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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."
It's for the children! Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children! FORGET IT! Ban electricity! For the children! For the children!
What about internet use, with sites such as youtube, will that cause autism as well?
Damn, I read that as "TV Really Might Cause Atheism".
How disappointing!
Everyone, let's say this together. Come on, I want everyone to join in. Let's all yell it at the top of our lungs until the media hears us. Ready? Here we go:
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION!
Now stop reporting on every correlation between disease X and social variable Y as though it were somehow equivalent to a randomized double-blind study on the effects of Y on X. Thank you.
"Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy."
I guess not anymore, huh?
Learn to separate truth from illusion. Because in this world, it's the hardest thing to do.
I call bullshit.
That is, it is entirely possible (and plausible) that a correlation exists. However I'd interpret it in the reverse way. That is, the study shows just that children born with autism are more likely to spend time watching TV (knowing the features of autism, this is entirely possible).
Moreover, the existence of a correlation does not show necessarily a cause-effect relationship. Do you remember Lisa Simpson showing Homer a rock that protected from tigers?
This kind of papers are what my collegues call "scientific pornography" -papers thrown up just to stir up controversy, but based on very fragile assumptions and with a few data inflated as much as possible. Quite a common occurrence, sadly, these days.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Could there POSSIBLY be other factors at work?
How about the increased understanding of and accurate diagnosis of autism and autism-related disorders around that time?
How about the repetitive nature of television programming, especially kids shows, appealing to autistics as a source of consistency and comfort?
How about the fact that the places getting cable were also the places getting elevated concentrations of geeks, who seem to have genetic quirks that have this tendancy to result in autism-like disorders? Could that POSSIBLY have ANYTHING to do with a rise in autism in Washington, _Oregon_, and *CALIFORNIA*?
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"
Before anybody starts jeering stupidly and making wise about this subject, perhaps people should read this article from Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colI D=1&articleID=000B7F38-893D-152E-88E283414B7F0000
Now for some of the usual comments people tend to spew out:
Correlation is not causation
This is true - but correlation indicates that there MAY BE a causation. Thus, when things are strongly correlated and there are other reasons to suspect a causal connection, it is well worth researching further.
Increased awareness
Perhaps 'increased awareness' of autism means that we discover more cases that were not previously recognised? Perhaps, but I don't think it is very likely. Full-blown autism is not something you overlook. It is a serious disorder that in most cases means lifelong disability, and it is unlike any other psychiatric disorder. The increased awareness, I suspect, mostly means that now we spot more of the milder cases, but it is not my impression that this is what this research is about.
So why is it that people on this list are hostile to the idea that maybe TV can contribute to the emergence of autism? My guess is that this is because people on the list tend to be heavy consumers of passive entertainment, like TV and computer games; you don't want to hear that it may be bad for you.
If you have read the article I referred to above, you will know that autism probably has a lot to do with the development of 'mirror neurons' in the brain; a neural system that makes us able to imitate what other people do. Like all neural systems, the mirror neurons need to be trained, and TV is probably not a very good role model for that, at least not if you are already weak in this area. So it is actually quite reasonable to suspect that watching too much TV at an early age may contribute to the development of autism.
The MMR vaccine:
http://www.badscience.net/?p=249
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...
Although I agree with you on the overdiagnosing of various "mental diseases" it can very well also be allergies manifesting them in these ways. :p
:)
I'm allergic to (well, not really allergic, but hypersensitive) sugar and various related sweeteners like glucose etc. Before this was known I couldn't handle any criticism, loud noises etc etc. Used to cry a lot (the real heavy tantrums) and everything. I guess I could've been diagnosed with a million mental disorders, however luckily my parents found out it was an oversensitivity towards sugars and a type of foodcoloring.
Now I'm perfectly fine. No moodswings anymore etc. Still nuts as hell though, but who defined "normal" anyway.
There are more and more artificial stuff (artificial aroma's, food colorings, added sweeteners, preservatives etc. etc.) mixed with the things we eat, and it's shown that allergies or hypersensitivities towards these ingredients can cause all kinds of weird stuff with someone's personality, without causing real visible allergic reactions.
Diagnosing these types of allergies is also difficult because stopping to eat these types of foods doesn't usually have an immediate effect. It's not an on/off switch, but the effects are reduced gradually so it can be very difficult to quickly see wether or not someone is allergic (opposed to the acute reactions testable by those armscratch tests).
Most likely though it's a mix of factors.... a bit of television, a bit of allergies, and a bit of overactivity of the doctors
Manuals are your last resort only
In Canada we have warning labels on cigarette packs. Big warning labels. Cigarettes cause cancer, etc. So, naturally, some dollar store entrepreneur creates fake warning labels.
;-)
... it's obviously not a perfect analogy, but I've been debugging way too long to care]
e -against-the-mighty-machines-day-9-of-no-tv.
Anyway, when I was a stereotypical angry young philosophy student, I thought it would be fun to make my own fake warning labels to put on my cigarette packs. So, who did I turn to? Hume, of course.
So, my cigarette packs had a big warning: "Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" on them. I thought it was a good joke, by philosophy joke standards anyway.
Now, I knew perfectly well that in this case even though it did not imply it, it was in fact true. Of course cigarretes caused cancer. In many cases correlation is, um, correlated with causation. But I was 18 so I didn't care; I thought it was funny.
What a joke.
So, the point is: correlation is a start. If there is a correlation, you should look for ways to establish whether causation exists or not.
Now, you usually cannot do real proper experiments on humans with smoking (starting with a large random set of non-smokers, making half of them smoke their entire lives, and seeing how many of each group died of cancer). The ethics boards at the university wouldn't approve
So, do you just give up and say "thank you for smoking" or "well, we'll never prove anything according to David Hume then". No, you don't. There are statistical tools like factor analysis which let people smarter than me figure out how much of A is (probably) caused by B, etc.
Anyway, I have a 2 year old son now, and stuff I thought was funny at 18 is certainly not funny anymore over a decade later. I quit smoking. I certainly wouldn't give my son a cigarette, ever.
However, if there is a strong correlation between TV and autism, I have to wonder whether I am in effect doing something similar. What if further anaylsis proves (as much as you can prove anything) that it is indeed a cause?
What would I have done??
[yeah, yeah, there's a mountain of evidence in one of the cases vs. one study in another
"Correlation Does Not Imply Causation" does not mean act insanely. You have only ever seen gravity by correlation, but you still believe in it. (Yes you do. Wipe that smirk off your face.)
Now, coincidentally, I also cancelled cable TV after reading Gregg Easterbrook's original Slate article. Obligatory blog whoring: I blogged about it at http://peterarmstrong.com/articles/2006/10/08/rag
Do I think there is conclusive, Hume-would-be-proud proof that TV causes autism. No.
Do I think that TV is good for young children?
Would I give my 2 year old son a cigarette?
The word Autism is a catchall for a wide spectrum of disorders, from severly impaired kids to the fashionably diagnosed little darlings belonging to attention-starved suburban housewives, which tends to muddy the diagnostic waters a bit. Most seriously Autistic children manifest symptons almost from birth. Despite what some parents claim as a regression during the toddler years, I suspect kids are born with it. It's simply difficult to diagnose a child with a psychological disorder before they are old enough to even walk or talk.
If you want a controlled study, here it is: I have two children, by the same wife. One is perfectly normal. The other is autistic. I suspected there was something wrong with the Autistic one by the time he was nine months old. (Most babies love to be held. This one was completely hyper, and would squirm out of everyone's arms as soon as he was physically capable of it. He rarely slept. He walked early, but displayed odd mannerisms. While many toddlers are fascinated by television, he manifested no interest in watching it at that age at all.) But he was not diagnosed until he was three, because there was very little diagnostic criteria to go one. Babies really don't do much other than cry, eat, sleep and poop.
They both watched plenty of TV by the time they were three. Just like I did in the sixties. They are 10 and 11 now. I taught the eldest to read the usual way, and he is a voracious reader. He still loves TV. And video games. And fart jokes, and every other thing a normal eleven year old loves. He's still not autistic. The youngest, the Autistic one, would rarely sit still for a story. He liked to flip through books, but didn't want to be read to. He can read now, though. Know why? I turned the English subtitles on whenever he watched his favorite DVD's.
He learned to read watching television.
This study is bunk. It's not a theory. It's more like the plot to Halloween III.
As a pediatrician trained in child development (and the parent of an autistic teenager), I've got a strong interest and background in this, and I can tell you quite plainly that the paper is crap.
This is a spectacularly good example of really stupid statistical games. I only skimmed it (Acrobat Reader blew up on me as I tried to save it, and I'll get another copy later), but these people did the following amazing things:
1. Accept as fact that autism itself is increasing (as opposed to the diagnosis of autism). This is possible, but contentious and somewhat controversial. I'll spare you the full story, but the general opinion is that while the disorder is more common than it once was, changes in diagnosis (and benefits for diagnosis) make it hard to do more than guess at the actual rate of increase.
2. Consider de novo a hypothesis "that early childhood television watching is an important trigger for the onset of autism." They do note that nobody else has bothered to consider this, but don't spend much time wondering why. Apparently, they're special. Perhaps because nobody has measured this in a useful manner? They do admit this, but they find a solution!
3. Because there are no good numbers for early television watching, they use precipitation as a proxy for television watching. Apparently, if it rains, you're likely inside with the tube on. They do show a strong positive correlation between rainfall and autism. Yep, that's right - rain causes autism.
4. But wait - it can't be the rain, it has to be the television! That's what we started trying to prove, anyway, so it's important to stay focused. They try it another way: they consider the availability of cable. They show that autism correlates with the availability of cable. No, really, it does. Of course, diagnosis of a LOT of chronic developmental syndromes increases with affluence, because of the increased availability of medical care and the reduction in "grab-bag" diagnoses like "mental retardation". But still, it must be the cable.
5. Having neatly done all the "proof" they require, they then proceed to tear the numbers apart and "prove" that 40% of autism in California is triggered by early television watching, while only 17% is triggered in PA. Why, we don't know, but it appears that rain, or cable, or maybe just TV is more powerful in CA than in PA. Or something like that.
I don't have time for a complete fisking right now, but I may do it later. Aside from the basic methodologic errors (confusing correlation with causation, adopting a highly questionable proxy indicator without validating it, and spending almost no time ruling out confounding factors or tainted data), there remain the dozens of smaller tactical problems that should have sidelined this turkey. I assume the peer reviewers, if there are any, were on drugs.
This paper will be a bombshell, all right. I'll use it over and over again as I explain to medical students and colleagues that you don't have to have much in the way of actual brains to write a scientific paper. Or, as I said about another paper in journal club once, "the font is nice, and I like the layout of the tables. It's a shame the actual science is such garbage."
The problem I am having with the way things are going, is that Autism is suggested to be a lifetime handicap, while the different kinds of people that are labeled "autistic" these days may well have a simple development delay -- which can be treated.
I, myself, am known to panic under stress, resulting in somewhat manic-depressive behaviour (I get intensely absorbed in whatever it is I am doing, or I show signs of depression) combined with tension problems. People are trying to see if the label fits me as we speak.
But whenever I go to the library to get information on Autism, I recognize so little about myself there. For instance, I am not rigid at all; I dislike talking about exact topics; I have a vivid imagination.
There may well be an interesting theoretical causality, but it doesn't help me much. I haven't had any advice or help whatsoever from the shrinks -- only tests, tests, tests, and more to come (it takes a very long time to check for autism) -- and the books on the subject don't help me manage myself.
Instead, I have learned a lot from reading about bipolar II, and managed, with much effort, to stabilize my mood so that I can think clearly again.
I insisted on intake that I learned about the underlying cause of my problems, so that I could learn to manage them, so you may say that I have caused my own problem. What frustrates me more, however, is that I have also had to solve it myself with so little help from the experts.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
I wish I'd gotten in here sooner. I am officially diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, and I spent most of my childhood without TV. Even though I had to entertain myself in other ways such as reading, and indulging different hobbies (having several obsessive hobbies is in itself an autistic trait) I still turned out the way I did. The only way that TV could affect someone in this way is if they were already genetically or developmentally predisposed to it (or EVERYONE would be autistic, since nearly every kid watches TV in developed countries) Also, it pisses me off when people try to "cure" autism. It's not some disease that I have, it's a part of who I am. If it were possible to remove all of my autistic traits, I wouldn't be the same person after said process was done. Autism is just a different way of seeing the world and interpreting things around me, and even though people mean well, the fact that they would want to override who I am and attempt to make me like they are does kind of insult me.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
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.
My suspicion is that the problem is due to the (over) stimulation of the visual centers in very young children. Have you noticed how incredibly brief the duration of one camera shot is in modern TV? Barely 5 seconds. SECONDS! The point-of-view is constantly shifting from one camera to another, and it's common with children's programming to have a hand-held camera that bobs and sways in order to keep the show "interesting" and increase concentration. Add to that the visual effects and zoom/fades/transitions plus all the audio crap and it's a miracle any child emerges with his brain intact.
Go watch a classic episode of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooner's or The Twilight Zone. It's not uncommon for one camera shot to last four minutes. And at that point in time (I'm thinking 1960s and earlier) it was common to listen to dramas on the radio -- Green Lantern, Lone Ranger, The Strangler, etc. -- so the listener was actively involved in building mental imagery. Kids who have been raised on a steady diet of modern tv don't have the patience for old-fashioned TV or stories (or, for that matter, conversations requiring well-developed listening skills)... it's too "boring." (IMO, their brains aren't well adapted to concentrate for that period of time and they find it tiring and/or difficult.)
...and here we have another M.D. who thinks he knows something about science. I wish medical schools would concentrate less on memorization and more on critical thinking skills, especially with respect to statistical studies.
This is a spectacularly good example of really stupid statistical games.
In actuality, the paper is a good example of the way in which social research can take advantage of natural experiments.
I only skimmed it...
Then why write with such unwarranted authority and in such certain terms about its contents and conclusions?
Aside from the basic methodologic errors (confusing correlation with causation, adopting a highly questionable proxy indicator without validating it, and spending almost no time ruling out confounding factors or tainted data), there remain the dozens of smaller tactical problems...
They made none of the errors you list. I would like to think you might have realized this had you bothered (as I did) to actually read the paper, but based on the evidence of your post, I would be reckless to assume that.