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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.'"
And all of them are lurking on 4chan.
Whereas on slashdot the ratio is the prevelance is the far more alarming 1 in 2.
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...
It would be useful to know if there's more autism by some objective measure, or just more diagnosis. I've heard it pointed out that children who are diagnosed as autistic get a very large amount more attention, private tutoring, and such, in many school systems.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So once they all have it, it'll be normal right? Then we can stop overdiagnosing it and get back to life.
Autism isn't a new issue. It's been around for hundreds of thousands of years. It's just it wouldn't be diagnosed before.
How many cases of appendicitis were there 10,000 years ago? Would be rational to look at existing reported cases and conclude that all of this just started in the modern era?
I'm not saying autism isn't a problem. It's just one of many old problems.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The article I read about this earlier today did actually credit better/more defined diagnosis criteria as a major part of the increase in diagnoses, but that roughly 50% of the increase is still unexplained. But yeah, years ago, just as with other mental diseases/development disorders, higher functioning sufferers were generally just considered slow or slightly odd, but otherwise normal.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
But when doing math, I do sit on the floor, rocking back and forth, whilst mumbling to myself.
Doesn't it mostly depend on what definition is being used this month?
One of the ongoing problems with both medical and economic statistics is that the definitions of what's being measured changes on a time scale of a year or four. This confounds attempts to measure changes over time, since the statistics for constant things are often changing.
Here in the US, one of the ongoing examples is the changing definitions of "unemployment". This was made clear back during the Reagan years, when the military was changed from ignored to "employed". This lowered the unemployment rate by roughly 1% (and varied a lot by state). It also meant that unemployment rates before and after that change were incommensurable.
This is an old, and ongoing story. Both the political and marketing people like to change definitions periodically, so they can use the resulting statistical "changes" in their propaganda.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
... will be to end all vaccinations, and not to clean up the poisons that our kids breath, the crap that's in our food, and all the other potentially genetically damaging stuff that we do.
Check your premises.
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."
General incompetence is increasing. People who are good at math get therapy until they aren't good at anything so they can be normal.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Which still warrants a different look. If we can now recognize what it is, and can do something about it that's better than just writing the situation off as a collection of unsolvable oddities that aren't worth investing much in.
There's a pretty active debate over how to classify it, and how it relates to "normal" functioning, and some of the major theories do at least hint in the direction that the picture of "normality" is complex.
One model, which has a clearer division, is that there is a specific etiology, which would make "autism" a more conventional "disease" in a sense, in that some people have it and some don't, and there is a known cause.
However another major model views the "autism spectrum" as something like the tail of a normal Bell-curve distribution for some cluster of traits. In that case, the dividing line between "normal" and "not normal" becomes a more subjective one having to do with how far in the tails you decide to put a cutoff, which probably involves some judgment of ability to function in society (which in turn depends on the society).
Other models think that we're conflating several etiologies in this big basket, and that some may be discrete diseases while others are tail-of-a-Bell-curve traits.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
'Cause outside US, not too many seems to care much about patents if they can go ahead with cheaper but equally effective generics.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
It just seems strange to me there are so many children on heavy hitter psych meds. It can't be a total coincidence that their parent's generation started the trend toward better living through pharmacology. With their parents taking Zoloft, Seroquel, Zyprexa and Abilify like candy it just seems oddly coincidental that there are so many autistic kids running around.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Jenny McCarthy.
"Who grammar checked the title?"
Hi there, you must be new to Slashdot. Welcome to Slashdot!
Define "normal".
Whatever society at that time had constructed as normal. 70 years ago, if you lived in a rural area, normal would be getting up early, walking several miles to school, playing with the school kids, then walking home and helping out around the family farm. If you lived in a city, you probably helped out in your parents' shop, or watched your younger siblings while your parents worked. But the biggest factor in normality has always been, and more than likely always will, be a certain level of social interaction. This is because we are by our very nature social animals. That is why kids that are less social than normal tend to get singled out, or people get "weird" around asocial adults: it's not a conscious act, but rather a response conditioned by evolution and years of social cues.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Researchers have recognized for years that autism is heavily a question of chemical pollution in the environment, just like cancer. However, it's pretty clear that there is also a genetic component to vulnerability, otherwise we'd all have it. The problem still needs to be understood in full if we want to do anything about it.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Normal people know normal when they see it. But you knew that, right?
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
Here is the actual study and is annoyingly light on details to help answer that question. The total number includes people diagnosed with Autistic Disorder, Aspergers, or Pervasive Developmental Disorder–Not Otherwise Specified. They have tables that slice and dice the data between gender, ethnicity, locality, IQ, and other factors, but nowhere in the paper do the say what the split between these categories is. The closest is a table that shows how many people were diagnosed before the age of 8.
If the increase is largely in Aspergers, the I would expect that it is mostly due to increased diagnosis, since it didn't didn't even have an official diagnosis standard until the early 90's and didn't enter into mainstream awareness till about a decade later.
Without this information I have no idea how to react. If we are seeing a huge increase in the number of people with low functioning Autism, that is a cause for alarm. If we are mostly seeing an increase in the number of people with Aspergers, then that's a good thing, because it means that more people with Aspergers are receiving information that can help them live their lives better, and there isn't much to be concerned about.
Was over at a friends house recently. He had on some kind of Mickey mouse adventure DVD for the baby. It was essentially demented. Mickey mouse traping around on an undefined saccharine adventure with shapeshifting companions, reaching into a sack of some kind to use tools on CG doors that lead to the next microplot with no connection to what came before or after.
It was the closest I have ever seen film come to capturing the hazy stream of consciousness of a dream. I think it was over an hour long.
If Disney and others have been mass producing DVDs like that for children for the last 15 years, I'd fully expect incidences of all kinds of mental pathology to be skyrocketing right about now.
May the Maths Be with you!
Having children diagnosed with Autism, and fairly far out on the spectrum, I wouldn't call it a dis-ability, they're "differently-abled."
If all you care about is being able to sit in a room with 17 other kids their age, shut up and do what they're told - yeah, that's a problem, well into the disability range. Personally, I don't think that the ability to sit like a vegetable and follow basic instructions is the only thing of value that a person can offer to society.
In my family, at least, this finding goes a long way toward explaining at least some of our "abnormal" behaviors:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=mind-wandering-is-linked-to-your-wo-12-03-17
Define "normal".
Like me.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Childhood friend never spoke until he was five. Seemed to be in a world of his own, but I still liked him. So he graduated from one of the Ivy League (honors or something) and finished two doctorates. He's still in his own world.
People have been studying "genius" for quite a while. Although inconclusive, there are some interesting findings about genius. One of the interesting things is what people like to call the 10,000 practice hour rule. The presumption is: you can be smart or talented in an area, but if you don't practice, you don't get to the genius level. The other side of that coin is that if you don't have the smarts or talent, all the practice in the world won't get you there.
Maybe being in a "world of your own" helps to carve out 10,000 hours of practice time, but if you don't have the talent in that area to begin with, you probably won't get anywhere near the genius level.
So there might be some correlation between some asocial/ASD behavior and genius in getting in the required 10,000 hours of practice, but you can also have a dragon-like parental units, or group of like-minded friends/collegues/mentors, or have a hostile/driven/ambitious personality, or maybe just being born/stranded in a small town (or island) with nothing else to do help you get to 10,000 hours... Researchers of genius have seen all these components in their studies...
As to where the underlying smarts/talent comes from? Well, some might be nature and some might be nurture, but since there are many examples of ASD folks with varying levels of "intelligence", it stands to reason that there is a good chance ASD is not a sign of genius...
No they have not. Research has continued to show that genetic factors overwhelm any other possibility.
It has nothing to do with pollution, and is nothing like cancer at all.
There is no epidemic, there's just increasing awareness and better diagnosis.
Fuckin-A right. Just like how all of a sudden everyone had fucking ADHD in the 90's, now everyone has Autism. In ten years it'll be some other bullshit excuse for why their kids are antisocial little fuckwits and there will be a doctor standing right there, ready to smile and nod and write a bunch of prescriptions and set up a bunch of testing that will bill insurance companies for thousands of dollars for another great big circle jerk...
Meanwhile having an autistic kid is the new "in" thing so now all the suburban housewives are rushing their kids off to the doctor and can't ever fucking shut up about it, and if that's not enough here's a goddamn magazine and a pamphlet and a group and a mailing list and a ribbon and a wristband and a bumper sticker...
Give me a break.
Citation needed.
The environment as an etiologic factor in autism: a new direction for research. (2000)
Autism, Brain, and Environment. (2006)
ASD-CARC Genetics and Environments Studies. (2007 or so.)
Nurture over nature (page 8). (2011)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
...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.
The funny thing about this is that those of us who weren't normal couldn't really tell what normal was. I laugh now about how I thought I was getting away with fitting in.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
For what it's worth, though, it's certainly true that under some circumstances the complex gene networks involved can behave in ways that appear to be trivial if the problematic environmental condition is sufficiently prevalent. This past summer I did linkage analysis on a family that appeared to have Mendelian inheritance of autism. But given the plethora of subtly different autism conditions that our lab has seen and studied, it's absurd to believe that their situation describes the majority of cases.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Of course, even in NA where polio has been 'eradicated', there are still thousands of us recovering and dealing with nerve damage from the vaccine. In a way I still think it's a good thing. I'm pretty sure that those of us sensitive to the vaccine would probably have died from the actual disease.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
All right, let me elaborate through my editing your statement: Researchers have speculated for years that autism is heavily a question of chemical pollution in the environment, just like cancer, but it's never been demonstrated.
Perhaps I'm wrong. I'd be very willing, humbled and even eager to give a look-see to any valid, world-renown documents or studies that have demonstrated that what you're saying is true (especially if you're the one who'd come up with the results; I can't dispute that) without question. Seriously. I'll take back the 'bullshit' comment if you can, with promises.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Every teen and young adult who has self-diagnosed themselves with "asperger's syndrome"?
I will go half way with you on editing: let's keep "recognized" where it is, but we adopt your "but it's never been demonstrated [conclusively]." I invite you to read this paper, and look at page eight of this. We can say with good certainty that genetic effects alone are probably insufficient to explain the entire autistic problem, as cases are still going up—it's not just a matter of more sensitive diagnostics (this is in TFA.) All that's left to do is to invoke Conan Doyle, and use some good old-fashioned Holmesian abduction: the environment looks pretty damn suspect.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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
Or are we changing how we measure it?
Most probably, as the criteria for diagnostics have indeed changed over the years, but this is not the only problem. One issue is that the risk for autism increases the more a mother waits to have a kid. This is at least one of the reasons that kids with autism are appearing more and more frequently all over the country.
Medicine/contraception has been getting better. Education is getting longer. And families are waiting longer and longer to procreate. This is in stark contrast with the opposite problem of mothers who are still giving birth way too young, or giving birth to babies with the alcohol-syndrome...
Our society is now suffering from both types of problems, parents who wait too long and parents who do not wait at all, and an entrenched political system that seems to discourage and penalize middle-of-the-ground discussions over these topics.
Perhaps he believes Autism is made up. It is likely psychological diseases are over diagnosed. Pharmaceuticals have an interest in promoting drugs for symptoms they often help define. However, it would be hard to argue that we aren't exposed to chemicals and frequencies of energy than didn't exist for most of our history. Our environment has changed and it would be rather odd if it had no affect on us. It seems equally obvious that genetic variation would mean variations in symptoms/responses.
We have no baseline for what is 'normal' for many of modern diseases. We have a pharmaceutical industry deeply tied to deciding what constitutes the need for medication. And we have introduced countless chemicals(and the chemicals they break down into) into our environment, food and water.
Figuring out cause and effect gave humans a huge survival advantage; figuring out cause + cause + cause = effect +effect seems to give us more trouble.
This might be a stupid thing to do, but at this very moment, do something for me: read this entire comment I'm making to you with deep thought. I'll try not to be preachy and over-wordy.
In some ways, you are absolutely right. In some cases, there's over-diagnosing, and some people use it as an excuse instead of working with the diagnosis. You'll have parents who get their child diagnosed with autism and think "well, nothing I can do", whine about it then expect everyone to understand why their kid just knocked down an end-cap full of cereal boxes.
But that doesn't mean that the child isn't autistic. I myself believe I'm an undiagnosed autist, or at the very least AS, so when my son was diagnosed as autistic, I already had a grasp on what that meant. My world wasn't over, my son wasn't dying and there was plenty I could do about it. He was diagnosed early, so he was able to be enrolled in special programs that popped up in our public school system (free services, with the quality of ones you'd pay thousands for--we're never moving from this town). I'm a parent of an autist who easily and readily recognizes what is an autistic-meltdown and my son just being obstinate. When he IS being ridiculous which is connected to his natural, "I'm a nine-year old who WANTS SOMETHING!" self, I get right down at his level and say, "You know exactly what I'm telling you to do. You're smart and you know better. Now come on," then lead him away. Does it work every time? No, because he's autistic, and his threshold level is MUCH lower. But when my mom's tried justifying something he's done in public as "well, he's autistic," I've sat her right down and said, "He's not stupid. He knows. If it was an 'autistic thing', I'd tell them myself it was, but don't say that when it's not warranted."
Any parent needs to figure it out and know what their child can and can't handle, depending on where they are in the spectrum. My son is almost nine now, and we have worked extremely hard on getting him acclimated, while meeting him halfway. He will never "fit in" or be "normal", and there are times when he can't control his autistic-impulses. Those times, yes, you have to excuse. It exists. No rods or paddles will do anything for my son, and those like him. In loads of cases, it's not an excuse; the sooner you see that, the better.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
If Disney and others have been mass producing DVDs like that for children for the last 15 years, I'd fully expect incidences of all kinds of mental pathology to be skyrocketing right about now.
My boys are both diagnosed (mostly non-verbal) Autistic - they feed on Pixar DVDs like they were crack, same super strong dopamine push high when they get it, same withdrawal symptoms when they don't, same "will do anything to get it" motivation.
The only thing worse are Disney "Sneak Peek" trailers.
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!
My mother has runs a special needs unit of about 3 classes in a normal government primary school in Western Sydney for about 5 years and has been a teacher of "normal" kids for about 30 years before that. She is convinced that the percentage of special needs kids (autism, downs etc) as compared to "normal" primary school kids is rising due to advances in medical technology. She feels that 30, 40 or 50 years ago a lot of the kids she teaches would have died due to complications at childbirth related to their conditions whereas with better medical technology today more survive. This judgement is just based on her experience only. Whether its true or not I don't know but she has been teaching kids for over 35 years.
Funny and Interesting things from all around the net
Again, the first article is very, very speculative. Basically, they state that 1) Autism exists but we really don't know what it is, but it's some sort of neurodevelopmental disorder. 2) That environmental factors have caused (other) neurodevelopmental disorders so there is a potential model for a similar mechanism in autism 3) Genetics is certainly part of it but Mendelian genetics doesn't really explain the data (as it fails to do for most human diseases with a clear genetic component - the review just completely blows by the newer regulatory mechanisms such as methylation, the various small RNA control dohickies and the other neat stuff coming down the pike).
So since genetics can't explain it and environmental factors have been shown to have a role in brain development it is certainly possible that there is an environmental factor.
That's fine but it's not going to get anybody the Nobel prize. The hard work has yet to be done. The paper was really a preamble for a grant proposal. Nothing wrong with that - its a deserving hypothesis but I'm not overwhelmed with the data.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
As a parent of an autistic child, let me tell you:
You are ignorant and have no idea what you are talking about.
Just like all those wonderful "parents" with all the answers who don't actually have children.
Boy though- I do wish you were right. I wish it was just a simple failing of myself as a parent that caused this. I wish I could lift this burden from my daughter through simplistic things like like being more servere in disciplining her. Lord knows my wife and I tried that route unsuccessfully for over a year and a half before she was diagnosed.
Anyways- keep on trucking in your ignorance and comically naive view of complex problems. My family and I in the meantime have to live in the real world.
Yes.
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This reminds me of a family my parents are friends with.
Their son was diagnosed with moderate autism at about age 10. Everyone that knew the kid wasn't surprised, he always had just a general lack of social grace. So he was enrolled in classes to teach him social skills. And for the year that he was in the classes his behaviour was vastly improved. You could just tell he was observing the situation and formulating a response.
The problem was as soon as he stopped going to the classes he went right back to being a little asshole. Except, when my mother was around. When she was around he was a pleasant young man, the moment she was out of earshot he transformed into a little prick.
Then there was an incident where my father played a practical joke on him. The boy was red faced and emotionally laid bare in front of everyone he held dear. Then my father puts his arm around and says, "See what happens when you don't listen."
Then it clicked for me. That's what dad did to my sister and I when we were being a little shits. He was the master of public humiliation as discipline device ("You need to listen to the advice I'm giving you, or else.").
Which meant that mom had a "We need to talk" moment with him (My mother has this way of being so calm she's scary during those conversations).
So fast forward to a couple of years ago. We're all at a 4th of July party. He's being a more of an ass than any 15 year old has a right to be. When we were away from the party for a moment, I used a couple of joint locks on him and got him pinned face down on the lawn. Then I told him point blank, "You're being a little shit. Stop it or I will get very angry." After I let him up, he behaved. Never had a problem with him since.
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
My kids are all perfectly typical and have the same response. That's just kids.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Reading your insightful and articulate post about your own 'autism-spectrum' disorder really underscores to me how much of this issue boils down to a problem with semantics.
I've met someone with autism. Requires constant care. Blank face. Mute and illiterate. Likes to bang head repeatedly against solid objects for comfort.
I've met someone with Asperger's syndrome (my informal diagnosis, but not in dispute). Worked for the same company as me. Independent to a fault. Blank face. Slow but precise and articulate communicator. Calm, personable and helpful. Admirable intellect.
Clearly we are conflating things that do not deserve to be conflated.
'm curious as to why so many people seem to be jumping out of the woodwork and complaining about this.
Because it sounds close to what the anti-vaccination lobby is claiming. They have been cherry-picking and distorting scientific evidence for more than a decade, not to mention doing fraudulent and unethical research on children, in order to show that mercury in vaccines cause autism. When thimerosal was taken out of most vaccines, the autism rates failed to drop (indeed, the rise did not even slow down), the smarter ones started blaming undefined "toxins" in vaccines.
So, to put it shortly, cranks have been screaming for years that autism is caused by (specific) environmental factors in order to spread preventable diseases. This (unfairly) makes people skeptical of such claims.
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
I don't know how much experience you have with Autism, but I can assure you, as the parent of TWO ASD children, it goes well beyond "quirky".
"Quirky" is when a kid likes to wear silly hats, or insists on wearing tights with everything, or like to dance and sing at not always appropriate times. That's quirky.
"Quirky" is NOT being unable to dress yourself properly or being unable to BATHE yourself, or sitting on your bed making moaning and grunting noises while rocking back and forth and flipping through toy magazines and then stripping your clothes off and shredding your underwear into teeny tiny bits before having a poop accident and then smearing it all over yourself and your walls. At 11 years old. THAT is Autism. Not "Quirky".
I think far too many /.ers have a really inaccurate idea of what Autism actually is. Many here seem to think that it's all Aspies. Trust me, it's not. Aspies are the tiny minority of ASD sufferers. MOST ASD sufferers are so social and learning disabled that even doing basic day-to-day living activities such as toileting or bathing or even feeding themselves is a challenge. So this isn't the kind of thing taken lightly by researchers. If there has been a substantive increase in diagnosis, then I am wont to believe it.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I know my son would not have been diagnosed properly 10 or 15 years ago as autism spectrum. I certainly was not properly diagnosed as a child.
He appears normal, but querky. Would not look you in the eye, could not remember names, even of his best friend and cousins. Can pick up almost any musical instrument and make, if not music, a pleasing set of sounds from it. No interest in learning to play tho, just plink. Kinda sad, we have a semi-retired concert piano tracher down the street, she offered to tutor him for free after hearing him plick away on her stienway. Cheerful disposition at almost any time, is very charming and girls even a few years older just come up to him and talk to him. Hell, he was asked out on his first date by a girl at age 8. At age 9 he is 5 feet all, adrenal glands are in puberty, but not his petutitary. Very picky eater. He can do 2 position multipliers in his head, 4 digit add/subtract. At age 7. At age 8 he could solve for X with the four classic operators. At 9 he could perform 3 and 4 step math problems in his head. Not a math genius, but gifted.
Classic aspergers, an autistic spectrum disorder. Height stinky armpits and pubic fuzz aside, he appears normal. Aside from his natural attractiveness to the opposite sex, he is a typical geek.
Careful testing as revealed that he can store information in his brain, but it is hard for him to get it back out effectively. It is sort of like a bad hash algorithm...
If I tell him the boy work a red hat, a green shirt and blue pants, and then I ask him what the boy wore, he would say "I don't know."
Give him a key, and he can return the value. "what color was the hat?" gets an instant "Red" response. Even a day later he will retain and retrieve the color of the hat.
if you ask him what a book was about, he says "I don't know". Ask him about the boy in the story, or an event in the story you get near total recall, but he needs the key supplied to him.
Ask him to name ten Pokemon or bakugon no dice. Give him a name, you are buried in detail and stats and battle pre plays from a book or a show he has seen.
He can memorize 5 spelling words in a single pass. 8 takes him 4 or 5 tries. Give him ten, you are,lucky if he can memorize 2. Mind you, that ten cold be made of words he learned in two 5 word sessions, and he will not be able to recall the information, but we know it is there.
So all of his therapy is around socialization and how to build his own keys to his knowledge and socialization skills. They are all skills I had to build myself because I was never diagnosed until my 20s.
Now he gets some services for free, some we pay for, like a writing tutor. Autistic awareness has resulted in more autistics being identified and read, and that is a good thing.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
If we look at cancer rates across the board. They are down over the last 100 years. What I have noticed is that spanking your kids is at a historic low. Which could be a cause of autism. And there's always the pirate theory, with increase in pirates over the last 10 years, that could be contributing factor to autism in our kids.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Fuckin-A right. Just like how all of a sudden everyone had fucking ADHD in the 90's, now everyone has Autism
I'm pretty sure I had ADHD when I was a kid, but back in the '50s and '60s nobody knew it was a disorder. Back then it was "goddamnit boy, can't you pay attention???"
Autistic kids back then were simply labeled as "mentally retarded" and treated as such.
How the hell you got modded insightful is a mystery to me. The comment is not just uninsightful, it's downright ignorant and shows no knowlege of science, medicine, or progress whatever. I'll bet you and the people who modded you up are all from Texas.
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