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Early Brain Response To Words Predictive For Autism
vinces99 writes "The pattern of brain responses to words in 2-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder predicted the youngsters' linguistic, cognitive and adaptive skills at ages 4 and 6, according to a new study from the University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. The findings are among the first to demonstrate that a brain marker can predict future abilities in children with autism."
It's predictive OF cognitive ability FOR autistic children.
“We’ve shown that the brain’s indicator of word learning in 2-year-olds already diagnosed with autism predicts their eventual skills on a broad set of cognitive and linguistic abilities and adaptive behaviors,” said lead author Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences.
In other words, they can tell you a lot about your kid's future based on this one test.
The bad news:
“This is true four years after the initial test, and regardless of the type of autism treatment the children received,” she said.
In other words, the autism treatments don't work.
I suspect that even a nigh-science-fiction breakthrough in robust biological characterization wouldn't free you of the dreaded 'spectrum'.
Even among comparatively well understood and characterized medical problems, where you can run some labs or an MRI or something and get an nice graph and some numbers out, there are very few 'binary' disorders. You might either have a strep infection or not; but the only limit on the detail of the 'strep spectrum' is how much diagnostic detail is worth the effort. In principle, you could count up every last bacterium, rank the more heavily and less heavily colonized patients, classify them according to location(s) of heaviest infection, have subclasses based on efficacy of immune response(possibly even which elements of the immune response are active, and how fast they come online). If that isn't enough, you could even start looking at the (definitely variable from one person to another) genomes of the bacteria. Any special plasmids? Obviously, that isn't worth bothering with, because it'd cost a fucking fortune and(aside from a few basic tests for antibiotic resistance) wouldn't change the proposed treatment.
The odds that a serious perturbation in something as complex as the human neural network wouldn't result in myriad different outcomes, of varying flavor and severity, seems vanishingly unlikely, even if you had arbitrarily good diagnostic tools at your disposal.
Autism is real. The "spectrum" is bullshit.
Another A/C sets the adults straight.
Perhaps 'spectrum' is merely a sign of our ignorance - maybe there are 29 different disorders that we call 'autism spectrum' due to our inability to distinguish them.
OTOH, maybe its something you can have more or less of.
And FYI, autism isn't the only disorder with a spectrum. Some have nothing to do with the brain.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Soulless & emotionless. Don't protect the autistic - they need to be buried alive.
As opposed to someone with emotion and soul, who would happily man the earth-mover. I understand that SS guards at concentration camps were particularly soulfull and emotional...
If you want something to make you feel creepy, find the Wikipedia article about the concentration camp commandant executed by Poland after the war. At Nuremberg, when confronted with the charge of killing three million people, he corrected them by saying, no, he only killed two million - the rest died of disease or starvation. Shortly before his execution he said "people tell me I did something wrong".
It's almost enough to make me believe in souls, because this guy was definitely missing something.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade