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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."
There's a pretty big difference between psychologists and psychiatrists.
One of them gets to prescribe drugs.
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. 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. I do worry that when you diagnose someone with autism there is this natural "I'm broken" feeling along with it, and everyone treats you like you're disabled and thus useless. So I cannot say if being able to identify autism more often is a good or bad thing.
It is interesting, but unsurprising, that they found that ADHD and autism had no link thus far. Based on the symptoms I expect we'll find that if ADHD exists at all that it will be localised around control, while autism is localised around right/left brain communication.
Autism is basically a cluster of behaviors and other factors that often appear together in a child.
Some examples from the Wikipedia article about autism include toe-walking, refusing to be interrupted, making repetitious sounds, compulsive behavior, problem recognizing faces...
Does that sound to you like basically any kid under the age of 10?
Or that, like all good screening tools, it's used as an aid to proper diagnosis rather than the final arbiter of such. There's nothing wrong with mass screening per se so long as you don't rely on it to make the final decision. On the other hand, I wonder what percentage of those false positives are, as GP pointed out, potentially patients who were misdiagnosed in the first instance.
If we’re asking, “If I have autism, will the brain scan find it?,” the answer is an encouraging 90% “yes.” But if we change the question to “If the scan says I have autism, do I have the ASD?,” that number plummets to something like 5%.
In other words, this method is roughly as accurate as:
bool hasAutism(void *data) {
return (rand() % 20) == 3;
}
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
This would be ideal - but in my experience, there is zero intuitive understanding of asperger behaviour in people who doesn't have it. Zero as in, in all the people with obvious asperger and attendant behavioural problems that I have encountered IRL, none have gotten any understanding from the people around them. "Why does he behave in this bizzare, antisocial way?", "He's straight up evil.", "She's a cold bitch", "He's to smart to relate to us normal people (the standard explanation for my behaviour as a kid)" etc.
When it has affected my friends/family, I have explained to them the (to me) obvious reason behind these people's behaviour - later, they tell me that when they interpreted the persons behaviour in the way I argued they should, they suddenly notice that they are able to predict the former utterly crazy persons reactions in a way that, while still making no sense to them, are at least consistent.
Emotions! In your brain!
The pojnt of the test was to see if it was even possible to detect someone with autism. That's all.
Apparently it is. More refinement needed.
If peoplem started using it right now as an actual yes/no test then everyones complaints would be justified.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on