Slashdot Mirror
More Evidence of Increase in Profound Autism
I am Jack's username writes "The New York times has an article (no registration required) about an increase in profound autism in California of 273% between 1987 and 1998. Between 1999 and 2001 more than 6 500 cases were reported, similar to the number reported between 1970 to 1995. The increase cannot be accounted for by misdiagnosis, increased awareness, childhood immunizations, emigration, birth injuries, and genetics. Some autism experts think the actual cases to be dramatically more than reported in the UC study. See also previous discussions about high-function geek rich areas like silicon valley."
Right here on Slashdot!
I know very little of the condition, but considering autistic people have some extraordinary abilities, is it possible this could be an evolutionary step?
the state that also invented "Epstein-Barr", second hand smoke, and ADD.. hypochondriacs from San Diego to Sacremento
Intelligent Life on Earth
Surely the way to chase this down is to get some clever cross-disciplinary folk on the case. Meanwhile, here's two links that don't require registration:
The Independant's version of the same story.
The BBC is bringing up the MMR "link".
I would become autistic as soon as possible, too. Anything to avoid the nightmare reality of stupid consumerism gone horribly wrong that is exemplified by the California lifestyle.
I mean they say that a baby breaths in twice the carsinogens in thre first day of life in california than what has been deemed safe for a life time.
what is the autism rate in other parts of the country or the world?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
If it's a genetic disorder, and it's occurring more frequently, it must be one sexy disorder. Maybe that blank stare on your favorite supermodel isn't "attitude" at all!
Current theories suggest it's more like sickle-cell mutations. If you have 'half' of autism, you're good at living within your mind/interacting with machines and information - the classic 'geek' skills.
:}
However, breed the right mix together and you get the full whammy, an individual incapable of interacting with social 'reality' at all. As of yet, there's no "niche" for the poor kids (no evolutionary advantage off getting on Maury Povich), but maybe they'd be killer ML coders had we direct-brain interfaces.
If this *is* a consequence of "geek inbreeding," it'd be interesting to consider the sociological factors that make it so widespread.
Of course, I don't think they've ruled out environmental factors yet, either. Could be another thalidomide at play.
As refreshing as it is to see autism brought into the news, I don't think that /. is the best place for it. As we can see in the posts so far, posters (as well as the moderators) have just made a joke of it. I'm sure not many people in this forum will have much to say about autism that isn't either modded as funny or flaimbait. I'd be surprised to see more than two posts that are actually enrich my mind.
But what do I know anyways?
Be a man! View at -1
acm.cs.uwec.edu
I'm not trying to be humourous here, but I honestly feel that somewhere right under the Genius level of intelligence lies a gray area in which many folks with autism tend to lie.
Bill Gates is partially autistic, as are several students who do research here at my university. Autism isn't fatal, but it can have a troubling effect on one's social life. Many Normal folks don't quite understand it and laugh/point fingers at those with autism.
It's nothing more than just an enhanced perception of life, but I guess it is technically a disease of sort.
This new epidemic in California is probably just a bunch of really smart people having children together. It's too bad that the children, though they will be absolutely brilliant, will have to suffer their entire lives as unattractive and anti-social.
The chain will continue with their children's children, etc...
Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, B3H 3J5
This is also being discussed over at kuro5hin.
The cake is a pie
Could it be accounted for because of the change in population over the last few years in California? Perhaps there are more people having children now than before in that area, as it is becoming a place full of younger people, more apt to have children in order to start a family.
This is getting much talk in the conspiracy circles.
Many think the leading cause for autism comes from the regiment of shots we give our kids from birth to a few years of age.
I have to admit, it's alot of shots these days, and there's clear economic motives for the makers.
Funny thing is, if you scrutinize this, they label you a wacko, or some extreme religious zealot (because of stories of a parent's kid dying because the parent refused treatment based on religion.)
Just go to the news groups and do searches for this type of stuff. It's some very interesting reading.
I refused chicken pox (not smallpox) for my first two kids. It was just becoming mandatory in schools, then when they figured out that many babies were getting deadly disentary, they backed off.
It's crazy when you take your kid in, and get 4 different shots on some occasions.
Parents in the study were asked what might have caused their child's autism. Nearly half the parents in both groups said they did not know. A third blamed genetics; smaller numbers cited immunizations, birth injury or environmental factors.
So, just about half of parents are intellectually honest, then. We don't know what causes autism--there is nothing approaching a consensus among researchers, and there are few well-designed studies that even suggest a possible cause. Asking parents what caused their child's autism is like asking a non-technical person why their hard drive crashed. The answer as likely as not will be "I dunno, maybe I've got a virus?" Interesting for investigating the biases of the hapless user, but not a useful diagnosis.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I'm just surprised that nobody in the study thought to blame living near power lines--unless that's an "environmental factor".
Hypothesis: The incidence of autism is higher because children aren't being allowed to eat enough dirt. Exposure to more microorganisms when young strengthens the immune system. There exists a microbe (virus, perhaps) as-yet-uncharacterized that causes autism. (This happens sometimes with diseases. For example, most stomach ulcers are caused by the bacterium h. pylori and can often be cured with antibiotic therapy. This fact only came to light very recently, after decades of assuming that ulcers were essentially untreatable.) Children's weaker immune systems don't fight this pathogen as effectively as they used to, so they develop autism more frequently.
Solution: Feed all young children dirt.
This hypothesis actually has about as much grounding as many of the other suggested causes of autism. Based on very weak evidence, some parents have started to avoid immunizing their children, putting them at much greater risk for measles and other potentially deadly diseases. Bless the internet and its unquestioned authority on medicine.
~Idarubicin
Some forms of autism make one not like to be around people. I wonder if I have some of that. People who talk too much about non-geek things drive me crackers. Some people just cannot shuddup. My mom, for example, can stretch a 2-minute story into a 20-minute one by providing details that are useless to the story, but I cannot tell her off because she is my mom. She is the reader's digest in reverse.
Mild autism may be what makes a lot of geeks geeks. You never know.
Table-ized A.I.
Reminds me of the time when doctors everywhere were warning us of the unusually high cholesterol content found in eggs and telling us to cut back. I wonder how long this whole autism in Califoria study lasts before someone figures out why the numbers were skewed.
one summer when i interned in the bay area, i was schocked to discover that there was a superfund site right across the street from the building where i worked. even more incredible was the fact that they were building an office building right on it!
a friend later told me that the area has alot of superfund sites due to the dumping of chemicals and pollutants that are byproducts of chip design and fab processes and other engineering type methods.
now i dunno the validity of this statement, but if parents are working on top of superfund sites being exposed to all kinds of wonderful chemicals, is it all to surprising that effects are showing up in their progeny?
----
i do not use drugs, i AM drugs -- Dali
What's changed in a big way in the last twenty years? Fast food. Tolerance for fat people.
So this is what happens when all those parents spend too much time reading /. and sucking up monitor radiation!
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
From the article...
meaning they suffered from a brain disorder that left them unable to speak or compulsively performing repetitive motions like flapping their arms or rocking.
So this is what afflicts all of our programmers, and I thought it was because our marketing department keeps saying the product will be released next week when we are still in beta...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
California is no where near as polluted as it used to be. There are many other areas of the US which are substantially worse (Houstan, Atlanta). In addition, if it were an issue of pollution, you'd see substantial differences in Southern California, where smog hangs over the city, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where the prevailing winds blow most of the smog eastward.
The cake is a pie
I bet, 'No registration required', becomes the next thing that everybody starts posting - you know, just like 'Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those', and 'Business plan'... :-)
This is pretty old news.
There has been lots of on and off writing in the media about the increase in autism being a direct result of highly intelligent people mating.
People with normal intelligence has a normal risk of getting a child with autism. A couple where both are nerds have a significantly increased risk of giving birth to a child with autism.
Since the tech industry has attracted lots of intelligent people to California, the risk of two nerds mating there is higher than elsewhere in the US.
There is some pretty compelling evidence that gluten, a grain protein, triggers autism. Many parents of formerly autistic (!) children swear that a gluten-free diet "cured" their child's autism.
For some unknown reason the medical/scientific community has been very resistant to studying this phenomenon.
-Peter
The Telegraph had an article back in February of last year (no longer available) that set the rate of autism in the UK at 1 in 175 children, or 58 out of every 10,000 (compared to the 10 in 10,000 rate reported in California.)
/.'ers may find Mercola's website hard to stomach, since he's going to tell you to exercise and to stop eating McD's fries and twinkies. ;-)
The evidence is becoming very persuasive that immunizations do bear a large portion of the blame. See the National Vaccine Information Center for some good articles on links to this and other complications.
For our part, after reading dozens of books and talking to as many people, we made the decision not to vaccinate our now six year old. (Commence the flamebait about how we're playing with fire, yadda yadda yadda...)
Dr. Mercola, a naturopathic doctor out of Chicago, also has many good articles about the possible causes of austism. WARNING:
Crocuta
Some autism experts think the actual cases to be dramatically more than reported in the UC study If there is a possibility that the *actual* cases are higher than the *reported* cases, wouldn't this mean that it would be possible that higher awareness could create a statistical anomoly of this kind? If at any time the *actual* cases are higher than what is being reported, then through higher awareness, more cases will be reported, thus skewing the statistics. (Or maybe I'm just sniffing something... its possible)
This was an interesting article in wired a while ago.
Asperger's Syndrome is considered very high functioning Autism. Where the person still has some signs of autism, but isn't as extreme as most cases.
There is a wonder in the psych community about whether or not technically inclination and/or mathematically inclination has any correlation to autism. If so, it gives an interesting window into autism.
Wired refers to Asperger's as the "Geek Syndrome." It discusses this boom of autism in California.
Here's the link to the Wired Article (The Geek Syndrome).
~ kjrose
could it be that the reason is not geekism but
the recreational use of drugs by the parents
before and during the pregnancy?
Don't confuse the movies for reality.
I read an article about autism in Silicon Valley in Wired several months ago. In the article, they described one of the common tests used to determine whether a child is autistic. The test is done with a puppet show, something kids can understand.
Bob and Sally (two puppets) are in a room. Sally has a ball. Sally puts her ball in a box, and goes outside to play. Bob takes Sally's ball out of the box, and puts it in a basket across the room. Sally comes back inside, and wants her ball. Where does she look for it first?
An autistic child doesn't recognize that what he/she knows (Bob moved the ball) is different than what Sally knows (she left it in the box, and wasn't there when Bob moved it).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Here's a page blaming a lot of autism on vaccinations, including studies and doctor quotes.t ism.htm
http://www.shirleys-wellness-cafe.com/au
Someone listed a few health issues that came straight from California. The state also gave us fast food; the lowest quality, least nutritious, most processed, highest use of antibiotics and hormones food available. Fast food also seems to be the worst industry for the economy. (had to throw that in there)
I hope some of these people investigating consider diet as well. Diet affects every disease. People with perfect diets rarely ever get sick. People with trash diets get sick a lot. A bad diet affects brain development, circulatory function, development of blockage all over the body, failure of the elimination system, failure of the immune system, and so on. Bad food kills. The AMA doesn't much like hearing that said out in the public though because if everyone ate healthy, they wouldn't make so much money.
This is my sig. The post is over.
deficits in communication and social interaction, preoccupation with fantasy, language impairment, and abnormal behavior, such as repetitive acts and excessive attachment to certain objects. It is usually associated with intellectual impairment.
deficits in communication and social interaction, -- Silicon Valley
preoccupation with fantasy -- Hollywood
language impairment, and abnormal behavior -- LA
repetitive acts and excessive attachment to certain objects -- Hollywood again! (movie sequels)
It is usually associated with intellectual impairment. -- Sacramento (the gov.)
They've only described the whole bing-bong state!! gimme a break. Someone has too much time on their hands... (um - besides me, of course)
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
My great-grandfather was autistic..That was pretty bad for him. In Israel, however, that's not so muchc of a problem, everyone is very supportive.
:) Yalla Bye!
Hope it doesn't run in the family
Btw: I am looking for a girlfriend.
I'll bite ...
... but they are certainly peer-reviewed, and not completely anecdotal!)
...
What economic motives are there for vaccine makers to produce a product that could cause autism?
Just FYI, most of the employees at the vaccine company I am familiar with insist on their families being inoculated with the vaccine produced by that company. They are aware of the stringent testing, QA/QC and improvements in the products made by the company. Of course, all vaccine manufacturers have to meet an extremely high standard of quality now, but it shows you the loyalty and security that these employees feel about their employer's products.
As for searching the newsgroups, I have to just laugh. What an unbiased and peer-reviewed source! (Admittedly, not all scientific publications can be regarded as unbiased
With the recent upsurge of panicked parents refusing to let their children be vaccinated, I'm (pessimistically) awaiting the return of the scourges that our grandparents used to fear
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
Wired had a great article on this phenomenon, including the high incidence of Asperger's Syndrome in Silicon Valley. Asperger's Syndrome is sort of a high-functioning kind of autism which I imagine many /. readers suffer from. Wired called it the "Geek Syndrome". Great article- check it out.
Let me guess, they were all conceived while their mother was on the pill.
That is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I have heard all week.
Could I suggest that people who are really interested about vaccines consult references on both sides of the story? Or even read something based on facts, on scientific methods, peer-reviewed (scientific publications in refereed journals)?
/.! Never mind. ;-)
Oh, wait, this is
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
The Twinkie Defense!
However, there is no shortage of theories to explain the surge in autism. There are two of them that seem to deserve some research:
- Autism is caused by mercury (thimerosal) in vaccines.
- Autism is caused by methylmercury in fish, when eaten during pregnancy.
The FDA already discourages eating some types of fish during pregnancy (they even publish mercury levels in seafood).months ago - but they kept to themselves and got distracted.
Look we need to de-generalize this thread a bit. Austism ranges from the profoundly disfunctional to the almost normal.
Some studies suggest a genetic link, others suggest environmental triggers. I suspect both will be validated at some point. Consider that autism has been around and documented for centuries - "idiot savants" - yet why a huge increase now?
Some suspect the MMR vaccine since the disease manifests around that time period.
As far as the autism spectrum goes it covers several "disorders". My son is either Asperger's or PDD-NOS (pervasive development disorder not otherwise specified) but seems normal to most people at surface glance. He is high-strung, and needs support for social situations but is extremely bright. He was reading at age 3 and doing base 2 math, multiplication and division at age 5.
In today's world he will be academically very gifted and socially completely disadvantaged. Yet the strange thing is that he is simply expressing traits my wife and I both possess more strongly than we did.
Once I starting reading the literature dealing with my son's condition it became obvious that I expressed many of these traits as a child. My wife was gifted but not as socially challenged. Once I figured things out I was able to appear mostly normal....well that's subjective I suppose.
So - my suspicion based on my experience and that of the parents around us in our support groups is one of two possibilities:
1. That autistic traits are caused by genetic and environmental factors and the environmental factors are increasing in severity....
OR
2. It is genetic and becoming more prevalent because male and female "geeks" are now allowed to co-exist. Perhaps this is nothing more than a result of women's equality allowing women and men to meet their true peers. Consider that in the "old days" women that were mentally gifted did not become doctors or computer programmers. Even 30 years ago it was not common to see female doctors or lawyers - yes they existed but compared to today where parity is finally beginning to show...
I suspect number 2 is more likely and unfortunately since evolution is currently suppressed for humanity thanks to our advances we cannot tell how this will affect our race. Our son will do well aside from some challenges socially, but do we tell him to marry someone dumb or not to have kids?
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
I have a feeling that the answer to this question is going to shock and dismay us all. Some individual, common, hitherto-thought-harmless pollutant? Ambient noise levels?
Nope.
It will be demonstrated that the true cause is that true Autism is indistinguishable from the way people in the Bay Area act.
http://www.909shot.coms eases/Autism.htm
http://www.909shot.com/Di
http://www.vaclib.org/index.htm
I'm autistic. But am I high functioning or do I suffer from "profound" autism? I believe this distinction is meaningless.
I have problems with bathing, cleaning my house (I literally can't see my floor right now, it is covered with food, dirty clothes, and trash), and dealing with people. There are many times when I cannot speak (sometimes I can; sometimes I cannot).
However, I work in the IT industry and am doing quite well there. I always get very good performance reviews, and am currently managing a multi-million dollar project. So, am I high functioning because I can work? Or am I low functioning because bathing is terrifying? I could never date another person, yet I know many autistics who can do that - but can't work!
There isn't one axis in autism that goes from "normal-like" to "not-normal" (or, as it was phrased, "high functioning" to "profound").
Autism is used to describe a spectrum of disorder, from children with low intelligence (the majority of people with autism are also retarded) to high functioning people. Personally i think autism is simply a term we are using to lump several different conditions, which seemingly have the same symptoms, togather. By this I mean that autism is really several different disorders being confused as one and those different disorders probably have different causes.
This gluten story is typical of bullshitotherapists. What happens is that *some* people have an intolerance to gluten (I think it's called coelial disease), and their body reacts badly to it, with very different symptoms from person to person.
It happens that, among those few people who have this disorder, the symptoms can look like ADHD or Autism. But those persons do not have ADHD or Autism, they really have gluten intolerance! The problem is that, IIRC, this disorder is pretty difficult to diagnose, and since it's quite rare, and as a result of the confusing symptoms, most of the victims are not properly treated.
Now here comes the bullshitotherapist stupidity: blame ADHD and Autism on gluten. Et voila!
But yeah, if you suffer from this gluten problem, and you stop eating gluten altogether, the symptoms will usually go away; now the difference is that psychostimulants won't do a thing to those people: they will still have the ADHD-like symptoms. Conversely, people with real ADHD won't get any benefit from removing gluten from their diet, they'll just waste a lot of their time.
But I'm WAY out of your price range.
The cake is a pie
Could the increasing age of mothers when they have their children be a cause? (Dual-income, white-collar households tend to have their children later.) Autism is one risk factor that is well-known in pregnancies later in life. Why hasn't the results and follow-on (flurry) of news addressed this?
Here is a website http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/autism2 .htm that says that there is some anectdotal evidence that the MMR vaccine may be partially responsible for some cases of autism. The web page says there's not much proof.
i d=78
There is also this link which shows some problems with autism and vaccines.
http://www.hacres.com/articles.asp?art
Perhaps you should...nothing in my post is contrary to "punctuated equillibrium" (not "punctuated evolution", BTW), which still works by random variations and selection with varying levels of reproduction success.
The cake is a pie
A couple of years ago I heard a story on All Things Considered that was about a gentleman who had opened what is basically a free/open repository of genome info on families with autism.
The reason he'd done this is because his son was autistic, and he discovered that biomed research firms were fscking patenting autistic genes to ensure that if a cure was ever found they'd reap huge profits from the treatment. This landrush for intellectual property also had the nasty side effect of killing just about any collaborative research effort for a cure or treatment... no one could get samples to work with. And the companies doing this weren't even trying to protect their own research projects.... they were just sitting on the damn knowledge (or rather, rights to the knowledge).
Now we've got stuff like the CAN Foundation and AGRE, so hopefully there's a shot at developing an answer other than, "Uhhhh.... just stick Rain Man in the looney bin and get on with your life." Hopefully a cure can be found, and failing that a treatment or at least we can figure out what the fsck causes it.
But I can't help but wonder if this "epidemic" might not have been preventable (or at least mitigated) if some greedy bastards had actually used their talents to help other people instead of making the downpayment on the Lexus.
But your compelling evidence may be really nothing scrutinized under scientific method. And that is why it may be dismissed. Parents tends to see a lot of progress ion a situation where there is none. Who don't remmeber the sempiternel "it looks like you grew a bit more!" when you stay the same size :).
And finally, you say Quote : "For some unknown reason the medical/scientific community has been very resistant to studying this phenomenon" Unquote well EITHER the sunderland university isn't belonging to the scientific comunity and that article is a bunch of rambling from wacko OR the cientific community is studying it and your supposition is false. Choose your poison.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Funny this has come up now, as I've been thinking about autism, in particular the high functioning versions for a while now, as it appears I have something called Asperger's Syndrome.
Basically it's a mild form of autism - check this out:
Many individuals with Asperger's lead highly productive lives, in highly specialised fields such as academia. Nevertheless, their behaviour is often slightly abnormal - perhaps lacking social skills even if they are more socially aware and willing to interact than people with other kinds of autism. Often someone with Asperger's may be obsessed with complex topics such as music, history, or the weather, and have above average verbal skills. But in some cases, the voice appears to be flat and lacking in emotion, speech can be stilted and repetitive, and conversations tend to revolve around self rather than others. Many have dyslexia or writing problems - and can appear to lack common sense.
...Now is it just me or does that sound like the average geek??
Now.. dotcom boom, THOUSANDS of geeks emigrate to California and in particular the Silicon Valley area. Many of these people were part of failed dotcom startups and relocated to other areas; some were part of successful startups and relocated to other areas. These people have children, and as autism disorders are typically hereditary, I find it as no surprise that their children have a high probability of having autistic disorders.
The following data is lifted directly from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/autism/au
Epidemiologic studies have shown no relationship between MMR vaccination in children and development of autism:
* In 1997, the National Childhood Encephalopathy Study (NCES) was examined to see if there was any link between measles vaccine and neurological events. The researchers found no indication that measles vaccine contributes to the development of long-term neurological damage, including educational and behavioral deficits (Miller et al., 1997).
* A study by Gillberg and Heijbel (1998) examined the prevalence of autism in children born in Sweden from 1975-1984. There was no difference in the prevalence of autism among children born before the introduction of the MMR vaccine in Sweden and those born after the vaccine was introduced.
* In 1999, the British Committee on Safety of Medicines convened a "Working Party on MMR Vaccine" to conduct a systematic review of reports of autism, gastrointestinal disease, and similar disorders after receipt of MMR or measles/rubella vaccine. It was concluded that the available information did not support the posited associations between MMR and autism and other disorders.
* Taylor and colleagues (1999) studied 498 children with autism in the UK and found the age at which they were diagnosed was the same regardless of whether they received the MMR vaccine before or after 18 months of age or whether they were never vaccinated. Importantly, the first signs or diagnoses of autism were not more likely to occur within time periods following MMR vaccination than during other time periods. Also, there was no sudden increase in cases of autism after the introduction of MMR vaccine in the UK. Such a jump would have been expected if MMR vaccine was causing a substantial increase in autism.
* Kaye and colleagues (2001) assessed the relationship between the risk of autism among children in the UK and MMR vaccine. Among a subgroup of boys aged 2-5 years, the risk of autism increased almost 4 fold from 1988 to 1993, while MMR vaccination coverage remained constant at approximately 95% over these same years.
* Researchers in the U.S. found that among children born between 1980 and 1994 and enrolled in California kindergartens, there was a 373% relative increase in autism cases, though the relative increase in MMR vaccine coverage by the age of 24 months was only 14% (Dales et al., 2001). For more on this study, see California Data on Theory of Autism and MMR Immunization.
* Researchers in the UK (Frombonne & Chakrabarti, 2001) conducted a study to test the idea that a new form, or "new variant," of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) exists. This new variant IBD has been described as a combination of developmental regression and gastrointestinal symptoms occurring shortly after MMR immunization. Information on 96 children (95 immunized with MMR) who were born between 1992 and 1995 and were diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder were compared with data from 2 groups of autistic patients (one group of 98 born before MMR was ever used and one group of 68 who were likely to have received MMR vaccine). No evidence was found to support a new syndrome of MMR-induced IBD/autism. For instance, the researchers found that there were no differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups with regard to when their parents first became concerned about their child's development. Similarly, the rate of developmental regression reported in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups was not different; therefore, there was no suggestion that developmental regression had increased in frequency since MMR was introduced. Of the 96 children in the first group, no inflammatory bowel disorder was reported. Furthermore, there was no association found between developmental regression and gastrointestinal symptoms.
* Another group of researchers in the UK (Taylor et al., 2002) also examined whether MMR vaccination is associated with bowel problems and developmental regression in children with autism, looking for evidence of a "new variant" form of IBD/autism. The study included 278 cases of children with autism and 195 with atypical autism (cases with many of the features of childhood autism but not quite meeting the required criteria for that diagnosis, or with atypical features such as onset of symptoms after the age of 3 years). The cases included in this study were born between 1979 and 1998. The proportion of children with developmental regression or bowel symptoms did not change significantly from 1979 to 1988, a period which included the introduction of MMR vaccination in the UK in 1988. No significant difference was found in rates of bowel problems or regression in children who received the MMR vaccine before their parents became concerned about their development, compared with those who received it only after such concern and those who had not received the MMR vaccine. The findings provide no support for an MMR associated "new variant" form of autism and further evidence against involvement of MMR vaccine in autism.
I read the title as "More Evidence of Increase in Profound Altruism"... what a shame.
There are other possibilities too. The US Environmental Assessment Center web page lists many dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide. Maybe this is a new one?
Some industry zealots say it is all just FUD, but I am not so sure. They seem to be members of a violent political party too.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
There was this kid who, as he got older, never spoke. His parents took him to doctors, specialists, psychiatrists, all to no avail. In ever other way, he seemed normal. This continued until his 10th birthday, when one night at dinner, he said "These beans are cold".
His overjoyed parents asked "if you can talk, why haven't you said anything before?"
He replied "Up to now, everything's been ok".
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Some parents are blaming everything from fluoride in the water, Mercury as stabilizing agent in shots, and measels virus from the MMR.
As a biochem grad student with a child on the spectrum, I can say that the current state of research is abysmal - at best shots in the dark based on heuristic arguments and hearsay.
My grandparents had their kids at 16, my parents had me around 20-22, my wife and I are 29-27 respectively. We haven't had children yet because we want to wait for things to become financially stable (we want our kids to have a good home)
:)
Out of all the factors in the article, it didn't seem to touch too much on the age factor. I read somewhere once that older parents can lead to all sorts of abnormalities with pregnancy. Could it be age is playing a role here?
There are a lot of similiar couples/singles my wife and I know, they're slowly approaching 30's, no children yet. Compared with our parents who all had thier kids in their 20's we're a bit behind
It seems that the older we have children, the more that can go wrong. Silicon valley is a tough place to live (financially) and the burden of buying a house here and paying the bills has made alot of my friend put off having children till their 30's. It's an enviromentally prompted response to make sure we give our successive generation a strong foothold in life.
I think the answer is as simple as, people in silicon valley have children at an older age, therefore more autistic children are born as a result.
I consider gluten an unlikely culprit. It's hardly a new item in the environment... it's present in huge quantities in almost every wheat-based product, most notably bread, and always has been. You can't account for an upswing in autism by blaming gluten; we've been swimming in the stuff for centuries, and I doubt that California has suddenly experienced a massive increase in bread consumption.
I'll take these stories more seriously when I see convincing, controlled, peer-reviewed studies that show that they're for real.
--Larry
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
"Thank-you! You're very kind! I'm here all week! Try the fish!"
Autism genes that enhance programming abilities may lead to less children for the autistic programmer (AP), but if the AP is programming in the area of, say, development of life-extending technology (e.g., beating old age, cancer etc.) then the AP genes may lead to greater disperal of human genes later down the road.
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
Interestingly, the test result interpretation key says: Scores over 32 are generally taken to indicate Asperger's Syndrome or high-functioning autism, with more than 34 an "extreme" score. A "normal" score, based on control groups, is about 16 (or 15 for women and between 17 and 18 for men). A group of mathematics-contest winners scored an average of 24.5. A group of scientists scored an average of 18.5 (19 for men, 17 for women), with computer scientists at about 21, physicists at 19 and those in biology or medicine at about 15.
... might be related autism percentage. Just a theory.
An abusive use of antibiotics, causing autoimmunities may very well be a contributing factor.
Regressive Autism May Be Linked to Autoimmune Enteropathy
NEW YORK (MedscapeWire) Apr 30 -- A regressive type of autism described in the April issue of Molecular Psychiatry may have an autoimmune basis, either directly or indirectly from an autoimmune enteropathy.
"We report findings of a novel form of enteropathy in children with autism, characterized by lymphocytic infiltration, increased crypt cell proliferation and enterocyte numbers, with co-localization of IgG and complement C1q on the enterocyte basolateral membrane," write F. Torrente, from Royal Free and University College Medical School in London, United Kingdom, and colleagues.
This comparative histologic study examined children with a form of autism characterized by regression in the second year of life after apparently normal early development. Earlier reports of immunologic abnormalities and unexpected bowel pathology in autistic children have come from this subgroup of affected patients. In this study, the researchers compared duodenal biopsies from 25 autistic children of this type with those from 11 children with celiac disease, 5 with cerebral palsy and mental retardation, and 18 histologically normal controls.
Compared with the normal and cerebral palsy control patients, the autistic children had increased numbers of enterocytes and Paneth cells, increased lymphocyte infiltration in epithelium and lamina propria, and upregulated crypt cell proliferation. Compared with those with celiac disease, the autistic children had fewer intraepithelial lymphocytes and lamina propria cells and more lamina propria T-cell populations. In 23 of 25 autistic children, but in none of the other subjects, there was IgG deposition on the basolateral epithelial surface, co-localizing with complement C1q.
Although these findings support an autoimmune basis for the unexpected bowel abnormalities in children with autism, the authors question the relevance of these findings to the general autistic population, because these children had more obvious bowel symptoms than are typically reported.
Interestingly, however, some children with regressive autism respond to enteric therapy. The bowel changes could also reflect a genetic condition affecting several systems, with brain symptoms more obvious than gastrointestinal symptoms. Although further research is needed to clarify the role of the "gut-brain axis" in autism, autoimmune mechanisms may suggest avenues for future treatment.
"It is possible that in the future there will be such a concept as 'autoimmune autism' within the autism spectrum," J. Licinio and colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, write in an accompanying editorial. "Other biological alterations may be the hallmarks of distinct disorders that may emerge from within our current classification of autism."
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Most of the theories [guesses] seem to focus on genetics or environmental factors.
I don't think it's genetics. People haven't changed that much in general and there isn't a "California" gene pool to point to--new people are moving to California and having children all the time. (I was born and raised in California and I'm still live there [here] so I'm seeing this firsthand.) And I don't think that there are enough "geeks" to account for that big of a shift even in Silicon Valley--It still takes a small army of burger flippers, gas station attendants, janitors, car washers, etc. to support a high-performance "geek."
Under environmental factors there seem to be two areas being looked at: stuff happening or being done to children such as vaccinations, and general lifestyle such as poor diet.
I think that it is environmental and probably something unnatural. My guess is some government mandated program such MTBE in the gasoline.
--
But then again I thought VCR+ was a stupid idea and would die a quick death--so what do I know?
The Globe and Mail (Saturday October 19, 2002) has a related article (with the title given in the subject line) in print and online.
They even have an "AQ" test to see where you are on the "autism spectrum".
I'm not sure I share the enthusiasm some of the quoted experts have for the idea that a number of talented people are having children with "good genes", which is causing this recent increase in autistic behaviour. Even assuming that exteme talent implies retarded social skills, I find it hard to believe that the basic talent it takes to write code, train users and invent documentation is extreme enough to warrant this kind of musing.
Add to that the skepticism I have for anything as complex as social interaction and family having a measurable genetic quality...
Good read nonetheless.
-- clvrmnky
Still another possibility -- that large numbers of families with autistic children had moved into California -- was discarded when it turned out that most children in both groups were born in California.
;-). No need to get militant about diet, just cut out the obvious stuff (soft drinks, candy, donuts, and all that). As a bonus I shed my excess weight with no additional effort and I'm a lot less lethargic. I suspect that this has no influence on Asperger's/Autism but autism might cause or merely corrolate with allergies and other problems as side effects?
;-).
That's because the geeks who moved to California likely didn't marry until they got there. You've still got a self-selected community.
Nevertheless, more parents of younger children reported constipation and vomiting, which they attributed to complications from the measles vaccine. Wheat allergies were also more frequent. But none of these differences fully explain the increase in autism cases in California, Dr. Byrd said.
Interesting, since I fit the profile for Asperger's and I remember vomiting quite a bit when I was little. I was having all sorts of stomach trouble until recently when I discovered that cutting out refined sugar from my diet cured that (sugar feeds yeast, mix Coke/desserts with fresh bread/pizza crust and kaboom!). Fruits and veggies keep things moving
Hmm, trophy wives would be a good defense against having children with full spectrum autism
A lot of the increase might be explained by information overload as well - since the 70's, the amount of information you are exposed to has increased dramatically, and even adult brains are not able to handle it!
These folks have been doing a somewhat radical program for Autistic children (and their parents) for a while now, with impressive results!
I print, therefore I am.
Internet dating allows geeks who never would have been together in the "real world" to meet. So they have autistic offspring. It all started first in California.
As a parent of an autistic child, I'd like to throw in my 2 cents. There used to be a rumor that the MMR shot was causing autism. After about a year of research my wife and I found out that most vacinations are presevered in mercury. The mercury level in these shots is four times what the government calls safe (if you want to consider even some of that stuff safe.) And you usually get three shots at a time. Since everybody is different, we all have different tolerance levels for foreign substances. My son's tolerance was lower than normal I guess. My son started showing signs of autism at 8 months. But thats not all, two days after my son's 6 month shots he had a seizure, followed by two more, within a three month period. -The doctor assured us that this was not because of the shots- Needless to say we sent our child through all the tests, EEG... and more. They showed nothing.
After further research we found that the government banned drug makers from using mercury in vacinations, but forgot to tell them not sell their 5 years worth of inventory. Most of the supply has run out but their is still some shots out their with mercury in them. Because this is starting to make the news you can (and should) request your child's shot without the mercury perservative. There is now tons of info on the web, just google aroung a bit.
So, what might cause Asthma (Which may be leveling off as we speak), childhood Diabetes, increased incidence of autoimmune disorders and cancer, and increased incidence of autism?
It isn't vaccines! The science doesn't stand up. If you think it's vaccines, we'll agree to disagree, okay?
I blame the chlorinated carbon molecule.
Organochlorines have been absent from the earth, in any appreciable amounts, since before the appearance of multicelled life. They are immensely stable, but nothing natural creates them - for energetic reasons, they are purely synthetic. They have unique (powerful, TOXIC) chemistry that we can "exploit but never control", in the words of Pandora's Poison author Shalini Ramanathan. This is an excellent book if you're interested in which feature of our 20th century lifestyle is raising disease incidences.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Autism doesn't make you not want to be around people half as much as it makes you want and practically need your interactions with other people to follow carefully crafted scripts, which is not a feature of this society, and therefore autistic people interact less with other people, despite a desire to do so.
An increase in people with autistic traits should lead to features in society that such people want and need.
A question I've been wondering is whether most people with autistic features (not the severly autistic) can function better in a society with such features than non-autistic people do in this one.
> Dr. Mercola [mercola.com], a naturopathic doctor out of Chicago, also has many good articles about the possible causes of austism.
Like my grandma always said, "you'll never go wrong with a Doctor sells 'superfood' that will 'optimize your weight' and 'improve your detoxification system' on his website."
Those variations which do not cause total reproductive failure are propagated.
I repeat: If you reproduce, your genes will be propagated.. They'll be propagated with two 'a's and only one 'o', by the way.
Now, it may be true (and I'll bet it is true) that autistic people breed less than the rest of us, but autistic people who die before breeding (as they did 5,000 years ago) do not breed at all. If autistic people live long enough to breed, some will breed. If they don't live that long, none will breed. Some of them now live long enough to breed. Some of them are breeding.
To recapitulate: Dead people rarely have children. Live people, even very stupid ones, often have children. I don't have any hard data on hand to support this contention, but my limited experience with ROTTING CORPSES BURIED IN THE GROUND has led me to believe that such corpses don't often pair off and produce offspring. Call me crazy, but that's the impression I get.
So: Autism is not the genetic dead end it once was. There is much less selection against autism than there once was. Don't make the naive Bell Curve mistake of assuming that owning a BMW and a condo in Midtown (money supposedly correlates loosely with intelligence, right?) is a "survival trait". It's irrelevant. Having kids who breed is the only survival trait that ever mattered or ever will, evolutionarily speaking. A wealthy genius who dies childless is a genetic dead end. A drooling, babbling moron with fifteen brainless children, each of whom has fifteen kids in turn, is an evolutionary success story. In modern Western society, intelligence, education, and wealth correlate with low birthrates. The people we consider most successful are the ones least likely to have any genetic influence at all ten generations down the line -- statistically speaking.
I overstress all that yap about wealth and education because people in our culture seem to have a terrible urge to associate sociopolitical "success" with evolutionary "success", and that's just plain foolish. If they correlate at all, it's a negative correlation. It's a distraction from the real issues.
So now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about evolution again. Evolution has a lot to do with "natural selection", which doesn't have to be natural at all (ever seen a Siamese cat?). What's being selected is genes, rather clumsily and inefficiently (not all traits are inherited, remember).
Traits can be selected in , if they tend to lead to a high birth rate. Other things beside genes can lead to a high birth rate, too, but that's much less likely to benefit any particular gene very broadly or for very long.
Traits can also be selected out: Any inherited trait that kills a child in the womb is a dead cert not to propagate itself. Any inherited trait that results in sterility is a dead end. Any inherited trait that invariably kills a child before it's old enough to bread is a dead end, too. Anything that usually does those things has a dim future, but if it doesn't always do those things, it's liable to stick around for a few generations at least. The less efficient a killer or sterilizer it is, the longer it'll linger and the more common it'll be. If we unnaturally turn a reasonably effective "killer gene" like autism into a much less effective "killer gene" by helping autistic kids live long enough to have kids of their own, and if even a few of them are just clever enough to figure out which part you stick into which orifice, why then by golly we are, in a small way, selecting for autism. We're selecting a lot more enthusiastically for other things (whatever genes lead to great skill at basketball, for example, if indeed there are any), but you can select for more than one thing at a time.
Whew! Long lecture, eh? It's almost over. Now we get to the real, honest-to-God money shot of the whole discussion:
None of the above provides any kind of an explanation for a 273% increase in autism between 1987 and 1998. There is absolutely nothing here that could even begin to explain those numbers. Nothing whatsoever. The West has been gradually taking better and better care of such children for a couple thousand years at least, and this "evolution" stuff works gradually. The "evolution" thing might manifest itself as a ten or twenty percent increase in autism over the last five hundred years with a smooth rising curve along the way, but not almost 300% over ELEVEN years. That's not evolution and it's not genetics. That's something in the environment.
The "selecting for autism" theory is pure bullshit, but not for the reasons you give.
I remember a very old 2-3 year slashdot news article mentioning this. It is no longer online. Basically a women did a study with nerdy and brilliant computer geniuses and mathematicians to find out if they are autistic to a mild degree. Turns out she discovered a separate syndrome which is in the mild autism category.
For the geeks reading this:
1.) Do you find certain social situations difficult or awkward?
2.) Do you feel out of place sometimes?
3.) Do you have bizarre certain interests that no on cares about? *computers cough cough
4.) Do you feel smart in certain area's but lack knowledge sometimes of other different area's?
5.) Do you find expressing emotions difficult even though you have them?
6.) Do you feel yourself to be somewhat clumsy ?
7.) As a kid did you feel more interested in complex things like science or weather rather then playing GI joe ?
8.) Do you find yourself to be somewhat compulsive?
Chances are you may be mildly autistic
Autism and its related aspergers syndrome is very complex. Its different then mental retardation and is hard to describe. I know because I have aspergers which is a mild variant of autism and have an IQ of 122.
I have both conditions that match autism and aspergers so I am unique. For example I can easily handle most social situations but I am clumsy and have poor eye and hand coordination. To this day I can not play a piano with two hands. The mechanism in the brain that divides the signals to my hands does not work properly. My left hand will play the rhythm of my right and my right would play the rhythms of my left. In complex situations like in relationships, I can notice my difficulties. I do not do well when women are not real direct about how they feel. Why do women do this?
As a kid I fell into the autism category but as I grew up I become less and less autistic. I use to daydream at school and go into my own world whenever the teacher wasn't looking. I no longer do this. I can do things today that I could not do a decade ago. Its weird and I can not explain it but I guess maybe my brain is re-wiring itself. I have brilliant in some area's but falter in others. Especially anything doing with 3d-space or mathematics. However I am great with logic and programming which uses the same area's of the brain.
http://saveie6.com/
First of all, note that I am not saying you don't have Asperger's. But it doesn't neccessarily follow from the definition you provided that Asperger's is even the most common cause for the behaviors described. For example, I was a bright little kid. I picked up reading early, enjoyed it greatly, and so of course I was made fun of often in elementary school. This, for a long time, made me reluctant to interact with other people or try to make friends - I thought they'd just make fun of me. (Sound familiar, slashdotters?) I got over it eventually, but for a lot of my early childhood, I missed out on a lot of the normal socialization process.
:-)
:-)
/. to assume they have Asperger's - it's an easy explanation for nerdiness, but it needn't always (or even often) be the correct one.
As a result, I'm a bit socially inept. A lot of social interactions other people take for granted - especially interacting with groups of people - I picked up later. But this isn't because of some sort of neurological problem - I just didn't have a normal social life, because the other kids made it hard to have one.
Likewise, I have above-average verbal skills (don't judge by this post, please), a strong interest in politics and history, and I'm a bit self-centered in my conversation. But this can all be easily enough explained as the product of social isolation and an affinity for the written word, not Asperger's. If you like to read, history (and politics, which is really just a subset of the same) is something you're going to have an easy time learning. And as for being a bit self-centered - again, that could be the result of social isolation. Or, I could just be an asshole, that's certainly a possibility.
In the interests of intellectual honesty though, I feel the need to mention some things that I can't explain away with social/psychological factors. Asperger's suffers, if I read the definition write, tend to have mild speech problems - I had to visit a speech therapist for a while when I was seven. And my handwriting has always been very, very bad. And, as my friends and family can attest, I do seem to lack common sense.
My point, however, is it makes no sense for the tends of thousands of fine people on
I'm the stranger...posting to
So this explains the rise in use of Apple computers.
Oh you said autistic.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
The thing with Asperger's is that not everyone suffers with the *all* the symptoms, people typically have their own set out of the bunch, and also there are varying degrees of severity.
To be honest, it sounds to me like you might have Asperger's from what you say in your post - have you ever considered it?
I am convinced that I have it as it explains an awful lot in my life like how I just didnt "get it" when with a group of people and the difficulties I had with essay writing in English class - I consider my command of the english language strong, and it has always been so relatively speaking, however when told to write an essay at school I experienced what can only be experienced as "brain freeze". This used to drive my teachers nuts as I'd be scoring top in most other subjects, yet English was a non starter, and drama was an absolutely terrifying nightmare. I also was not very good at sport. I remember being taken to one side by an english teacher and the conversation was like "now, I know that you arnt doing this deliberately..." etc. Social skills were very awkward for me always until I learned a few things. I still consider myself to be inadvertantly rude sometimes.
As it was eloquently put in a description on Asperger's somewhere "People with Asperger's can learn social skills in much the same way as others learn to play the piano." which I would agree with strongly as I'd say my social skills are now rather good, but it's been hard work.
hello
"Asperger ... weav[ed] his continuum like a protective blanket over the young patients in his clinic as the Nazis shipped so-called mental defectives to the camps. -- from the Wired article.
All my above yap about genes left out a very important point: "Unnatural" selection can turn very, very ugly. Given that we're never as wise as we think we are, that's inevitable. I'm not saying that anybody who discusses human genetics is a Nazi; far from it. What I'm saying is that everybody who ever tried to "clean up the gene pool" by force just happened to do enomous evil and little or no good. I'm saying that the road to Hell is as well-paved with good genetic intentions as any others. Call it a "high correlation".
I'd be surprised to see more than two posts that are actually enrich my mind.
I'd be surprised to see more than two posts that are actually enriching for any Slashdot article.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
When geeks breed. Get out of the gene pool, before you pollute it with more of your defective offspring.
One of the ways life has seemed to work lately is that the higher-end bits of society (higher paying job, better education, etc) are so damn busy that they have less time to breed. I wouldn't entirely discount the possibility that being able to afford a house full of electronic gismo's isn't subjecting them to all sorts of fun partial-sterility-causing radiation either.
Now, on the other hand, you can take somebody who is not quite as smart, maybe works his butt off 9-5 and then goes home. Then, instead of going to shopping, social clubs, blah blah blah, he either grabs a little TV or hops in bed and makes a few kids.
The other end to this is that those with Harvard educations and etc etc also often seem to see children as an obstacle to personal success in life (my question, what do you have to show for life at 70 with $2mil and nobody to inherit it?).
Anyhow, this is not a rant. The final point is this:
I know *somebody* will want to flame me on this. Disclaimer: I'm not rich in any way, nor do I believe that those with such opportunity should be allowed to have children any more than those of lesser. I'm not a scientist. These conclusions are only on a basis of independent reading and some researching and may not be entirely applicable to autism.
Makes me wonder. I doubt very much this is a result of geek inbreeding. I mean seriously, where are they getting all these female geeks?
/. readers are getting women on a large scale. Why didn't someone let me know hell froze over?
You are implying that
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
The diagnosis has been a great help.
In the past, people used to say "What the fuck is WRONG with you?!" I would reply, "uhhh... dunno", and they'd say "you're a fucking FREAK, that's what's wrong with you!"
Now, people ask what's wrong with me, and I say "I've got Asperger Syndrome", and they say "what the fuck does THAT mean?!" So I tell 'em, "it means I'm a fucking FREAK, that's what it fucking means!"
...and everybody's happy.
No, seriously, I do have most of the symptoms of Asperger Syndrome, though not as pronouncedly as some. My shrink likes it for a diagnosis (with the loud caveat that the DSM IV is a lot of arglebargle in some ways). I'm just astoundingly poor at social interactions (like, well outside the normal range of variation), not totally incapable, as some are. And so on and so forth. But you know what that means to me, to put a label on it, to know exactly what my problem is called? It doesn't mean shit. They can't treat it can they? Just knowing it is worthless: Telling a girl "I seem weird because I've got Asperger Syndrome" won't help any better than just standing there silently, trying desperately to think of something to say while she realizes that I'm some kind of freak. In fact, I'm a lot better off just seeming "sort of shy". Lots of women don't see shyness as a deal-breaker; I lost my virginity on schedule, like anybody (I'm just barely bright enough not to lecture her about Linux, however tempting it may be). Genetically-linked SYNDROMES that turn people into freaks? That is a deal-breaker.
So who fucking cares if I'm this way because of Asperger Syndrome, or fungus on my ass, or because Mom drank Drano during her pregancy? Not me.
I don't know if this is too obvious but if the thesis is that geeks have a higher chance of getting autistic children why don't we just check the line of work of the parents? Or perhaps we could just check the frequency of /. membership among parents to autistic children... That should sort things out.
www.prestigepublishing.com
Hi, can you mark "yes" to 4 or more really generic questions that are so incredibly vague that 95% of the population could also easily "yes" to?
I have no idea how you got modded up. I guess it's because slashdot moderation is broken for any topic outside the LINUX RULES! and MICROSOFT SUCKS! list.
I feel I must mention something that noone here has brought up... The effect of pollution on human gameteogenesis and prenatal development. The areas mentioned by the article are all areas of semiconductor manufacturing, which spew large amounts of fairly destructive compunds in to the environemnt.
The rise of incidence of ANY birth defect in a given area should arouse suspicions of some form of teratogen (a substance which can harm embryonic development) contaminating the local environment. An increase of over two ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE in less than 10 years is cause for genuine alarm.
The timing of the increase in autistic births lends itself more to the idea of a cumulative pool of toxins, rather than an increase in geek reproduction. Remember, the incidence of autism is far higher AFTER the internet boom than during. If autism is caused by geeks mating, The flight of laid-off geeks from these manufacturing areas would make the austism rate DROP after the boom.
The argument that geekiness is a form of heterozygous autism has a certain pop-sci appeal. But the effect is too profound, and too economy-independent, to be the result of a natural increase of geek-genes in a population.
just my two pesos
Lord Halfjack
I blame the chlorinated carbon molecule.
That doesn't explain why the profound increase in Autism is present in CALIFORNIA, with no evidence (so far) of anything similar elsewhere.
So, assuming that further research doesn't come up with a similar rise elsewhere, that raises the question of "Why California". (Or why heavily in California and more lightly elsewhere.) Exposure to chlorinated carbon compounds is not particularly higher there - especially given Californian's aversion to chlorinated water.
Continuing to assume that causality implies correlation and it's a chemical issue, let's go down the list.
Right at the top: Gasoline oxygenation additives - in particular: MTBE, to which everybody in California who pumps their own gas - or drinks water - is exposed to in significant amounts, and has been for years. It's quite toxic, and has been implicated as a cause of asthma for a while now.
Certain illegal drugs exposure during and just before pregnancy is probably significantly higher in California - both because the drugs have been more prevalent here and because people interested in taking them have migrated here. But they're hardly unknown or unpopular elsewhere.
Dropping drugs for a bit: Another candidate is child rearing practices - in schools and home. California is the epicenter of the feel-good schools of child rearing. Systematically reward self-destructive behavior with attention and you can quickly teach a child to emit it continuously. And self-esteem based teaching systems will do precicely that.
California is also a hotbed of NON-vaccination. Side-effects of childhood or foetal viral infection immediately springs to mind. (Second trimester influenza has already been implicated in another mental syndrome - Schizophrenia.)
I could go on. But somehow I don't think the culprit will turn out to be Freon, PCB, Vynil Chloride, or chlorinated water byproducts.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
1) Humans are travelling further than ever from their place of birth to find their mate. This means mixing with more people and therefore having a higher chance of having children with a like personality type (oft influenced by genetics)
2) Societies function very differently in the technology age. There are far more divisions, subgroups and sociological / values seperation in society. People with slight autistic personality traits are more likely to marry someone alike themselves than ever before
3) Pollution. We're in an age of massive chemical and heavy-metal pollution (which will probably ultimately kill most of us, but that's another story), there are theories that autistism is triggered in people with certain genes by the presence of mercury in conjunction with other pollutants.
4) Teeth and vaccinations. They have both until recently contained lots of mercury, which is passed onto the child both in utero and in the first couple of years of life
5) Computers. Never before has there been a social paradim which is more of an autistic-magnet... ~10% of those on the autistic spectrum are female after all.
The computer industry is utterly dominated by people on the autistic spectrum. When people think of autism, they think of "Asperger's Syndrome" or "'full autism'", but the reality is that there is a 3rd and probably more common lower-level which very seldomly is diagnosed. I'm in this zone. Just because you've got normal facial/emotion recognition doesn't mean you're not on the spectrum.
From the article:
"...the mysterious brain disorder that affects a person's ability to form relationships and to behave normally in everyday life."
OH, that's why I don't have any friends and people think I'm wierd! I must be autistic!
"Re:Hmm...maybe too! (Score:1)
p icsilicovolcanoconiosis!" And yeah, maybe you do. But you need to look at other, simply possibilities as well - simply choosing the most interesting one, like Asperger's, is intellectually dishonest.
by skinfitz on Sunday October 20, @03:58PM (#4490881)
(User #564041 Info | http://www.mywebsitelinks.com/)
The thing with Asperger's is that not everyone suffers with the *all* the symptoms, people typically have their own set out of the bunch, and also there are varying degrees of severity.
To be honest, it sounds to me like you might have Asperger's from what you say in your post - have you ever considered it?
I am convinced that I have it as it explains an awful lot in my life..."
Have I considered it? Yes, that's why I mentioned a couple things which could, concievably indicate Asperger's. But there are so many other, more mundane things which can cause social ineptitude and other "Asperger's symptoms" that it seems implausible that all or even most nerds are the product of this disease. People tend to have medical student's syndrome - they hear about a disease, and they say to themselves "Hey! I have that symptom! I have that symptom too! I must have Asperger's/cancer/pseumonia/pneumonoultramicrosco
I'm the stranger...posting to
The evidence is becoming very persuasive that immunizations do bear a large portion of the blame...
There may be commonality between the vaccination figures and autism figures. That does not mean that the one causes the other.
(Commence the flamebait about how we're playing with fire, yadda yadda yadda...)
To be successful a vaccination programme needs to include over 95% of the population in order to achieve 'herd immunity'. Less than 95% and you run the risk of an epidemic. Remember, the ultimate aim is to erradicate the virus. Deciding not to vaccinate your children based on the unsubstantiated causality between vaccination and autism is selfish and irresponsible.
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
However, it is possible that a milder expression of the same genes does have advantages, ala tech centers. Think sickle-cell anemia, where one gene gives you malaria resistantance, but two make you very sick.
So clearly, the answer to stopping the spread of this Autism is to mandate that every geek coder in Silicon Valley must mate with a supermodel who has no math or technical skills whatsoever. They must not mate with other geeks, but only with those who get paid to wear their underwear on stage. This is absolutely necessary for the survival of intelligence and technology in our country! So please models, take one for the team!
Hmm, I posted this story with an article in the Globe and Mail yesterday and got rejected, but "ce la vie".
Here is my slashdot commentary on the article with the direct link to the Globe and Mail article (also in my sig).
Here is the Globe and Mail article entitled: Is there a 'geek' syndrome?. The title points out that parents with a technical background are far more likely to produce autistic children. Some studies have shown that parents of autistic children are twice as likely to be engineers. Rather alarming. The article also features an "autism quotient" quiz to determine the prominence of ones autistic traits.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
... with any variant of Autism. However, despite not understanding, my parents were very understanding. I never even heard of Aspergar Syndrome until less than a year ago, though I had self diagnosed myself as having some form of mild autism since my mid teens.
I too have slowly learned the things that came naturally to other people... subtle nuances of body language, interpersonal relationships, etc. I am very sensitive to sound... I cannot have a TV on while I am trying to do anything, because it distracts me completely. I cannot tune it out. And I have various other symptoms common to Asperger Syndrome (AS), though I have never been 'withdrawn' or in any way introverted. I have always been outgoing, though often vary naive.
I doubt having a label to attach to my oddities would have made me less of a pariah in school.
It is interesting to think that Geeks = Autism, but I think it is highly unlikely. Many people diagnosed with AS may have some geeky traits, but that does not mean that those with geeky traits have AS. It would be interesting to see a study done on this though.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I saw a 20/20 type story a year or so ago about a lady whose son developed autism, and after a lot of research she found that removing dairy products from his diet essentially cured his autistic behavior. Check out articles like this:
? pa ge=2
http://www.parents.com/articles/health/2085.jsp
I'm totally serious. There's a brief test at the end of this Globe and Mail article on the autism explosion and the apparent geek link.
:-)
Interestingly enough, I received an AQ of 12 (below the average of 18), meaning I'm more well-adjusted than "normal" people. Rather amusing I thought.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Some people have found gluten-free diets successful in helping autistic children.
The whole gluten-intolerance area is *way* behind other areas of research; hopefully someday there will be more discoveries that can help both conditions (especially autism).
Rather than slashdotting a specific site, I'll just mention that a google search for "gluten intolerance" and autism has a lot of related sites and articles.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
This one's by the Globe and Mail... very interesting read. Here
What economic motives are there for vaccine makers to produce a product that could cause autism?
Indeed, what motive is there for an industry whose downside is not only recognized but economically protected by U.S. state and federal law? As of 1995, over $600 million dollars have been paid out to families of vaccine-damaged children.
How is it, that, of all medicines, vaccinations are (to its supporters) somehow without risk? That allergic reactions are unthinkable, and the notion of triggered immune disorders the very stuff of quacks and wingnuts?
As for searching the newsgroups, I have to just laugh. What an unbiased and peer-reviewed source!
When pharmeceutical firms and govt begin funding peer-reviewed research into adverse reactions, then hopefully we can all laugh with you. When knowledge replaces conjecture, we'll all be better off.
There is virtually no medicine without risk, even simple medications such as aspirin and its kind have adverse reactions. Immunizations contain not just the dead or partially dead bacterium or virus, but a whole host of other ingredients, including culturing material and mercury, some of what is suspected in producing adverse reactions.
Finally, there are few who don't acknowledge the benefits of vaccines to society. But thanks to their effectiveness, the risk of disease has been replaced by the risk of adverse reaction. That risk has been identified, but there's no way to protect an individual from it. That's the problem that's got to be solved, predicting when an individual will get sick from an immunization.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Are sure you didn't miss one?
I was safely at 35. Oh wait. Err, I wouldn't worry much about it. I guess I rock once in a while, but I function pretty well in society. I'm sometimes accidentally rude. People that know me know there's no malice intended. I guess that's a problem when it is intended. But more convincingly I've known people with autism and they have many more problems than your average geek, so it's safe to assume the survey is not so well calibrated, at least for our demographic.
I'm sorry, but how can any Autism study say there's a 273% increase in Autsim and not take into account that the DIAGNOSTIC RULES CHANGED IN 1994?
The DSM-IV came out in 1994 and significantly broadened the diagnostic criteria for Autism. In my not so humble opinion, this has to have contributed directly to the 273% number the UCD study spouts.
My 3-year-old son was diagnosed with Autism last year. There are a huge number of "autistic traits" scattered through out my family. I have no doubt that if born today, I would have been diagnosed on the "autism spectrum", my father certainly would have been, as well as two of my nephews and quite likely my sister.
As it is, we were simply called "different" or "challenging" or "problematic". "Autism" was reserved for the likes of "Rainman".
The study (at least as it's being reported) is invalid. There has not been a 273% increase in Autism, there has been a 273% percent increase in the Autism cases being diagnosed.
I have a personal theory on the major origions of autism. It is often reported that autistic children often have mothers who are in intellectually demanding careers and are of above average intelligence. My theory goes that such mothers tend to have less emotional bonding to their children, perhaps in pregnancy as well, thereby giving their unborn children a profound sense of rejection. The children then retreat into their own inner world.
The extremely high intellectual demands of modern working environments doesn't leave much place for emotions or attention or warmth for that matter. This is what I attribute the raise in autism to.
To underscore my theory, go and visit online places like the Fray where lots of lonely rejected people recount their inner feelings and lives in our digital age.
If you get a diagnosis after suggesting that you might have certain conditions, go to at least one more doctor and don't say a thing to them and let them diagnose you.
There are people that have real problems and you detract from their plight, just because you are some geek that needs reassurace that you are special and medically fucked in the head as opposed to just being fucked from your personality.
Everybody saw Rain Man and *somehow* the diagnoses went up.
A paste from that page, there's more news articles grouped there, well worth the loook before you (anyone you) dismiss it out of hand. There's billions of dollarts at stake, maybe trillions if you count the lawsuit potential. There's been cases so blatant-kid gets shot, gets immediately sick, doesn't recover- that it can't be dismissed out of hand. the newspaper article is repeating the mantra of mega pharmco profits="good", nothing to see here move along now. Phooie. This info is being ignored in favor of "profits". And before anyone wants to debate vaccinations good/bad, read the links first, there's hour's worth.
Documents 1 to 10 matching the query "autism AND vaccinations":
1. Fears Raised Over Preservative In Measles And Other Vaccines Abstract: Rense.com Fears Raised Over Preservative In Measles And Other Vaccines By Kimberly Atkins Boston Globe Correspondent 7-18-1Lyn Redwood, a registered nurse, thought she was doing the right thing when she took her healthy son, Will, to get vaccinated (8,498 bytes - 7/23/2001 7:50:52 AM GMT)
2. SIGHTINGS Abstract: SIGHTINGS Vaccinations May Be Rx For Disaster By Kelly Patricia O'Meara Insight Magazine Online Vol.15 No.37 - October 4-11, 1999 Published Date 9-10-99, in Washington, D.C.http:www.insightmag.com/articles/story4.html. 9-15-99. The ounce of prevention t (13,651 bytes - 7/23/2001 6:09:34 PM GMT)
3. UK Families Seek Compensation For Alleged MMR Vaccine Harm Abstract: Rense.com UK Families Seek Compensation For Alleged MMR Vaccine Harm By Richard Woodman 1-7-2. LONDON (Reuters Health) - More than 1,000 British families have joined a legal battle for millions of pounds compensation for harm they claim was caus (4,861 bytes - 1/8/2002 3:17:15 AM GMT)
4. SIGHTINGS Abstract: SIGHTINGS Measles and Mumps Vaccines Banned In UK BBC News 8-28-99. The single-dose jabs may be ineffective, says the government The government has banned the only alternative to the controversial triple measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccin (4,889 bytes - 7/23/2001 5:15:36 PM GMT)
5. Top UK Doctor Ties 170 Cases Of Autism To MMR Baby Vaccine Abstract: Rense.com Top UK Doctor Ties 170 Cases Of Autism To MMR Baby Vaccine By Lorraine Fraser - Medical Correspondenthttp:www.telegraph.co.uk. 1-21-01. The consultant who first raised concerns about MMR vaccinations has disclosed to The Telegraph that (5,990 bytes - 7/30/2001 4:47:57 AM GMT)
6. More Madness - Toxic Vaccine ORDERED Used On Babies Abstract: Rense.com More Madness - Toxic Vaccine ORDERED Used On Babies By Rosie Waterhouse The Sunday Times - London 8-6-1The Department of Health has told doctors they must use stocks of a mercury-based vaccine for infants even though it is being (5,826 bytes - 8/7/2001 1:48:11 AM GMT)
7. More Madness - Toxic Vaccine ORDERED Used On Babies Abstract: Rense.com More Madness - Toxic Vaccine ORDERED Used On Babies 8-5-1. The Department of Health has told doctors they must use stocks of a mercury-based vaccine for infants even though it is being phased out for safety reasons. The department is (5,538 bytes - 8/7/2001 1:48:21 AM GMT)
8. Living Without Vaccinations Abstract: Rense.com Living Without Vaccinations By Dorsey Griffith Sacramento Bee 12-5-1. They are as lively and rosy-cheeked as any 5- and 6-year-old girls, their long, blond hair gleaming in the sun as they swing upside down from the monk (10,281 bytes - 12/6/2001 2:57:44 AM GMT)
9. Measles Virus Found In Boy's Brain After MMR Vaccine Abstract: Rense.com Measles Virus Found In Boy's Brain After MMR Vaccine By Lorraine Fraser Medical Correspondent The Telegraph - UK 10-7-2A child who developed severe epilepsy after receiving the MMR jab has been found to have measles virus from the vaccine in hi (11,946 bytes - 10/8/2002 6:14:05 AM GMT)
10. Mother Of Five Children...All With Autism...To Sue Over MMR Vaccine Abstract: Rense.com Mother Of Five Children. All With Autism.To Sue Over MMR Vaccine By Celia Hall - Medical Editorhttp:www.telegraph.co.uk. 1-26-01. A mother who claims that five of her children developed autism after having their measles, mumps and (3,064 bytes - 7/30/2001 4:47:58 AM GMT)
more links at parent link
One of the implicit themes I see here that has not gotten much open discussion is that of being smarter than other people, both as a kid and afterwards. This notion seems very deeply embedded in geek culture, and is tightly bound up the sense of alienation that seems so prevalent here. For some reason, being "smarter" than other kids seems to set one in the direction of alienting narcissism.
As Jay Matthews, a very well-spoken education columnist for the Washington Post puts it in a piece on college interviews:
This is some of this wisest advice I can imagine giving a teenager. First of all the notion of being "smarter" than other people is suspect - you have to define smart in a very narrow way to believe that. Or put another way, there sure are a lot of "dumb jerks" out there who seem to be able to accomplish many of their life goals. Are they "smart"? Who cares, they're getting what they're after.
None of this is to contest the more knowledgeable points of view on autism or Asperger's, but simply to point out that there's a pretty strong link between alienation and one-dimensional estimations of intelligence (see the work of Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences, and to encourage everyone in this very intellectual crowd, particularly those raising children (saw a couple disturbing posts of 40+ somethings who really think they're smarter than most others) to look hard at what it means to be smart, and at the consequences of teaching a child to be a particular kind of smart.
Ever notice that when insurance companies get forced to cover something the occurence of that something increases to exceptional numbers?
Gee....
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Whatever happened to plain vanilla "shyness". In my own experience there seems to be some correlation between shyness and above average intelligence. So lack of social skills or social anxiety cannot be the same as Autism or Aspergers which are both forms of brain dysfunction. I'm getting tired of so many geeks here listening to a description of Autism or Aspergers and automatically assuming "that's me, at least a little". There is such a thing as shyness, social anxiety, introversion, etc, which are not related to Autism or Aspergers. Most geeks are just shy, end of story.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It is known that couples have an IQ near the average. I know many cases myself. My sister has about 160 and only dates guys belove 70 or so. :( I have arround 130 and seem to like girl with an IQ of 90 or arround.
:)
Of course, I will work it out against the odds and try to find a good match (IQ > 130) but it isn't working yet.
The funniest I heard was about a topic that about the average keyboard having 400 times more germs than a keyboard and someone posted the following...
I'll lick my spacebar if you'll lick the rim OK?
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
400x more germs than a toilet seat
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Seriously, the article jumps too far with conclusions. It almost says that geeks are genetically different than other human beings.
The Raven.
The Raven
> Question 4:
> Do you feel smart in certain area's but lack
> knowledge sometimes of other different area's?
>
> This one's just classic. Let's see your options:
> A. Answer No: This means you know EVERYTHING
> about EVERYTHING. Or think you do. Which makes
> you a conceited idiot.
You're misunderstanding the question. The answer is No most of the times. Here are the cases:
CASE 1) You're conceited. You've covered this case. The answer is No.
CASE 2) You're an average guy, so you don't see yourself as particularly smart in any one area. Therefore, the "Do you feel smart in certain area's" clause is false and the answer is No.
CASE 3) You feel like a dummy or a loser. Therefore, the "Do you feel smart in certain area's" clause is false and the answer is No.
CASE 4) You're smart but recognize you have weaknesses. The answer is yes here.
If you define smartness as being greater than one standard deviation, cases 2 and 3 make up about 67% of the population. The rest of the population would be divided among the cases 1 and 4. That means over 67% of the population would answer No.
You're not autistic, you are just a filthy, beast-bearded GNU/Linux hippy.
"It will be Interesting to See What Happens"
"Autism is caused by mercury (thimerosal) in vaccines [mercola.com]."
If this were true, in the future we should see a sharp drop in Autism cases, in children born right around now. The FDA passed down an instruction to reduce the use of thimerosal a while ago, and most manufacturers have either reformulated, or are in the process of reformulating to use other preservatives (a few never used thimerosal to begin with).
Many forms of Autism are related to the link between both sides of the brain. People with less connections (or less effective connections -- which is a different problem) tend to be geeks. The other end of the spectrum seems are the socialites. Thouse with low levels of cross conects tend to be able to focus on a problem on one side of the brain but are hopeless for problems that require both. Men typicaly have fewer cross connects than women. A high level of cross connects are very importaint for verbal communication of ideas (and they play a part in strange moodyness as well).
If your mother's father was an Engineer, your very likly to be a geek if your male. When you throw this into a social context, you will find that most of the women who like hanging around with geeks, have a geeky father or or gradfather. This means they have the gene for this and have become conditioned to the "different" level of communication. If a geek breeds with a woman who has the gene, a geeky child is very likly. Its standard genetics and it explains why the best geeks of all time had a very short line of decendants.
Mercury causes autism, mercury is in vaccines. In the past 2 or 3 years there has been a huge increase in fish consumption due to its health benefits. Fish has lots of mercury. Its also possible fossil fuel additives made to clean up the air in CA are creating mercury compounds.
Arrgghhh!! Disonance--Years of video games make me want a high score but that would mean ...
--
But then again I thought VCR+ was a stupid idea and would die a quick death--so what do I know?
As a person ages, the likelihood of RNA creating genetic misspelling in DNA increases. Locations where DNA is being replicated often is the most likely area for RNA misspellings during DNA production. This means that sperm you produce today is less like you than sperm you produced when you were 15. As you age and misspellings compound, useful genes may be modified (vs. junk DNA which is more like a personal serial number than something that changes your existence).
These "misspellings" of useful DNA aren't bad or good, but simply different. The differences could give your child a genetic advantage just as easily as a genetic disadvantage. If Autism is, in fact, genetically related, the misspelling could create the gene recipe for Autism in your offspring, or it could create a gene recipe that is further away from Autism than you currently are.
I'm surprised that none of the very-bright folks that comprise /. have pointed out the following: The diagnosis of autism has jumped by 3x. Not necessarily the actual incidence of autism. Real prevalence and diagnosed prevalence are often very close to each other -- for example, in cancer and other diseases that are diagnosed through actual science.
In the case of autism, which seems to have followed ADHD as the psychological pathology du jour, real and diagnosed prevalence may be *very* different. I've had the opportunity to research the subject lately, and the lack of science in the area is astonishing, even by the pathetic standards of the field of psychology/psychiatry.
The standards for diagnosing Autism (DSM-IV)are extraordinarily subjective, and thus very open to interpretation. The tests used to try to get a handle on certain aspects of development in an attempt to make a diagnosis are known to be very unreliable -- different folks giving the same test to the same child will typically get very different results.
At least one Psychologist has boasted to me that they, and others, make sure to over-diagnose children so that the children can get the marvelous benefits of the treatment, often comprising 25 hours of one-on-one time with a trained educator.
The problem is that the treatments have not been shown to be safe or effective. To my knowledge, there are NO controlled studies that have shown that any treatment for autism is either safe, or effective. See for yourself, search PubMed. Or look at this a grudging admission from the definitive book in the field, Educating Children With Autism, an otherwise evil little piece of work.
So, we have a nasty diagnosis being pinned on all sorts of kids, and very expensive treatments that, in my opinion, are as likely to drive the kids batty as to help them.
Very sad, particularly when all of this money and energy could be used to better help the folks that really do need it.
A number of people here seem inclined to blame this autism increase on "geek inbreeding". While that might turn out to be the case, I would point out that the reports do not mention any geographical bias in the per-capita rates of the cases. That is, the reports don't mention that Silicon Valley children are more likely to suffer from autism than LA children. Such a locality bias should stick out like a sore thumb if this were due to "geek inbreeding". Also, the New York Times article mentioned that there was no greater likelihood of a child having autism based on the parents educational status. You would expect such a bias if engineers were more likely than others to produce autistic children.
Why is it that we care so fucking much about this? Who gives a damn if our children happen to be different from Joe and Jane's kid. So what, they have problems talking, or adjusting socially. They'll either adapt or fail. If they fail, it's because no one tried to help them with this, or they couldn't do it on their own. So much bullshit that we get about things like this, and there's nothing you can do about it. If there's nothing you can do, why care?
Gluten intolerance is not the issue. Gluten is decomposed into glutomorphine molecules in the intestine. Many, many plants contain opiod peptides because all animals mediate respiration through the opiod peptides. Plants have evolved this trait so as to prevent their consumption by insects. Wheat contains particularly powerful opiod peptides, which is one of the reasons it is so resilient to insect infestation (but not molds).
,B., This and that : an artefactual alkaloid and its peptide analogs. Trends Pharmacol. Sci. 1992 / 13 (9) / 341-345.
For some reading on this info try these articles:
1. Fukudome, S. et al, Release of opioid peptides, gluten exorphins by the action of pancreatic elastase. FEBS Lett. 1997 / 412 (3) / 475-479. , Fukudome, S. et al, Gluten exorphin C : a novel opioid peptide derived from wheat gluten. FEBS Lett. 1993 / 316 (1) / 17-19.
2. Max
Note: Exorphins are opiod peptides which are exogenous in origin, as opposed to the endrogenous opiods (endorphins) created by your body.
Capsule summaries of these journal articles can be found at The National Library of Medicine.
I will attempt to summarize.
Opiods are used by the body to condition social behavior. Sex, human contact, listening to others speak, all of these activities cause measureable increases in endorphin levels in the brain. This occurs to condition humans to continue that behavior, it is a classic reward conditioning system. I don't want to get into WHY respiration and feelings of well being are related, but it is due to ancient evolution which is not completely understood. Social behavior of ants is mediated in a similar fashion for instance.
Glutan affects all people like all opiod peptides do. Is it any wonder that Asthma has also increased at an alarming rate, as rapid of an increase as autism? Not at all, because autism is the behavioral result of opiod consumption. As an adult, its not that big of a deal. A junkie can still speak, but it is the childs desire to be with his mother, that drives him to learn to speak from her. Without that initial drive, he never learns correctly. Asthma is ALWAYS the result of respiratory suppresion due to kappa-opiod receptor agonists. Constipation is another major problem. How many people here always know chicks who pop laxatives like mad? It is also because of eating glutan.
The other primary reason why glutan is added to foods is because it is addictive. More glutan, means mor profits. Why would glutan, a protein from wheat, be added to junk food like Doritos or Slim Jims, or instant soup, or TV dinners... It is to make people eat more.
Today, the pricessing of wheat has allowed extremely concentrated forms of gluten. Many are chemically decomposed such that they are nearly PURE gluto-morphine molecules, so that they are even MORE addictive.
And this is the way companies want it. Haven't you ever thought its crazy that people overeat on cookies, and they say its the sugar. But no one overeats on bananas, even though they have MORE Sugar per gram than cookies? Or they say its the starch, but no one gets fat eating 10 pounds of potatoes a day, even though potatoes contain a HUGE quantity of starch, more per gram than cookies? Its the opiod peptide content of these foods which causing overeating.
The government has known this for years. The first example of finding these effects of wheat go back to 1980, of you do the research. The government doesn't care, because they know just as the Roman emperors knew 2000 years ago that a population jacked up on wheat products all day will be less likely to rebel.
Hasn't anyone wondered why the popularus party at the end of the Republic gave away ONLY bread? Not any other kind of food? Or why prisoners are usually given bread? It keeps them apathetic and complacent.
Is it also any wonder that the narcosis effect commonly called ADHD is also countered by CNS drugs? Or better yet, that Amphetamine was until 10-15 years ago also the only drug used for Asthma? Respiration is stimulated through activation of the Alpha-2 adrenal receptors in the brain.
As far as WHEAT and Autism, for MANY mild cases of autism, administration of an opiod antagonist drug, such as nalextrone, can easily reverse much of the behavior (or lack thereof) exhibited by such patients.
What is the problem? In the past, natural wheat was used, and many population groups evolved to resistant to small doses of gluto-morphine peptides. But through modern chemistry, new kinds of glutan is being added to foods which is far more powerful. The end result is a population that is prone to asthma, apathy, antisocial behavior, constipation, and addicted to stimulants such as caffeine, nicotine, amphetamine, or cocaine.
The number of people who do not consume any of those drugs is very, very small.
I will be honest, there is a way out. Your body does adjust. I was even on prescription dextroamphetamine for a long time, smoked for 10 years, drank coffee every day. Not consuming wheat sounds like its impossible, but its SOO easy. It is hard at first, you will crave these foods, but like all addictions, it will past. It just takes time.
The end result is you will think more clearly, breath more deeply, be more awake, and have more of a will to live. Its also nice to have regular bowel movements. Anyway, its been a long weekend for me, and its time to go to sleep. I encourage anyone who reads this far to think before you eat, especially if you give food to children. Wheat products and junk food containing wheat is just not suitable for human consumption, and harms children in the long run.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Nutrasweet causes many health disorders including autism in infants, and cancer.
Worse than that, If your drink "Diet" drinks, statistically your will not loose weight. Instead, you will be drinking foul tasting chemical acid caffiene sugar water and increasing your chances for a number of illnesses.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of comments about this one. I'd even be willing to bet that most /.ers have more symptoms of Aspergers than not.
Getting down to cases: I can only theorise based on my own internal experiences. So, here goes some facts and opinions, without attempt at analysis:
When I was about 6, I had a General Anaesthetic. It took me over 10 hours to come out of it. For much of that period I was dimly aware of external stimuli, they just weren't important. Eventually I managed to decode the face-slaps and sounds as attempts to wake me up, and thought it useful to do so. I guess (and I do mean guess) that a lot of autistic children just haven't seen a good reason to interact socially or with anything else in the Universe. Even a fingerprint can be endlessly fascinating, so why bother with the sounds that the universe (the bits that are other people) makes? They are just a distraction. You can make them go away by screaming, so why remember words? As for my own son - who's now 16 months old - I'm playing games with him with lots of mechanical toys (lots of fun to be had with swinging doors ), but also playing social-interaction games such as "pass the juice bottle" where we share a cup of juice, taking turns. And a lot of exaggerated facial grimaces for smiles, frowns and other non-verbal communications. I want to show him that things outside himself are interesting too. Because to lose speech and get too fascinated by internals is debilitating and very very not-useful, fun though it might be. You will get frustrated, and not know how to alter your environment to make it better. You will also upset people around you who care about you.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
I'm amazed that a comment like this could get moderated up so high.
It is also known that Walt Disney's head has been frozen and the Great Wall of China is visible from the moon with the naked eye. It's known that 10% of the population is gay. It's known that we only use 10% of our brains. It's known that if you swim right after you eat you'll get cramps and drown.
If there's no evidence to back up a ridiculous assertion like this, why moderate it up? Fucking slashtards.
just wondering what the silcone breast corrrelation is?
and before you hit me..SI is foudn to be a posion in animals including hmans..
or it could be the legacy of once having fabrication chip plants in california..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Muhahahahahhahahahah
Yes, this is the proverbial it. The end of the universe as we know it.
In just a few moments, ladies and gentlemen
I have a five year old son who is allergic to sulfites. There have been times when he has been exposed to too high a level and he has exhibited some autistic tendencies. I also have a nephew who exhibits strong autistic tendencies at times but when his mother makes a greater effort to watch what she feeds him he reverts back to a normal behaving child. (He has some unknown allergies but we suspect it is also sulfites since he seems to have trouble with the same foods as my son.) I would not suggest that all autism (or even any autism) is caused by food allergies but is it not possible that the combination of genetics and a food allergen trigger could bring out the problem? Does anyone know of other information that might corroborate this hypothesis?
The New York times has an article (no registration required)
About farking time. Taco, perhaps you might want to add code to Googleize NYT links in stories?
your user name, flat 5. is that as in tritone, or sharp 11?
Here's a related one. I once asked a biologist how it was possible for a genetic disposition for homosexuality to survive Darwinism. It seemed obvious to me that homosexuals would have fewer biological children than heterosexuals. He agreed with me, adding that according to computer models, even if homosexuals had 99% as many children as heterosexuals did, any hypothetical "gay gene" would be completely wiped out in a few thousand years.
But, he added, some biologist had recently published a clever theory: Apparently small tribes of prehistoric people would generally have a shaman, or medicine man. Furthermore, he said, for various reasons homosexuals were particularly well-suited to such a vocation. Therefore, a tribe whose gene pool was "just gay enough" had better survival odds than a "straight tribe", since its shamans would be more competent, and suitable shaman protegés easier to find.
In other words, although the shaman had no sons, he would have more nephews. And that could theoretically have been enough to tip the balance of natural selection.
(Note that I've been putting "gay gene" in quotes because I believe that, while there may exist congenital factors, homosexuality is a conclusion drawn from many non-congenital factors as well.)
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
There is a great book out there called "Thinking in pictures" the author, Temple Grandin is autistic she is also one of the Worlds experts in designing humane slaughter houses and livestock handling pens. She has the ability to design these complex structures in her head. A very intresting read about a remarkable woman.
At 146, you're never going to find an intellectual mate. I remember that less than 2% of the population is over 120. I usually test at the 130 range. You probably represent about
Your biological urges will tell you to BREED UP. Your mental mind will tell you that breeding up means that you need to find someone that can hold a conversation on your level with. There is the rub. You will never find an intellectual equal. More than likely you never have felt that you have ever been fully challenged with an intellectual equal. So don't expect to find a woman with those qualities either. It is a goose chase. Besides, women don't run that way. You're trying to spawn like salmon instead of human.
Give it up. I did and won. I never found a girl that dazzled me mentally. So I cleaned up, kept my head up and found the female equivalent. A "GO GETTER." She is a beautiful, motivated, big breasted veterinarian who is fascinated by my thoughts. Keep this in mind: there will be nothing EVER that people can do to address your fundamental difference in thinking... and a woman will not change that either. If you are a 146, you might never, EVER find a peer in this world. Much less a female one, because women's intellegence does not manifest itself well by men's standards.
You will have to accept that in this lifetime, you will never be like them. SO DON'T. Your mind will always be alien to them. Just hunt out characteristics that makes your ideal, NON-SUPERHUMAN BRAINED WOMAN, and I will guarantee that love will pursue immediately. Besides, she (the one that you will find sooner or later) is not looking around thinking, "Gee, I need the smartest man I can get my hands on." It is a soup of characteristics. So point to the other ones that you have. You're smart, so blend in a little.
Think about this one for a bit. Which is more appealing to women 1) a man that is a brilliant thinker with hygiene problems and an affinity for Danger Girl T-shirts or 2) a man that looks like all the rest until he opens his mouth and in 30 seconds you can tell this man really has a brain and is going somewhere.
Remember: Uncleanliness and lack of style to women is like irrationality and lack of utility to men, they are on the same standard of turn-off.
Good luck. Happy hunting.
Autistic != stupid. Many autistic individuals are brilliant, often focused in one particular area of talent. One of the symptoms is the tendency to focus very exclusively on one thing at a time. My guess (based only on your description, YMMV) is that your nephew (and many boys) is very mildly autistic, but has been able to overcome that early, and now uses his focus to learn.
Starring Charelton Heston, "You blew it up! Damn you all to hell!"
*Gasp* it's a human that can talk! And he's not stuttering! Yikes!
If a person has extraordinarily abilities wont that help in the propagation of his blood relatives & community?? if yes, then the genome has achieved its purpose, ie. it isn't necessary for the genes to be propagated direct , but the chances are that the genes that cause autism are present in a passive state in his relatives/community. By increasing the chances of survival and successfull dispersion of genetic material of the community/relatives,the autistic person is actualy increasing the chances of survival of his own genes. it need not be autism alone, If a physically challenged person attracts the attention of the society which thus provide him with care/benifits, these would also go towards ensuring the survival of his offsprings/relatives who are actualy able to disperse genetic material.
~561
I take a look at most of the people around me who excel in computer-related fields, and on average, they certainly seem to have a significantly higher rate of lots of little "fun" neurological conditions. Concentrate a bunch of them in the same place, and they're going to breed.
In a way, it's kind of like marrying close relatives. All of the recessive or otherwise unnoticeable traits (be it from low penetrance or low expressivity) are going to start showing up in big ways.
I'm aware of Asperger's, but I was really speaking more generally- and only "genetically" in the sense of refuting the "Next step in evolution! Nerd supermen will overrun the planet!" tone of the initial poster. Probably could've phrased things better, but hey, it's Slashdot. The point was that the *phenotypes* resemble the sickle-cell phenomenon (have 'half' the trait and you benefit, have 'all' of it and you're screwed); whether their expression is controlled by an underlying *genotype* or other environmental factors is up for grabs.
:) I find I tend to focus on... little big pictures, problems within constraints as 'geeks' tend to enjoy... but wider constraints than most geeks, let alone autists would choose. Artificial overclassifications ('fuzzy states,' for those studying that branch of AI) tend to send me rocking in my chair. ;)
--
More of a personal ramble, here:
Knowing a few people diagnosed as Asperger's, and having some traits that may or may not fall under it myself, I have to feel there're some major problems in the diagnostic or treatment protocols. Too often I've seen people who *were* socially functional (if, perhaps, nervous and unsure of themselves, possibly based on an underlying autism) come back with their diagnosis and treat it as a 'free ticket' to discard/regress from their social graces.
The argument can run that, in those cases, the people don't really have the problem, but if that's the case, then I'd say the diagnostics are failing in 50% of cases... or if a true Asperger's individual is, by the nature of the beast, incapable of understanding why *not* to drop all pretense with diagnosis in hand... then the psychological establishment needs to fix its protocol there.
Since autism *isn't* conclusively genetically linked, and it comes in all sorts of flavors, I'm inclined to consider it a continuum, and to believe focusing in on labels for fairly 'loose' categories of symptoms hurts rather than helps. Better to spend some time probing each individual's strengths and weaknesses, and develop personalized protocols to help them handle whatever might need handling (vs. what's worth letting slide as human diversity).
Perhaps that's my inclination to recoil from incorrect categorization rearing its head; is that an autistic trait?
Hope some of that's readable; it's a tough concept to discuss. I should note I don't harbor any grudge against Asperger's individuals, as much as they can't help but assume it if I start discussing the syndrome; I just cringe that psychology cares more about the act of their diagnosis/labeling than about helping them select which traits to 'keep' and which to 'work on.' It's a common problem in the brain industry, and philosophical counseling, while a bit 'out there' itself, seems to be the closest thing to helping a patient define personal motives for 'change' (a crappy term- why should anyone have to 'change' just to integrate with society, when society itself is broken?), or better-put, 'reasoned action.'
Pretty soon, the global economy will undergo a significant "correction" whereby the specialness of (most) coders (like that of any other specialized trade in history) will be rendered irrelevant by advanced production techniques and cheap, relatively unskilled labor.
Whiz-bang genius coders, hackers, inventors, etc., will still exist, of course, and some of them will be social retards like you (-: ...
...but don't let it go to your head!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
[disclaimer: I'm not:
:-)
- trying to offend anyone
- trolling/flaming
- astroturfing
- offtopic (I hope.)
Also, I have no idea whether anyone's said anything like this before. I don't browse at -1.
Anyway...]
In commercial (often closed source, but not necessarily) environments, people often have to work together to get the product developed, debugged, tested, etc. Now, given that AS' sufferers (or those with mild autism) are not very good at handling social situations -- and also the fact that if you sit in your office/cubicle non-stop writing code, then most people think there's something wrong with you -- it would seem that commercial software development (even commercial OSS!) and geeks don't go together.
Hence why geeks like free OSS. They get to, for lack of a better word, "indulge" their social isolation by coding on their own, and also have the associated feeling of accomplishment when their code is accepted. Even if it isn't, they're still able to avoid having to work with others in person. Plus you get to flap your hands without anyone noticing.
This is also partly the reason why I don't believe the general public will start using/contributing to OSS development any time soon. They don't want to be associated with a bunch of anti-social nerds.
There was a fascinating article in New Scientist, 26 Aug 2002, about how consumption of omega-6 fatty acids (from animal fats) has gone up by a factor of 16 in the last 100 years or so, and this seems strongly linked to a great rise in depression. The article is not online but there is a fairly complete summary at http://vmailw2k2.trinitevisp.co.uk:10018/food-e/sh ownewsletter.asp?ID=115#879
:)
Quite a lot of studies have shown that increasing omega-3 fatty acid consumption (e.g. from oily fish, olive oil, walnuts) can make a great difference to depression. I would strongly recommend this to anyone who is susceptible to depression - just take a cod liver oil capsules every day, and try to eat more oily fish and less animal fat. The great thing is that there are no side-effects and it is very cheap, unlike anti-depressants, and it really works (unlike St John 's Wort, which is no better than a placebo IMO and according to various studies). I've been taking cod liver oil capsules for about 6 weeks now, and feel much better than I have in years. Exercise is also great for depression, but the geek lifestyle means that taking cod liver oil is a lot easier
How does this relate to autism? It may be completely irrelevant, but I think increasing the intake of omega-3 fatty acids is a good idea for all children, since the brain is essentially made up of these fats and there does seem to be a link between lack of omega-3 fats as a child and developing depression later in life. It's possible there is a link to autism, or not, but increasing consumption of omega-3 fatty acids has no side effects.
And you're having the same argument with the same person, too.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
"Microsoft has taken the extraordinary step of paying for its employees' autistic children to undergo costly behavioural-analysis therapy."
Make you think doesn't it.
How credible is this study? It's a pilot study making a request for more funding and it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet.
How do we know this isn't a ploy just like the Marin County Breast Cancer power-grab/funding-grab?
He could've gotten whooping cough. Or measles. Mumps is not fun either. I've traveled in places where they have these vaccines. When my father was a child these vaccines weren't available even in the USA. He missed six months of school due to various "childhood" diseases that few, if any, slashdotters have seen. Fortunately he didn't suffer any permanent disabilities.
Best Slashdot Co
Au contraire, a significant group of medical researchers are working on whether childhood immunizations may be related to the rise in autism as well as other maladies.
There is enough skepticism about the safety of vaccines now, that some communities have very high rates of parents who refuse to have their children immunized, at least until they are adolescents or older..
Increase in Autism Baffles Scientists
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
Trying to account for a drastic rise in childhood autism in recent years, a California study has found that it cannot be explained away by statistical anomalies or by a growing public awareness that might have led more parents to report the disorder.
But the study's authors, who reported their findings yesterday to the California Legislature, said they were at a loss to explain the reasons for what they called an epidemic of autism, the mysterious brain disorder that affects a person's ability to form relationships and to behave normally in everyday life.
"Autism is on the rise in the state, and we still do not know why," said the lead author, Dr. Robert S. Byrd, an epidemiologist and pediatrician at the University of California at Davis. "The results are, without a doubt, sobering."
As diagnoses of autism have increased throughout the nation, experts and parents have cast about for possible explanations, including genetics, birth injuries and childhood immunizations. The California study found that none of these factors could explain an increase of the magnitude reported there -- more than triple from 1987 to 1998.
Dr. Catherine Lord, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Michigan who is a leading authority on autism, said it was unclear whether the California findings applied to other states.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working in 13 states to look at the apparent increase in autism cases, said Dr. Frank DeStefano, an epidemiologist at the agency. So far, there is no reliable count of autism cases nationwide, since criteria and reporting practices vary from state to state.
The California study was prompted by a 1999 report from the state's Department of Developmental Services, which reported that the number of children with "full spectrum," or profound, autism had increased by 273 percent, to 10,360 in 1998 from 2,778 in 1987. The study did not deal with milder forms of the disorder, like Asperger syndrome.
The numbers were surprising, Dr. Byrd said. The traditional estimate was that 4 or 5 children out of 10,000 might develop autism. Instead, it appeared that 10 children in every 10,000 were seriously autistic, meaning they suffered from a brain disorder that left them unable to speak or compulsively performing repetitive motions like flapping their arms or rocking.
After the period studied, the number of autistic children continued to rise, to 18,460 cases as of July 2002, according to the California Department of Developmental Services.
In response to the study, the legislature directed the MIND Institute, an autism research center at the University of California at Davis, to investigate.
"We wondered if the increase was real," Dr. Byrd said. "Maybe we were doing a better job of finding cases. Maybe there was an increase in awareness of autism. The movie `Rain Man' was very popular."
California has a system of 21 regional centers that diagnose developmental disorders and provide services to children with them. Dr. Byrd and his team mined these centers for data.
Researchers sent questionnaires to the parents of 684 children with full-spectrum autism or mental retardation. About half were teenagers, born from 1983 to 1985; the others were ages 7 to 9, born a decade later.
If the criteria for diagnosing autism had changed in those 10 years or if the definition had broadened, the mystery would be solved, Dr. Byrd said. But the standards used to diagnose full-spectrum autism were the same in both age groups, he said.
Some people suggested that the centers might diagnose autism so families would receive more generous state assistance. But the centers have no incentive to do so, Dr. Byrd said, since they do not receive more state financing for identifying more children with disabilities.
The study also considered whether children in the older group were incorrectly classified as mentally retarded, when they were in fact autistic. But the rate of misdiagnosis was about the same in both groups, Dr. Byrd said.
Still another possibility -- that large numbers of families with autistic children had moved into California -- was discarded when it turned out that most children in both groups were born in California. A general increase in population accounted for about 10 percent of the rise in autism, Dr. Byrd said. The rest remains a mystery.
There also were no significant differences over time in sex, race or parental education. Parents of the older children were more likely to report mental retardation along with autism, but the finding did not explain the rising incidence.
About a third of parents in both groups reported that their children began to regress around the age of 18 months, Dr. Byrd said. They suddenly lost the ability to say words and stopped making eye contact. Many parents blame vaccinations thatare given around 18 months; until recently some vaccines contained a mercury-based preservative that some people believe can cause brain damage in young children. The study found no evidence that the vaccine was the culprit, Dr. Byrd said.
Nevertheless, more parents of younger children reported constipation and vomiting, which they attributed to complications from the measles vaccine. Wheat allergies were also more frequent. But none of these differences fully explain the increase in autism cases in California, Dr. Byrd said.
Parents in the study were asked what might have caused their child's autism. Nearly half the parents in both groups said they did not know. A third blamed genetics; smaller numbers cited immunizations, birth injury or environmental factors.
"You can't explain an increase of this magnitude on genetics," Dr. Byrd said. "Something else is happening."
"We know autism has a strong genetic component," said Portia Iversen, a founder of Cure Autism Now, a research and advocacy group in Los Angeles formed by parents of autistic children. "But we don't know what in the environment is interacting with genes to contribute to this huge increase in cases."
Most IQ tests have a standard deviation of 15 or 16. Thus, 130-132 is about 2 deviations above the norm, representing the 98th percentile (this is the threshhold used by MENSA for admission). 145-148 is 3 deviations, or the 99.9th percentile. Want to meet people at that level? Try the Triple Nine Society, or search Google for 99.9 percentile intelligence. At 146 you're in the 99.8th percentile -- 1 in 500 people have the same IQ or higher. At that rate, there should be more than 12 million people on the planet for you to pick from. Rare, but not that rare. We are out there.
Over the past century electronic media have become more pervasive- telephone -> radio -> TV -> video games -> internet. People were "wired" together minutes a day in the past to 24/7 now. Could this cause the "shutdown in emotitional communication the autistic experience?
'A lot of good dialogue going on! Here's a little info from my 15 years of research. This is off the top of my head, so I'm sure I'll leave things out. To solve a problem, first define the terms: What is Autism? Autism is diagnosed by _behavior_ rather than by medical test. That means there could be many different descriptions and different causes. Typical diagnostic criteria: positive behaviors (things autistic people do) * repetitive, self-stimulatory behavior ("stims") such as rocking, hand-flapping, spinning, humming, or hitting self rhythmically; (self-injurious behavior, such as head-banging, falls in here as well as in "poor communication" and "increased sensory acuity"); * obsessive-compulsive behaviors, such as having to count all the ceiling tiles, opening and closing the door or turning the locks a certain number of times, doing a "dance" over thresholds or cracks in the sidewalk, having to retrace your path exactly or cause objects to retrace their's (i.e., a soda can that rolls under the table must be rolled back under and picked up from the spot where it fell); * insistence on sameness and order, for example, lining up toy cars by color rather than pretending they are real cars, or sorting Halloween candy and being able to tell instantly if one piece out of hundreds has been disturbed; freaking out if a different route is taken to a familiar place, or if a familiar room or person is changed -- i.e., new glasses or a chair moved; * sensory hyperacuity/confusion: as someone said, autistic people really do perceive the world more intensely. Gentle touches may be painful. A human voice may sound like a freight train, and rain, like machine gun fire. Stimuli may cross sensory perceptions; a loud sound may be perceived as a flash of light, or a color may give a tactile sensation or taste. "Enhanced" does not necessarily mean "better"; this is often reported as the most painful part of autism, and results in some of the self-stimulatory behaviors (to control what is perceived) and sensory shut-down typically associated with autism; * perseverative interest in unusual topics. Often, autistic people are fascinated with trains, vacuum cleaners, locks (in waterways), and radio transmitters/transformer towers and may collect these things or pictures of them. They may also fixate on topics; for instance it is not unusual for verbal autistic children to know the names of all the Presidents, dinosaurs, states, or countries of the world before starting kindergarten. * hyperlexia. More on this below. * savant skills. About 10% of autistic people have one thing they do remarkably well, usually related to something mathematical, such as calendar calculations, multiplication, or music. * appearance. It's odd that someone called autism "unattractive" and someone else responded it has nothing to do with looks. Some forms of autism actually seem associated with unusually good looks -- a large-eyed, youthful appearance, with unusually perfect symmetry. (One explanation is that unattractive people are diagnosed "retarded".) * literalism. (Is this a trait or a deficit?) An autistic person may answer, "Would you like to take the trash out?" with "No" rather than understanding it as a request; "What's the big idea?!" may garner the response, "Well, what were the smaller ideas?" Autistic humor is generally associated with literal interpretation of things "normies" use figuratively. (In my opinion, it is this keen sense of irony that distinguishes the autistic from the mentally retarded.) * geeky relatives. Autism is more common in the families of engineers, programmers, classical musicians, and college professors. About 65% of the Nobel Prize winners for science have an autistic brother, son, uncle, or nephew. (More on that later.) negative behaviors (things autistic people do not do) * regressive onset; autism is frequently characterized by normal or even gifted development for 12 to 18 months, followed by regression in language and other skills, usually between 12 and 36 months. * speech is often absent or delayed. Emotive language, in particular, is difficult. Conversational rhythms (turn-taking, etc.) are absent. * generalizing across environments. An autistic person may have trouble recognizing a teacher encountered at the grocery store, or may not realize this is the same "father" he's always had, since the last one had a beard and this one doesn't. Similarly, if an autistic person knows how to wash his hands in the bathroom, he may need help to wash them under the kitchen sink; the skill is specific to the environment. (Hence the need for consistency.) * trouble interpreting social cues. An autistic person may not know if someone is being sarcastic or sincere, if they are interested or bored. They have difficulty recognizing faces (faces change), and even more difficulty recognizing facial or postural expressions of emotion. * lack of "hard wired" social behavior. The expressive side of the above; an autistic person may not automatically cry or say "ouch" when in pain. They may laugh or give no expression when frightened. They probably won't look at a person who's speaking to them, even if they are paying attention: after all, you hear with your ears, not your eyes, right? * lack of self-awareness. Autistic people often do not know they need to eat, drink, and sleep. This could explain reliance on consistent schedule. When they eat, they may fill their mouths to the point of gagging, because they can't feel the food. When in pain, they are more likely to be generally anxious or irritable (possibly violent) than to be able to identify a specific area of pain (i.e., sore throat, ear infection, ingrown toenail). They are often not aware of the volume of their speech. They often hear through bone conduction rather than aural passage, so they tend to talk in the back of their mouths, much like a deaf person, and to mumble. * chunking things down: an autistic person either fixates on one detail to the exclusion of the bigger picture (teacher points to picture of policeman and asks, "What is this?" Autistic child responds, "Button."), or sees the big picture and is literally incapable of seeing the details (i.e., room is a mess. Cannot clean whole room at once and cannot pick out trash to throw away, then clothes to put away, then dishes to take to kitchen, one thing at a time. Cannot mop floor because it is too big; cannot mentally divide floor into sections.) All these behaviors are normal, to some extent, at a level. Disability is a matter of degree: If you jiggle your leg or chew your pencil sometimes, you're normal; if you cannot eat because you have to be rocking and pounding yourself on the chin, you're disabled. Being excited about a pet project is normal; being unable to listen to something that's important to your friend is disabling. If you like a neat room, that's normal; if you can't go swimming because your winter gloves aren't where you remember putting them, that's not. Disability is environmentally dynamic. Deaf people who sign are not disabled at Galaudet (hearing people who do not sign _are_). A geeky kid may be fine in a geeky household; only when he enters kindergarten do the parents get an inkling that their child is "different". Someone suicidally miserable in a public high school may find a job and subculture perfectly suited to his functioning -- and prosper. My son is considered low-functioning and severely autistic. A social worker observed, "He's not disabled at home." Subtypes of autism: * PKU. Yes, phenolkeytonuria was originally "autism". In a database started by an M.D. (Bernard Rimland; Autism Research Institute) with an autistic son, someone noticed mothers reporting a "chemical" smell in the diapers of their autistic children. That subset was identified and tested, and diagnosed with an inability to metabolize the amino acid phenolalinine. Their bodies created phenolykeytones which caused progressive, irreversible brain damage, following the pattern of regression often seen in autism -- language loss and loss of skills around 18 to 36 months. Now every child born in a US hospital is tested at birth, and dietary restrictions prevent this damage. There is every reason to believe that other metabolic differences are responsible for some other cases of autism. * Kanner's Syndrome. Named by Leo Kanner in the 1940's, this is the classic autism; non-verbal or barely verbal, usually retarded, rocking. This is one type associated with unusual attractiveness. (There was, at one point, a study to determine if the pupils of autistic children were actually larger than those of non-autistic controls. It was given up when it was determined that it was physically impossible to measure the pupils of autistic children without doing something that would change pupillary dilation. Those who work with them will understand.) * Asperger's Syndrome. Not just high-functioning Kanner's Syndrome, people with AS tend to have little or no speech delay, but unusual speech patterns and interests. They also tend to have unusually attractive faces. * Landau-Kleffner Syndrome. This looks like autism, but is actually a seizure disorder -- deep seizures that may not show up on a normal EEG. About 1/3 of people with autism have some kind of seizures, usually starting at adolescence. * Soto's Syndrome. This is characterized by a large head (many autistic people have unusually large cranial circumference) and characteristic sworls on the feet. Clearly, it is a genetic condition, and almost always accompanied by severe retardation. * Angelman's, or "Happy Puppet" Syndrome. This sub-type is characterized by extreme hypotonia (low muscle tone) and giggly behavior, possibly from an imbalance in the serotonin system. * Hyperlexia. I don't know that this is formally recognized yet, but there are a great many children who read at an advanced level long before entering kindergarten. These children learn to process language as a visual entity. For them, speaking/hearing is a foreign language; they must perceive it, translate it to visual, formulate a visual response, and translate that to spoken word. They seem slow, and often can take in only part (usually the very first or very last) of what is said to them. Because their "reality" is visual/static, they are often out of sync with the labile, flowing world of auditory language users. They usually get surprisingly good grades (book work; stuff that stays) but have trouble socially, and may be accused of plagiarism because their verbal/spontaneous abilities are so far below their written performance. Great Plains Laboratory has identified two or three other actual causes/types of autism -- a couple of which are curable (metabolically based). I can't remember those right now, though. Prevalence (or "Is autism really increasing? Is it "epidemic"?): Survey studies (that is, researchers looked at every child in multiple, specific geographic areas born within two specific years and evaluated all of them on the same tests) showed 2-3 autistic children per 10,000 in the 1960's. Similar studies in the 1990's showed 70 cases of autism per 10,000 population. Going by school district records now, the rate is about 1 in 150 for general population; 1 in 70 if we're just looking at boys. Autism is 3-4 times more common in boys. (These numbers cover Colorado, California, New Jersey, England, and Scotland. Those are the areas with which I'm most familiar and I have reason to suspect numbers are similar elsewhere.) Interestingly, other forms of auto-immune disease, such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, and some forms of depression, are 3-4 times more common in females than males. There is conjecture that autism is an auto-immune disorder (discussed more under Pt 2: Causes -- if all goes as planned). Notably, while male brains tend to be larger, female brains have ten times the percentage of matter devoted to translation of emotions/sensory perceptions into language. This could account for the difference in manifestation of similar insults to the brain. This got long. Sorry! This subject puts a nickel in my juke box. I hope someone found information they can use. Next I'll tackle causes, treatments, and cures. 'Probably be as long-winded as this one, though.
So their relatives reproduce the same while those with the autism reproduce less, making it a net loss, and therefore a trait that is selected against.
The cake is a pie
Could day-care be a possible cause? I don't know for certain, but it seems that the number of infants in day-care has probably increased by about the same amount as the increase in autism. Perhaps dropping off an infant with a genetic predisposition towards autism off at a day-care center every day is enough to push him over the edge.
Only if you call HMO's kicking new moms out onto the streets 15 minutes after the kid is born. In my adopted daughter's case, her mom was on welfare, the kid under 5lbs, and the hospital booted her out, even though they diagnosed her with Yellow Jaundice - a brain-damaging disorder common to under-weight babies. What do you think happened to her? She got...duhhh.. brain damage.
As far as I understand, HMO's going after profit as their number one priority is not "natural", so therefore it can't be attributed to "evolution".
yes, you're right that (19 + 17)/2 != 18.5. however, that equation assumes equal numbers of male and female test subjects.
algebraicly, we see that (19m + 17f)/(m+f) = 18 only if m=f. the average can easily be 18.5 so long as male subjects outnumber females 3 to 1.
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
WTF? How is this flamebait? I was meta moderating comments and I saw this. I think some of the moderators are on crack. This person left informative refrences.
I think that I agree with you here. It's not about lowering standards, but a modification of existing standards. Check. I suppose I'm half-way there: I always dress like I have a clue, I never leave my house without bathing, and people consider me highly articulate (even online, which is hard for most people). I'm learning that I just need to relax before I gather up the courage to talk to a girl. It's funny, because I don't figure women as sex objects; I find them as equal, often superior to the male gender in many ways. I always speak rightly around women, avoiding vulgar talk. The biggest problem I have is that I come across as 'the nice guy' all the time, and the nice girls don't like a nice guy. Perhaps I should be a jerk from time to time, grow out a mullet or something.
Lowmag.net