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CDC Reports 1 In 88 Children Now Affected With Autism In the US
An anonymous reader writes "A new government health report indicated that about one in 88 children in the United State has autism or a related disorder, the highest estimate to date, which represented an overall increase of 25 percent since the last analysis in 2006. The Centers for Disease Control reported on Thursday that the rate increased by 78 percent compared to the reported rate in 2002. From the article: '"The CDC’s new estimate of autism prevalence demands that we recognize autism as a public health emergency warranting immediate attention," Autism Speaks Chief Science Officer Geri Dawson said in a new release.
"More than ever, these numbers compel us to redouble our investment in the research that can reveal causes, validate effective treatments and guide the effective delivery of services to all our communities," she added.'"
Or are we changing how we mesure it? How we define "autism"? Maybe it's because autism is more acceptable, and doesn't require someone to be locked in a basement until a group of 1980s teens decide that they need to find a treasure in order to save their housing development.
All kidding aside, I'd be interested to know how much the autism scale has changed over the years. I realize that highly functioning people with autism still count as having autism, but was that always the case?
There's a reason there is no "Disagree" mod...
This is an important point to remember.
As an example: I was diagnosed with Asperger's in 2010 at the age of 37. Do I count in the statistics of 2010, or 1973?
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
I Had Asperger Syndrome. Briefly.
By BENJAMIN NUGENT
New York Times
Published: January 31, 2012
"FOR a brief, heady period in the history of autism spectrum diagnosis, in the late ’90s, I had Asperger syndrome.
I exhibited a “qualified impairment in social interaction,” specifically “failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level” (I had few friends) and a “lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people” (I spent a lot of time by myself in my room reading novels and listening to music, and when I did hang out with other kids I often tried to speak like an E. M. Forster narrator, annoying them). I exhibited an “encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus” (I memorized poems and spent a lot of time playing the guitar and writing terrible poems and novels).
The biggest single problem with the diagnostic criteria applied to me is this: You can be highly perceptive with regard to social interaction, as a child or adolescent, and still be a spectacular social failure. This is particularly true if you’re bad at sports or nervous or weird-looking.
But my experience can’t be unique. Under the rules in place today, any nerd, any withdrawn, bookish kid, can have Asperger syndrome."
My son is autistic, and I can't stand it when people involve the words 'disease' or 'cure' when speaking of it. Autism Speaks goes so far as to use the word 'eradication', so I don't bother with them whatsoever. They want a cure for something, in my own opinion, isn't curable. It's the way you're made. There are no cures for Down's out there right now, are there?
And when it comes to the "OMG SO MANY AUTISTIC KIDS!" issue--I'm sure everyone here remembers the days back in grade-high school, where the special-needs kids were all dumped into one room. From Down's to ADHD, they resided in the basement where none of us "normal" kids ran the risk of running into them and giving us complexes. There were many, many children that were autistic, but they'd only get the colorful, cute euphemisms, like 'retards' or 'speds'. They were ALWAYS used with great care and kindness, of course. /sarcasm
Nowadays, more people are eager to look into each case specifically, instead of throwing a blanket over any kid that falls behind or shows some sign of disability. Therefore, we're all freaking out about how there are so many sudden cases of autism--to me, it's always been here. I myself am in the spectrum, but back when I was little, I was brought to 'retardation' tests to examine my issues (where they discovered that my IQ was actually strangely high). I consider myself an undiagnosed case until I learn otherwise. If you look around yourself, think back to all the kids you went to school with, the more you might realize that autism's always been there... we just haven't met it with the same speculation, sensitivity and care until now. Are there environmental factors? Perhaps. But I think that only delays our understanding of autism itself: we're looking for outside reasons, when it's inborn, 'just the way you are'.
My son is almost nine, doesn't use the toilet exclusively, speaks almost exclusively in echolalia (and in my exact tone and inflection, as I was his main caregiver growing up), has odd, brain-numbing routines (he'll sing the same three words of a song for an hour straight while hitting the floor over and over again in specific patterns)... but he is damned smart, scarily so. I work on meeting him halfway; he does, deep down, have great understanding, and as long as I accommodate the things he can't help, it works out. To be honest, he's one of the easiest kids I've ever had to deal with, and I was a preschool teacher for over ten years.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
...from my 37 years on this rock, I've seen the descriptor of ASD go from savant to a whole swathe of "abnormality", from minor zoneouts (such as I have frequently) to total withdrawal (which I have in times of extreme stress). All have been applied to me in passing although I've never had anything like an official diagnosis. I used to act out at school, not because I was ADHD (as false a diagnosis as MSbP), but because I was bored: I had already learned what the teachers were trying to teach me. Problem was, as is common today, the school teaches at the rate of the slowest kid in class. I could think faster than all those kids, even the teachers, combined. So according to them I was the one with the problem - in a way they were right. They were holding me back.
It's not mental illness, it's a defence mechanism.
Back to the topic: ASD/ADHD/AS descriptors have become so diluted over the years, the terms could be applied to anybody. Have you checked out the standard mental health questionnaires? So full of leading questions, you couldn't say no to more than half of them - which is pretty much a guarantee that in any given situation, you could be assessed as having traits of some debilitating mental illness or other that would disqualify you from mixing in public. It's used in the UK on a regular basis to remove children from parents where in fact there is absolutely nothing wrong with the parents, yet one simple questionnaire that takes five minutes to answer ticks the boxes of psychotic, MSbP, NPD, ASPD, any number of "diagnoses" that immediately justifies the forced separation of families.
What we have now is those diagnoses being publicly scrutinised as it's now emerged that the assessments have been carried out by persons unqualified to do so, while claiming that they are qualified. Roy Meadow, Andrew Kawalek, Bruno Bettelheim, David Southall (just some names off the top of my head and I have extensive files on those and more) - all frauds, and provably so. Dangerous ones at that. All have had their hand in removal of many thousands of children from their families on the basis of fabricated mental illness. Southall does not even have a degree, yet he is on the GMC roll as a practising psychologist with license to carry out drug experiments on children. Gentlemen and ladies, I bullshit ye not.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
My son is autistic. Didn't talk until 6 and still has lots of problems. The one thing that we did at 6 years old was to remove all diary from his diet. After this he calmed right down (used to take 2 strong men to handle a 5 year old), started talking, going to the bathroom on his own and various other improvements. The days he come home acting like his old self always turned out to be days when someone fed him diary.
Diary is one food that the vast majority of people can not digest properly. Especially certain races (my wife is Native American) and I've never felt good when drinking milk. This raises the question, does diet make things such as autism worse? I'm not aware of any studies done on it but there are quite a few people who have reported good results from changing diet.
The problem is the diary farmers have very good marketing and most people are convinced that milk is a vital part of the diet. They also have a powerful lobby.
Wheat is another one that may be worth some studying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I like the limited conclusion of your first link. There is strong political pressure to find a reason to blame something that can be regulated, however tenuous the link. Politicians really want to be seen as "doing something" about this issue, because it affects so many people so deeply. If only we can blame it on some man-made environmental factor, the congresscritters can fight to regulate whatever it is and all be heroes (heck, it would be welome news in general). That makes me suspicious of studies that try to overreach in that direction.
The conclusion of "a disease of very early fetal development" seems strongly supported, and the points this paper makes about more general "environmental factors" seem reasonable, but I do share the GPP's skepticism of "let's blame chemicals".
Your second link is a sales brouchure, if I've ever seen one.
"Autism" has been the word for "I don't know what's wrong" for so long, and the definition keeps getting broader: once that term didn't include all mild retardation, nor ADHD, but was more speciifc to being non-reponsive to the environment, and high-functioning "autistics" of several decades ago shared a common tale of withdrawing from sensory overload, and difficult in processing stimulus that normal people took for granted. (That was certainly the case for me, though thankfully I eventually caught up, more or less).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
See... my issue is the term 'disease'. I can't do it. Even if I don't hold a doctorate in this, I don't SEE it as a disease. Disorder, yes--disease, absolutely not. So I automatically had trouble when both articles use the word. Maybe that's more feeling/opinion, but I don't feel 'diseased', nor does my son.
There could be environmental factors, but I think it's more genetic than junk food. I don't think the numbers have grown to the proportion people say it has when it comes to 'real time' and current environmental factors, because:
--Many of those 'new diagnoses' are people who were never diagnosed in childhood and are in their 40s-60s. The system's changed; as I said in my main comment here, we didn't explore autism as in-depth as we do now. Back when I was a kid, all the special-needs children were put into one group with no distinction.
--There IS, imho, an over-diagnosing going on.
At any rate, I'm not QUITE taking back my bullshit-vote. I need more conclusiveness. I put more stock into how we're made. But thanks for sharing and replying (and forgive me being glib/abrasive, I guess. I admit to being defensive on this issue. :P)
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Suzuki is indeed and unfortunately more of a PR mouthpiece than a real human being at this point (much less researcher); perhaps it would be better to say he illuminates the opinion of the research community by exploiting it to his own shallow ends rather than anything else. And yes, "disease" is a bad word to use; both pieces are dated (the first by age and the second by shortage of recent exposure) and hence prone to what today would be considered something of a faux pas. Make no mistake: it is improbable that it has anything to do with junk food, and Suzuki should have been shot for suggesting that. More likely culprits would be air and water contaminants, or perhaps some cocktail of food preservatives.
The word "autism" is also hilariously broad, certainly. One reason the diagnostic categories are expanding is that researchers want to understand the whole spectrum of attributes that go into making the really dysfunctional cases what they are. As my boss likes to parrot, almost everyone has one or more traits that would be considered autistic if they appeared in the right combination with other aspects; in fact, the diagnostic questionnaires (which you've probably seen) are scored by adding up the 'autisminess' of the responses, so even that is a spectrum. Of course, it's hard to take the news from a psychiatrist that your son has a surplus of autistic traits when they explain it like it's a disaster.
There's another confounding factor, also, in how the population of diagnoses has grown, besides shifting definitions and older people getting re-assessed: better-educated (as well as more paranoid) young families are more likely to seek diagnoses out in the first place. In retrospect there's probably too much interference to say honestly if the rate of autistic traits is increasing or not.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Perhaps he believes Autism is made up. It is likely psychological diseases are over diagnosed.
I think it's very likely that certain autism spectrum disorders are overdiagnosed, most commonly asperger's syndrome. It's like it is the latest trend in psychology to classify introvert intelligent people as having asperger's syndrome. I've come across more than a few people who function quite well in social scenarios that have been labeled as having aspergers where I seriously want to ask the question "Isn't (s)he just shy or introverted?".
The only person that I was quite convinced he had Asperger's was a man who really showed problems interacting in social scenarios. He wasn't a bad person, but he would sometimes make remarks that were inappropriate to the situation or the mood. He would often come off as rude and arrogant, insult people without realizing it, obsess over small details and maintained a very strict schedule that was nearly mechanical. I know that this sounds a bit condescending over the person, since the above factors alone don't necessarily give you Asperger's, after all he could just be a rude person who overly focused on the details, but if you worked with him for a couple of days you would get this feeling that something was slightly off.
I believe that in many cases people who go take an ASD test do so convinced that they've got Asperger's and will answer questions to skew the results in favor of what they were expecting. Any person intelligent enough can fairly easily subvert standardized psychological testing, and the people typically wondering about Asperger's syndrome are introvert intelligent people. As a part of a discussion about this topic I've done the first diagnostic tests myself twice, once normally and once with the intention of being diagnosed as having Asperger's, and it's needless to say that I got the results I was expecting in both cases. I think we have a lot more hypochondriacs than we have people with Asperger's Syndrome, and the initial diagnostic tests (often found online by the way) play into that by having people visit psychologists for at least 3 times to do an extensive test. The extensive testing here consists of a standardized series of questions (which are often the same questions worded differently for verification purposes), a logical test (including once again the tower of hanoi problem, which every programmer is familiar with) and another test, but I forgot what the third part was, each in a seperate session, followed by a session where the psychologist tells you the results. That's 4 visist guaranteed for everyone who takes the introduction test and manages to score high enough and become worried.
I also believe that it currently is a trend among psychologists to overdiagnose relatively harmless conditions such as Asperger's Syndrome and ADHD. The sale of Ritalin (for treatment of ADHD) has gone through the roof in the past 10 years here, with students starting a black market in schools because the drug supposedly helps you study better during exams. Many parents with kids that are underperforming in school take their children to psychologists expecting an answer among the lines of a psychological disorder instead of asking themselves the question if their child would rather study something different. After all some people just don't care about Latin or math, so it's no wonder they perform badly when their parents force them in that direction because of their own desires.
It's become all too common to hear people say "Well, he's not performing well in school, but it's because of ADHD", while he's been sitting there real quietly reading a comic book in the background for the past 20 minutes. It just reeks of "I pushed my kid in the wrong direction, and now I don't want to admit it, so I get a psychologist who told me it wasn't my fault. If he pops these pills he'll be fine."
Having said that, I don't want to downplay Asperger's Syndrome (or ADHD) or the standardized testing for it. I've certainly c