and studied biostatistics, I am inclined to treat any biochemistry arguments with deep skepticism. It is in the author's interest to say they have found the answer for something because money is always in short supply. The more boring answer that society is not about to collapse into flapping mutes because we have learnt some new facts and our culture has changed doesn't get you research funding.
We just decided to call more people autistic, we didn’t become more aware. I’m still awaiting any research, at all, to suggest that diagnosis with autism actually helps the people diagnosed at all. Never mind helping them enough to outweigh the various costs of medical treatment and various entitlements received post-diagnosis. I just hear if we call more people autistic that means we’re more aware and that’s fantastic!
The CONSTANT diagnostic drift also means the vast majority of research on autism is likely non-reproducible and worthless (because it might have been conducted when 5x less people were considered autistic). I’d very much argue diagnostic instability is actually SABOTAGING autism awareness not helping with it.
Other way around, I would argue increased awareness -> increased diagnoses. Why? Because a lot more people know what the words "autism" and "aspergers" mean today than 30 years ago.
A feedback loop where diagnosis -> incr. awareness -> diagnosis seems plausible and has a nice simple mechanism. So I guess increased diagnoses would lead to increased awareness too.
> you can draw the line between autistic and not autistic wherever you please.
Agree, this is what makes psych evaluations so tricky. It's hard to have rigour for human mental complexity. My prefered view on this is that autism is defined by a series of correlated traits which are all continous variables, we define autism as someone who has 1 or more of those traits in the tail of that trait's distribution. e.g. very low social ability or very high impact sensory disorders.
You can whinge all you like about where the line is drawn, but the fact is the line has to be drawn through six dimensions and none of those dimensions is easy to measure.
> various entitlements received post-diagnosis
Most people with an autism diagnosis (level 1) do not have access to any entitlements. This is a common argument against self-diagnosis which holds no water.
> diagnostic drift also means the vast majority of research on autism is likely non-reproducible and worthless
Clinical researchers routinely sub-divide groups with a diagnosis based on severity. You can do this with autism in much the same way we do it with cancer. So broadening the diagnostic criteria doesn't impact statistical effect size and thus your argument is incorrect.
In any case you raise a good point insofar that research on what is called “level 2 autism” and “level 3 autism” is more constant over time but it’s the research on “level 1 autism” I would take with a serious grain of salt especially the more pessimistic research. Because it was usually done on people who were on average more impaired than the people being diagnosed today, and that can result in people making bad conclusions about how life is for most people that we call Autistic.
I don’t know, this whole phenomenon is quite troublesome I reckon and bound to cause particularly unwarranted and inaccurate prejudices. I’ve already witnessed this happen many many times.
> As a result of the presence of BPA in plastics and other commonplace materials, most people are frequently exposed to trace levels of BPA. The primary source of human exposure is via food, as epoxy and PVC are used to line the inside of food cans to prevent corrosion of the metal by acidic foodstuffs. Polycarbonate drinks containers are also a source of exposure, although most disposable drinks bottles are actually made of PET, which contains no BPA.[1]
Polycarbonates are the rigid plastics like the ones used in reusable water bottles, but many such bottles are now BPA-free.
I don't buy the BPA causes ADHD/Autism correlation direction AT ALL because where's the dose-response relationship? BPA exposure varies quite a bit in the population and this correlation is slight.
Considering the rather huge differences between someone with autism and someone without, and the presumably rather large variation in ingested dose of BPA, a 10% difference in the elimination speed of a toxin doesn't seem like the whole picture.
> The study showed that for a significant proportion of children with autism, the ability to add the glucose molecule to BPA is about 10 percent less than that of control children. For a significant proportion of children with ADHD, it’s about 17 percent less.
Science in general, including MD conducted research has a lot of room for improvement.
They are all physicians.
Wanting to get rid of ADHD and Autism may be eugenics, but it’s also a popular notion. What do you think happens when you tell the whole of society since these people are different, they are disordered, and need to be treated with lower expectations and given more benefits? Plenty of the disabled were killed by the Nazi’s including Autistics.
it's not in any way implying that BPA exposure is causing neurodivergentnl disorders
so it's more like if you, through unrelated reasons have autism, you are also more likely to be worse at handling BPA
in general there is strong indication that autism is largely related to genes
also science is increasingly moving away from calling it a disorder, it seems to be more like a natural variation instead. A variation which happens to be not very compatible with modern society and therefore often comes hand in hand with disorders like e.g. anxiety disorders caused by the friction modern society exposes on them. I mean think about a societyb strictly build for people at most 1.60m in height but you are 2.20m, you likely would have all kinds of mental and physical issues from the fact that everything in the world isn't compatible with your body size.