Slashdot Mirror
TV Really Might Cause Autism
Alien54 writes "Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders. The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate."
Would that be so bad really? I gave up on TV years ago and haven't really missed it. The decent stuff comes out on dvds anyway, the occasional funny/interesting clip can be found on youtube and for everything else there is bittorrent.
Imo TV is just a way to sell ads - and apparently that can be accomplished by showing low quality, stupid, "show-me-your-tits", "the-sky-is-falling" undiluted crap... or maybe I'm just getting old.
*posting anonymously as not to be identified as being old and angry:)
Both authors are not members of the medical profession. Graduate school of management. Bleah... Move along...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The Himalayan country of Bhutan only started recieving television in 1999. This was followed by a drastic increase in crime (including murder) in the tiny nation. It would be interesting to see if there's also an increase in autism, as this study would suggest.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Autism is the next ADD.
Here's how I see it:
ADD started out being kinda rare, and only those kids with the obvious behavior problems were diagnosed with ADD; Ritilin seemed effective for them.
Ten or so years later, any kid who tapped their foot during breakfast got a mouthful of Ritilin on their way out the door. EVERYBODY had ADD (and the former behavior issue became known as ADHD).
Now, finally, ADD is more common than brown eyes (in the US anyway), but thankfully kiddy speed (Ritilin) is only generally prescribed for ADHD. That's good; it keeps the high schoolers from chopping it up and snorting it (seen it done by numerous people). ADD is now a disease of convenience; it's actually normal to have ten projects going at once, each of which is 1/3 done. It's also normal to finish one before you move on to the next. Neither behaviors are affected by Ritilin at all, trust me. But if you need an excuse for your bad grades, your kid's bad grades, your excessive passion and/or ambition for anything, by all means, get yourself some ADD.
Ten years ago, Autistic kids were incredibly rare. They were almost like Albino's - that rare. They were kids who were horribly sensitive to noise (you talking quietly sounds like a scream); they were generally mute; very emotionally sensitive; and in many cases, very gifted & talented (my mom's doctor's kid is REALLY Autistic... despite sensitivity to sound, he can play the piano like George Gershwin, no shit).
Today, if you seem shy on some days, you are Autistic. Now I can't really see excessive TV under (or over) the age of 3 resulting in shyness (I'm actually lying).
You see, TV doesn't cause Autism, medical professionals constitute Autism with the severity of the symptoms they choose to interpret as Autism. If you're 3, and you're ever so mildly reluctant to smile at the doc that day, and loud noise makes you cry (still makes me cry & I'm 24), you're probably running the word Autism through his brain, if not asking for a "referral to a specialist" (and hence a statistic as an Autistic case). I mean, I'm sure it's a little more involved, but that's the impression that I get at least.
I mean Cornell University, okay, I suppose. This kind of news IMMEDIATELY makes me suspicious of the drug companies. It's like they want everyone to expect their kid to become autistic in five years when their new Autism pez comes out. But, Cornell ain't a drug company, right, so I dunno...
Ditto here. I'm sure Amazon likes it because I read much, much more since I ditched the TV.
My set was broken and so I asked my wife to call the TV-guy. She said, you watch it more than I so why don't you call him?
After a couple of months, when still nobody had called, I ditched it and put a bookshelf in its place.
Never regretted it.
More sex, more talking, more reading, more workouts, more movie-going, more hiking, more biking, more everything.
TV is really time-stealer and when you at last are hooked to a TV-show, the idiots cancel it!
Let's suppose that there are three types of children: N, A, and pA. A kids are autistic no matter what. N kids are never autistic. pA kids may or may not realize full autism. Suppose that the amount of time that pA kids get to interact with society is an important factor in whether they develop normally (like an N child) or in an autistic manner (like an A child).
Here's a thought experiment. We have three populations, P1, P2, and P3, which all have the same constituency of N, A, pA. As the children age, we can re-categorize pA children as either N or A. P1 will be our control group: they will interact with society and watch a little bit of television. P2 will be like P1, but be exposed to more TV. P3 will model lazy parenting: the children won't get much social interaction, and the only thing they have to pass the time is TV, so they'll get a lot of it.
If watching too much TV can promote autism, P2 will have many pA -> A. OTOH, if it's a lack of exposure to social interaction that causes underdevelopment of brain circuitry that regulates social interaction, P2 should resemble P1 and P3 will have many pA -> A.
Even if there is a very strong temporal link between two variables, correlation and causation are tricky. You can't always say, "The reason that my alarm clock goes off in the morning is because the sun rises in the sky," even if you can point to some region where the sun is obscured by the terrain and people don't use alarm clocks.
I would love for non-interactive, advertisement-soaked, eye-candy-filled, dumbed-down media to be less prevalent. When Internet access began to be ubiquitous, I got excited, but then I saw and heard all of the media companies wanting to turn the Internet into a new form of TV.
I know, my examples have bad analogies, poor metaphors, logical flaws, et caetera. But I hope someone gets my point. Lots of people think "pot makes you stupid" -- but maybe it's just that stupid people enjoy pot more than intelligent people do, which could explain statistics.
Basically, there are correlations, relationships, and patterns EVERYWHERE. However, it's very rare that someone knows exactly WHY something is happening. If we knew exactly how something happened, usually it would make it trivial to manipulate.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
From the paper: If, for example, one compares the US Department of Education's reported number of school-aged
children diagnosed with autism in 1999-2000 with the similar figure for 2003-2004, one sees that
over those four years the reported number has more than doubled.
Does anybody really think that the rates of autism really doubled in this time period. Isn't it far more likely that the rate of diagnosis simply went up. What would cause parents to become aware of this unusual condition called autism? Maybe they saw a segment about it on TV?
Isn't it simply possible that autism rates are correlated with TV watching because many americans get much of their information about the larger world by watching TV, and therefore the higher the rates of TV watching (determined in this study by looking at cable installation rates and precipitation rates - people watch more TV when it's rainy out ) mean higher rates of awareness of autism as a condition to ask your child's doctor about? So now, instead of being diagnosed as retarded, the child is diagnosed as autistic because the child's parents saw a segment about autism on cable TV on a rainy day.