Slashdot Mirror
Autism Diagnosed With a Fifteen Minute Brain Scan
kkleiner writes "A new technique developed at King's College London uses a fifteen minute MRI scan to diagnose autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scan is used to analyze the structure of grey matter in the brain, and tests have shown that it can identify individuals already diagnosed with autism with 90% accuracy. The research could change the way that autism is diagnosed – including screening children for the disorder at a young age."
What are the operators of these machines called technically? Shamans?
Say you scan 50,000 a year, you'll get 5000 false positives. That means each year you'll have 5000 children who'll have to go through humiliating therapy and have their education severely hampered for no good reason! Of those 50,000, you'd expect only 500 to actually have autism.
Even if you used this as a basis for further testing, You're still putting 10 families through the stress of comprehensive testing for autism for no reason for every 1 family whose child actually has the condition.
I can only see this as a good thing, I'm on a compsci course and as you'd expect it seems like a good third of the people there claim to have aspergers, most of those seem fairly typical and reasonably socially functional. I'd be *highly* interested to see what this test reveals about them. This isn't to say I don't believe in the condition, I know plenty who have it and exhibit obvious major behavioural patterns and have actual issues with such things, I for one just suspect it's *way* over diagnosed, hell a number of psychiatrists have called me "aspie" after 5 minutes of talking to me, I certainly don't buy it. I just hope this sort of screening will help people who actually need help get the care they need and de-clog the system of hypochondriac nerds who want to feel special.
Yep, but that might make it a useful *screening* tool rather than a *testing* tool. You'd then go do proper (ie more specific) tests.
I can get a 99% correct diagnosis rate on autism just by going "not autistic" every time.
I've read the original paper, and its based on a sample of 20 normal and 20 autistic people, I might have another read to see if they've done multiple tests and only picked the significant one. Search for the poster about fMRI responses in a dead salmon for more info...
While people who suffer at the extreme ends of the autistic spectrum would have difficulty maintaining a society, some of the more moderate autistic individuals are leaders in engineering, technology, and science.
You could say the same about cancer. Some leaders in engineering, technology, and science have cancer. That doesn't mean cancer may not really be a disease or that a neoplasm may simply be the next step in our evolution.
It has become fashionable among nerds to identify with Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of Rainman to the point anyone who is even remotely socially awkward or left brain oriented to be called autistic, followed by the implication that autism fills an important role in society. The reality is somewhat different. With a few famous exceptions, patients tend to have trouble taking care of themselves - many are profoundly disabled - while actual leaders in engineering, technology, and science tend to have normal mental health. (though many of them may be assholes, but that's another story)
Since the main article says exactly that, how can it be inaccurate?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
So it only has a 4.5% true positive rate. Great
Indeed, it's significantly worse than my (99% true rate) autism diagnosing rock that evaporates if an autistic child holds it.
And my rock takes much less than 15 minutes.
Like ADHD, "Autism" is *HIGHLY* over diagnosed, it's very much big money these days, both for pill companies as well as "therapists". NOTE: I didn't say these "conditions" where fake, I said over diagnosed for the purpose of money.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
""we don't know what the problem is and in fact there may not even be any problem, but let's put a stamp on it anyway" (I'm not a psychiatrist, but my father is and I talked about it with him)"
Yeah right, like this qualifies you for saying anything about it. Real severe autism certainly does exist and that there is quite strong evidence that their is in fact a spectrum. See temple grandin:
Now just watching her now she seems "more normal" but you can tell their is something off about her right away and if you had no idea of her developmental history you could easily write her off as just another psychiatrists "fake disorder".
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html
Similar to what you get with intelligence, from very stupid to very smart. The idea that things are monolithic (well understood, easily dismissed as nonsense) instead of highly complex and difficult to understand is a huge problem with human understanding of not just autism but human traits and disease in general.
So autism can range in it's severity, since "Autism" is a rubric for a host complicated factors not well understood that leads to all sorts of real life issues.
One of the real issues is
1) Humans are profoundly ignorant, oblivious and stupid at all levels of society
2) If you do not believe this, check out how medicine was practiced in the 1800's and long before that.
Like many things autistic spectrum disorders are over-diagnosed but why why people are diagnosed on the autistic spectrum is in the first place is to get help. People are insanely insanely prejudiced against one another that do not fit the behaviour of the masses and so they become discriminated against in employment and in other avenues of life. So it's little wonder why many people think psychiatry is bunkum, they want the other to be easy to understand and to justify their their ignorance and innate prejudices against others. People want answers to complicated questions within their narrow window of existence, I'm sorry but reality does not work like this for anyone who has actually looked at the history of medicine and psychiatry in particular. Entire generations of people existed in darkness simply because it was beyond their ages understanding and understanding of autism today still suffers from this same phenomenon.
It's easy to to try to discredit something you've never known anyone living with or experience their daily behavior on a regular basis.
The research could change the way that autism is diagnosed - including screening children for the disorder at a young age.
The thing about primary screening tests is that they have to give false positives, due to high sensitivity and lower specificity. It's ok if the test tells you you have HIV when actually you don't. It's NOT ok if it doesn't tell you you have it when you do. The other thing about primary screening tests is that they have to be cheap. This test is far from cheap and in fact consumes limited resources. In some countries there are waiting lists for MRIs.
Perhaps this test could be used as a secondary screen, if specificity can be proven to be high enough, to screen those doubtful or borderline cases so that they can be correctly diagnosed.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If I got this right during skimming through the article, the test will produce roughly 20% false positives.
So let's just hope it will not be used for mass screening...
Therapy's not humiliating. Hell, OT's kinda fun.
Real humiliation is when you're growing up and all the interactions with your peers blow up in your face due to your mind-blindless and inability to read body language or understand personal space, and your classmates ostracize you because they think you're weird, and you don't know what's going wrong. And since there's nothing you know of (because your'e undiagnosed) that differentiates you from your peers or explains why this is happening, you conclude you're getting ostracized because you're some doofy, idiotic, bad person. That, my friend, is real humiliation.
Well, the fact that the false negative rate of 10% is worse than it's false positive rate of 5% doesn't really impress. Also MRI is not cheap. Screening tests that are actually useful are cheap and have very low false negative rates. This has neither.
With Autism being so prevalent in humans you do have to wonder if it is really a disease or mistake, or perhaps either a previous evolutionary step or our next evolutionary step.
This point gets raised on Slashdot quite often, and it represents in incredible misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution doesn't have steps and doesn't progress in an easily identifiable direction. Genetic features aren't mistakes. They just are. And they are either beneficial in some way or they are not. If there are specific genes responsible for autism and they always cause autism, they would need to spread to a very large fraction of the population to be indicative of evolutionary change. They would also need to be beneficial to reproductive success.
Now it's possible that some of the genes that cause autism are beneficial, but that having too many of them causes autism. It would be difficult to go from that state to an entirely autistic species. I don't see highly autistic individuals finding autistic mates and having large families. Even if they did, the children might not be autistic. We don't understand the genetic and environmental combinations required yet.
If you've had any contact with highly autistic people, you'll know that an autistic species wouldn't survive for long. Fully autistic people (not the ones on slashdot who claim to be autistic but are just lacking in social skills) do not have the skill set to survive alone. Or to recognize that another individual might need help. Or to recognize that another individual has thoughts, emotions, or a different point of view. The savant skills that some autistic people have are rare. Autistic people who can't count past 10 outnumber the "living calculators" by factors of a thousand.
Of couse, Autism isn't "good" or "bad." It just is. But it is hard on families. If a way is ever found to prevent it, I think most people would be happy about it.
Support SETI@home