Slashdot Mirror
Possible Cure For Autism
Henry V .009 writes "Scientists in New Jersey are claiming that children with autism are unable to metabolize key fatty acids that fight brain-damaging inflammations. They have already developed urine/blood tests to identify at-risk children. A preventive cure to autism may be as simple as a 'therapeutic cocktail' of fatty acids. Human trials could start later this year."
... definitely, definitely.
What will happen now to the legions of slashdotters who claim to suffer from autism/aspergers ? How can i relate to Knuth now? I'm doomed.
So, my daily diet of fried chicken and beefaroni is responsible for me being somewhat social lately? People just said it was bad for me.
You seem to have a strong opinion on this... were you also diagnosed with asperger's syndrome?
it won't cure autism. It sounds like the treatment would prevent the brain from being damaged, not that it would reverse any existing damage, for everyone with The Geek Syndrome.
"Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
*looks down at his waistline*
It would appear I have no problem metabolizing fatty acids. I'm definitely safe.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
I know that spelling, grammar, and punctuation, are lost causes for Slashdot editors, but proper use of quotations is easy. I didn't write the sentence "human trials could start later this year." Nor is it accurate exactly. The only "human trial" starting up later this year is a preliminary study of the effects of fatty acid supplements on autistic children aged 5-7.
Also, I'm not responsible for the story link that pops up a big Printer Dialog when you click it.
There are going to be people vocally declaring that we have no right to "cure" (or prevent, as the case may be) autism, and that it's not a disease. At the same time, others will insist that we should do everything in our power to mitigate the effects of autism, which can be quite formidable...I myself know a family friend a year younger than me who has pretty severe autism, he lives in a group home, but he plays the piano like a concert pianist (and has since he was 12) as well as being completely bilingual. He is quite intelligent but really can't function independently in society. I'm going to reserve judgement on this until the trials are completed and the results are in, but I can promise that there is going to be a HUGE amount of controversy over this.
Now they need to find a cure for printer dialogs.
'Same speed C but faster'
This is great. It's about time they tied this down to something that can be tested for so the people with real problems can get help, and all the Internet whiners can learn to deal with life instead of always searching for a cop-out.
I've been using chat programs and on online forums since 1996 and have never seen someone flame someone else and then later claim to have aspergers.
So, I just have to ask: What the hell straw man are you roundhousing to the face, chuck?
Latewire
Oh great. Now we'll have another drug to dope our kids up on. I predict an increase in the diagnoses of autism in children as soon as this gets marketed.
"Drink your fatty acid cocktail, dear, your psychiatrist has a new BMW to pay for..."
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
And what about those of us who have been finally diagnosed through traditional means, but sadly a decade or two too late for therapy to actually make a difference in our lives, due to our being told over and over again through the years that we were just your "Internet whiners".
Don't be too quick with the label. As a society, we've started to overdiagnose many conditions, and that hampers proper medical care. But it is just as bad, if not worse, to underdiagnose those who are suffering.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
Please stop spreading this lie. You are killing people by convincing them to avoid vaccination. It is more likely a result of trans-fats in food. Or a new neurological virus caused by sexual promiscuity (cerebral herpes maybe). How do I know these things? Well, both have increased at the same time as rates of autism. And, both can get a rise out of people by making them feel abused by others or powers at be.
And that, is the Modern Scientific Method.
Stop trolling.
English is easier said than done.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but as long as we are discussing Asperger's and such, I though I'd add this note to the original issue of urine/blood based diagnosis:
...and related Wikipedia Article.
Apparently, those suffering from "non-chelated pervasive developmental delay not otherwise specified or Asperger's disorder" do not have "significantly increased median coproporphyrin levels", which is the method used in the article to diagnose the more severe forms of autism spectrum disorders. (Note: There is an increase in the median urinary porphyrins for those with Asperger's and PDD-NOS, but not sufficient to be statistically significant based upon the authors' criteria.)
Source: Nataf R, Skorupka C, Amet L, Lam A, et al. "Porphyrinuria in childhood autistic disorder: implications for environmental toxicity." Toxicol Appl Pharmacol 2006;214:99-108
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
I was going to mod this down, because much of what you say is not true. But simply modding you down doesn't correct the misinformation present.
... and just as I've previewed, I see that you've been modded as a troll. I don'k know that's totally fair, but there you go.
There is no medical evidence that vaccinations cause autism. In particular, the MMR vaccination is given at around 3 years old, which is when autism starts to show, because expected neurological functioning does not develop. But the autism has been there all along! Correlation is not causation!
There is more autism around now because the diagnostic criteria has been refined and expanded into groups. Aspergers, for example, are counted as austistic because it falls within the autism spectrum, although a high-functioning autistic person (ie. aspergers) is quite capable of living a full, productive life.
The growing numbers of autistic and ADD and ADHD children can be attributed bad parenting and unreal expectations. Every child is special and above average - that's what we want to believe. Unfortunately, not every child is above average. There are equally numbers of above average children as there are below average children - it's called the Bell curve. If you put a below average child into a high average class, they may not be able to comprehend the work, and thus exhibit bad behaviour, which leads to a diagnosis of ADHD and then a course of Ritilin. Now, that is overly simplistic and is not meant to deny that there are ADHD suffers out there. But the vast bulk are not.
Given ADHD, above, it's not too big a step to see that a child who keeps to themselves and is quite; well they can't possibly be normal, therefore autism.
Now that I've had my rant. I'll be off...
If Autism is caused by mercury why has a gene recently been found that correlates highly? Why does a vaccine "transform" one child (anecdotally) but not affect anyone else in the class?
How many other growth trends have been occurring while the rates of autism have been growing? Global warming? The strength of the Japanese economy? The price of oil?
Leave the "A mother's story: We must fight against the growth of the Japanese economy for my special little autistic Suzy" stories to geocities please, and leave medicine to the pharmacologists (who recently discovered a key genetic link).
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I just heard a lecture on this subject today, so I can assure you that there has *NEVER* been any reputable study that showed a link between autism and childhood vaccinations. The entire argument is based on a post-hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: children get their vaccinations while around 1 years old, and the first signs of autism are noticeable about 6 months later, therefore the vaccinations cause autism.
What have the studies shown?
1) There is no difference in the rates of autism between vaccinated and un-vaccinated children.
2) Rates of autism have increased even though thimerosal was removed from the vaccines.
3) The increased rate of autism diagnosis is due to better identification and broader criteria, not due to a new cause.
Regardless, this has generated so much controversy that thimerosal has been removed from nearly all vaccines.
Don't get me wrong: vaccines do have a risk associated with them. But as far as the best science shows, autism is not one of them.
"key fatty acids" = aka Fish Oil/Cod Liver Oil = Essential Fatty Acids
As a parent of a child with autism who follows the DAN! protocal EFAs are essential to my son's progress. He takes a daily dose of fish oil. This is nothing new or great or even a "cure"....for those of us parents who are working on recovering our children this has been around for a while.
In fact EVERYONE can benefit from a daily dose. Its much better than the cod liver oil of the past, many are flavored now or in gel cap form, my entire family takes them and we're better off for it.
The autism-vaccine connection was 'research'
purchased by a law firm for almost a million dollars.
THANK YOU! (Someone please mod parent all the way up!)
After my son was born, I had concerns about thimerosol as a preservative in various vaccines. The way I looked at it, mercury is a known neurotoxin, and I'd rather not introduce it into his system if I could help it. I had concerns. I didn't know the differences between methyl mercury and ethyl mercury (nor do I know much more now as I'm not a chemist, but those articles were helpful).
Shockingly, my wife's OB didn't know squat about my questions, or even what thimerosol was. Our pediatrician, while very good with most everything, was likewise ignorant and somewhat dismissive of my concerns. I'm happy to read any scientific material to help me make my decision, and this stuff would have been a huge help. But in my state of ignorance (at the time), I went ahead with all the vaccines but crossed my fingers, the shadow of doubt far in the back of my mind.
Why can't OBs, GPs and Peds be more informed on this kind of stuff? Oi! I felt when I said the word "thimerosol" I was getting funny looks. I wondered if I knew more (albeit misinformed) than the doc on this topic, and found that alarming.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Obligatory claim of relevance: I am a pediatrician with developmental training. I am also the parent of a teenager with severe autism. It is my informed (but not omniscient) opinion that the odds that this is anything other than a complete red herring are too small to measure accurately.
We will begin with the obvious problem that they are treating autism as a single disorder. We don't know a great deal about the spectrum, but we certainly know that autistic symptoms can be found in a large number of discrete conditions. "Autism" is probably a final common pathway of subtle neurologic failure, and the idea that a single enzyme is associated has been discredited repeatedly. In fact, every time we think we've found "the" cause, more research shows us that we have found, at most, "a" cause, and usually not one that is common. Fragile X syndrome, Rett's syndrome, and others were all previously lumped in as "autism", and I don't think we're done finding things.
The next obvious problem is that if we indeed have a single liposomal storage disease causing most or all autism, you would find it with brain biopsy and/or MRI. We have not found this. You would expect other commonalities as well, since failures of fat metabolism generally have organ impacts outside the brain. We have not found these. I would be unsurprised to discover that there is a rare disorder of this sort with autistic symptoms present, but it means nothing for the vast majority of individuals with autism.
Don't get me wrong - I would give the rest of my life willingly if it would cure my son. I will be grateful beyond words if this works. But it won't, any more than secretin did when it was the last great hope for autism. I have learned much in the fifteen years of my son's life, and the thing I have learned most is that people who claim to have "the cure for autism" are lying. Not always in an evil fashion, and not necessarily knowingly, but they are saying something that is not true.
This is used against autistic individuals on all levels of normal function.
m l
The general argument goes like this:
"It's okay for us to torture autistics, because anyone who can object isn't a real autistic. Therefore no one objects."
http://www.autistics.org/library/whoisautistic.ht
Unlearn.
NOTICE: This notice will appear at the bottom of all my slashdot posts.
Thimerosal has been virtually eliminated in childhood vaccines in the US, yet we see no decline in autism rates. A large scale Danish study http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/ full/112/3/604/ persuasively argued that there was no link between autism rates and Thimerosal. As in the US, they found that the elimination of thimerosal had no effect on the rate of autism. What causes autism? Hell if I know, but it sure doesn't seem that thimerosal does.
As a bitter ex-UMDNJ employee, I am glad these guys actually had the money to carry out there research. Our project involving AIDS and children was shutdown as a cost-saving measure because of the various and sundry financial scandals at that hellhole. Bully for them.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
I'd rather not go into how having this has affected my life, as that is fairly personal to me, but Asperger's Syndrome is vastly different from a diagnosis of "geek" or "smart" or whatever else. And yes, I can suffer from Asperger's and still have the capacity to wish to be seen with some sort of dignity.
There is a chance that, had my condition been diagnosed at the age of 12 rather than at 22, that I could have had a normal relationship with my family and my now-fiancee, rather than being thrown into occasional depressive episodes due to the stress of attempting to associate closely with a neruotypical individual.
Give me a break. I wish.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
While I don't agree with the asshat who responded to your original post, I will tell you this. My son displayed the signs of autism far before his two year shots (typically the ones autism is blamed on). Your assessment that it has to be "caused" rather than genetic is flawed.
It took me quite a while to come to grips with the fact that my son has this condition. I've also done a lot of thinking on why so many kids today are being diagnosed with it as opposed to twenty years ago and the answer came from my Mother of all people. She saw nothing wrong with my son. "He's just a little behind" she said. "Your brother didn't start speaking until he was almost three" she said.
Explaining away the condition as some medical conspiracy is ignorance at its finest. Perhaps in the future you should study a little more and get a little more experience with topics you feel you need to comment so strongly on before you make such absurd statements (and no, the internet, while fun, is not the best place to learn if you're looking for facts).
While I appreciate the fact that you took five minutes out of your day to give the matter some thought and you decided that in your limited experience you've never heard of or seen anything that would lead you to believe autism was anything more than mercury poisoning, I'll have to side with the researchers and the doctors and the therapists I've spoken with who have actual years of experience dealing with children afflicted by this condition.
Just because you'd never heard of it in such numbers before doesn't mean they weren't there. They were simply explained away, ignored, or treated quietly while the rest of society went about its business. Not understanding a disease is not the same as it not existing.
There are healthy people with Savant-level mathematical skills. But no one really cares. But in someone with no real personality, someone who doesn't have conversations, someone who doesn't do any of the normal things that we're all used to, the extraordinary skills are the only things left to notice.
It's like walking into an empty white room that has a pornographic magazine sitting on the floor. The magazine will probably be the only thing you notice. But if you walk into a normal teenage boy's bedroom, there could be dozens of pornographics magazines lying around and you'll probably never notice them because your attention is being taken up by a few slices of moldy pizza, mounds of dirty clothes, the poster of Caprica-6 on the wall, the Slayer CD playing at 95 dB, and the precarious tower of empty soda cans that contains enough aluminum to jumpstart a small nation's airplane industry.
So- of those few vaccines that still contain thimerosal, such as Fluzone (the most I can find in the tables, at 25 micrograms mercury for a 0.5 mL injection), how does that compare with what you eat?
You get twice that much by ingestion from a single gram of chunk white tuna. Or, from the Mercury Calculator, two ounces of canned albacore is 180% of what a 40-pound child should eat in a day.
Of course, injection is very different from ingestion- but the example I give is extreme. After the influenza vaccines, thimerosal levels drop off dramatically- and virtually all use of thimerosal was discontinued years ago.
So stop whining about vaccinating your kids. There are low- and no-thimerosal options for everything but straight TT (tetanus toxin), and you can get your kid stuck for tetanus without thimerosal by using Tdap or another vaccine with a tetanus component. And in another 5 years or so, we'll know for sure if the thimerosal was responsible. Until then, your kids get way more exposure from food, water, and air than vaccines.
There's a lot of human variability, and that includes mental capacity.
If you had the option to eliminate the genes that made men weigh over 200 pounds, would that be a good deal? It would definitely get rid of the male obesity problem. It would reduce deaths due heart disease. It would also make football and heavyweight boxing pretty lame, and it would reduce the physical labor capacity of the population immensely - sometimes a heavily muscled construction worker type is damn useful.
Sure, it's obvious that full blown autism is strictly bad - in extreme cases an autistic person my never develop language skills.
That's very different from "mild autistic spectrum disorders", where the symptoms seem to consist entirely of being intelligent and hating social interaction (at least that's how it's portrayed on the intertubes). If those are really the symptoms, that's not something we want to be fixing - people like that are extremely socially valuable.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
(Although Aspergers differs mechanistically from the other types of autism, by my understanding of the fMRI studies on the subject, it is entirely possible that "classic autism" is simply Asperger's with any other disorder that disrupts the brain's ability to filter and process data correctly. Asperger's might also be the point of intersection of autism and an as-yet unidentified condition. Or one of any number of billion other possibilities.)
I agree that there are probably no "cures" for autism, as there is still so much uncertainty as to what it is we mean by autism and what it is we mean by "cure" in this context. And even if these were known, it would seem unlikely that the means to implement such a cure exist. How do you go about fixing a mirror cell? Certainly not by any kind of classical medicine. Are there methods of limiting its impact? Possibly. An interesting book, "Somebody, Somewhere", documents an interesting theory - that some forms of autism limit the ability to cope with the flood of information from a "noisy" world and that people with this form of autism may be coping with this by setting up mental blocks to avoid being totally overwhelmed. If this sounds reasonable, then it would seem to me that replacing coping mechanisms that don't work well for an individual with ones that might work better could help a lot.
(I have Asperger's and actually don't want a total cure. It is actually a big help in the IT profession. However, I could do without some of the more debilitating aspects, if it's possible to benefit from the positives whilst limiting the negatives.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
(Yes, I am aware of the irony of my calling someone else insensitive given my claim, picture a big Monty Python foot in here somewhere if you like)
I am one of the many people who may well have Asperger's Syndrome. Certainly I have all the classic signs. Unfortunately I cannot say definitively that I do in fact have it, since I have been labeled with a host of disorders, Asperger's being one of the later ones. Many others who may have this condition may never be specifically diagnosed with it. Between my normal antisocial reticence and my traumas at the hands of mental health professionals I rarely talk about it.
First, Asperger's is known as what is called as a Spectrum Disorder, which means any one person could have some symptoms but not others, it also means one could be greatly or only mildly affected by it. Someone could be mild to moderately affected and would never get referred to someone for diagnosis and treatment, everyone would just think of him as being something of a loner with poor social skills. (Otaku anyone?)
Second, some of the symptoms of Asperger's as the same as symptoms found in ADD/ADHD, ODD and a host of other general Learning Disabilities. I personally have been diagnosed, at various times, with being "Hyperactive" (my first diagnosis predated the adoption of the ADD and later ADHD labels), ADD, ADHD, Latent sociopathy, PTSD, ASPD and several other convenient labels which describe but do not illuminate the nature of the problem. All too often, doctors play a guessing game when several conditions have overlapping symptoms. Sometimes they figure out which condition it was when they find the right drug that treats it. (If such a drug exists)
Third, almost no-one knew about the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis until sometime in the 80's. I was diagnosed by a specialist at Toronto's Wellesley Hospital sometime around '88 or '89 as I recall and it was described to my mother as being a very new understanding. I have learned since then that it wasn't all that new, just suffering from the "not invented here" syndrome. Thus, even today there can be a much higher incidence of people affected by this condition then anyone really suspects.
Fourth, the anti-social or dis-social aspects of Asperger's and similar conditions predisposes someone with it to a more or less solitary life. Yet most are of entirely normal intelligence and there is one theory that suggest such people are actually higher in average IQ than the general population. (Just as some people have highly developed emotional reasoning and can be great with people at the expense of being slightly below average, the theory states that Asperger's kids are likely to bemore intelligent than the average because more of the developmental focus is on language and reasoning skills and less on emotional/social skills.) Intelligent minds are minds hungry for stimulation. Until very recently, this came in the form of reading, model building and other quiet hobbies. Now the Internet can provide more stimulation than any bricks and books library, computers offer more opportunities for endless design and tinkering than any model set. Thus, I suspect that you will encounter a higher proportion of people with Asperger's online than you will in the big room with the blue ceiling. Also, someone with Asperger's is a little more likely to devote a large chunk of their waking hours online than a "normal" person is because for an Asperger's person, the real world is confusing at the best of times, slightly annoying most of the time and generally just an all around irritation.
If my own experiences are anything to go by, most people with Asperger's Syndrome are likely to avoid talking about it. Our emotions are not as yours, thus we simply don't care all that much if we have it or not, all we care about is aping the nonsensical habits of our society so we don't stick out. Also, our slanted emotional set means we really don't care if you know we have it or not. In my point of v
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
How much more evidence of trans-fat induced mental illness can you provide than currently exists showing that mercury is a known, proven poison for developing brains?
The grandparent post mentioned 2 possibilities. You tear down one, but ignore the other, where your objection is not valid. Herpes has become far more common in recent generations; the majority of the adult population have an immune response to HSV-1 (Herpes Simplex Virus, type 1; generally acquired during childhood), and a sizable minority (20% or so) respond to HSV-2. Furthermore, herpes is known to be able to cause serious neurological damage - when it attacks the brain (amusingly there was even an episode on House mentioning that). Other viruses in the same family can cause lasting neurological damage as well (postherpatic neuralgia).
I am not claiming that herpes is in any way a likely explanation for the rise in autism. But, on the face of it, it is about as plausible as mercury in vaccinations - both are known to potentially cause brain damage, and both have risen in prevalence in recent generations. So, the grandparent post had a valid point. The conclusion should be to investigate such suspicions (it would not be hard to e.g. check for immune responses to herpes among autistic and normal children). So far tests regarding mercury seem to indicate it is not the culprit, according to the research I have read, at least.
Now let's have your definition. Preferably one not involving any references to magic, deities, astrological convergences, or other imaginary phenomena.
This has been an interesting dialogue to read.
1 7/04352504 8682,00.html
T oddlers__TV_habits_m.shtml ... The researchers didn't know what shows the children watched, but Christakis said content likely isn't the culprit. Instead, he said, fast-paced visual images typical of most TV programming may alter brain development."
s ible-Decisions-Alternatives/dp/0892819316
Just to throw in another possibility previously discussed on slashdot, perhaps "TV" helps cause autism in those susceptible to it. See:
"TV Really Might Cause Autism"
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/
Though others disagree:
"Does Watching TV Cause Autism?"
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,15
(even suggesting indoor air quality might be part of the problem).
See also:
"Toddlers' TV habits may 'rewire' brains"
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/04/05/Worldandnation/
"Very young children who watch television face an increased risk of attention deficit problems by school age, a study has found, suggesting that TV might overstimulate and permanently "rewire" the developing brain.
Autism (or other similar seeming behavioral issues) it likely to be a multi-factorial disease, with many interacting causes -- genetics, diet, heavy metal exposure, viruses, TV, stress, and so on. Some of these factors may weigh more than others -- probably all are involved to some degree or another, and the amount may vary by individual based on how well their genetics can compensate for various problems whether they are too little good fats, too much heavy metals from whatever sources, or exposure to rapidly flickering changing scenes on TV. And it remains true that eating right, exercising, moderation in vices like TV, and trying to reduce stress are all good things to do in almost any situation (which is why I like that omega-3 suggestion, because it is probably not going to hurt, but generally may improve health). So too for not watching TV -- getting rid of your TV can't hurt much, and probably will improve health. Vaccination is admittedly a much more controversial topic. Here is one of the less sensationalized books on that:
"Vaccinations: A Thoughtful Parent's Guide: How to Make Safe, Sensible Decisions about the Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives"
http://www.amazon.com/Vaccinations-Thoughtful-Sen
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This article makes it sound like autism is a bad thing like the HIV virus. "A preventative cure" You cure diseases, you don't cure an alternative intelligence. I was diagnosed with Aspergers at a young age and have recently been confirmed by another expert. Sure I sometimes don't take subtle hints but how is that a disease? My inability to lie (that part of my brain doesn't work) is actually a benefit in so many ways. I'm upfront so people would be more comfortable in partaking in a business deal with me rather then with someone who can and does lie.
Oh wow maybe we should cure all that so I can lie, cheat and steal. My brain is perfectly fine as it is. It's people's attitudes to autism that are the problem. I'm fed up of people presuming I'm stupid and incapable because I have a form of autism. That is the disease, not the autism itself.
There have been many times when dealing with people that I wished I could kiss my own butt goodbye
Yeah, like how the hell to get out of Jersey :)