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Vitamin D Deficiency During Pregnancy Linked To Autism (newatlas.com)
New submitter future guy quotes a report from New Atlas: The researchers examined around 4,200 blood samples from pregnant women and their children and discovered a link between autism and low levels of vitamin D. More specifically, they found that pregnant women who were vitamin D deficient at 20 weeks gestation were more likely to have a child with autistic traits by the age of six. Rather than taking in more sunlight and the heightened risk of skin cancer that it carries, the researchers suggest that making inexpensive and safe vitamin D supplements available to at-risk groups may be a better path forward. "This study provides further evidence that low vitamin D is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders," says Professor John McGrath from the University of Queensland. "Just as taking folate in pregnancy has reduced the incidence of spina bifida, the result of this study suggests that prenatal vitamin D supplements may reduce the incidence of autism." The research was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
No, you look after them for the rest of their lives, just like any responsible society does for those not able to look after themselves.
Many of them can look after themselves, especially if they get some help to get started. In America, 80% of autistic people are not employed. But with coaching, and targeted help, most autistic people are employable. Some countries do a far better job of this than others. The Economist recently had an article about the effectiveness of education and employment policies for autistic people.
Physics was not one of your best subjects in high school, was it?
Melanin make skin dark, and does indeed cause more light to be absorbed, but the light is absorbed before it generates vitamin D. People with darker skin living in northern climates are more likely to be vitamin D deficient.
Where is the news?
This seems to just confirm previous data, which is important to researchers, but not that interesting to the public.
Well, this is how science works. Overall, it is extremely rare to make astounding, new discoveries; most scientific research is about confirming what we already know or improving our observations - even the Higgs boson was just a confirmation of what we already knew, really. It is easy to get the idea that all science is making sensational finds, if you only read the popular science stuff, and it gives you the completely wrong picture. Important science is mostly routine. It has to be - the scientific method dictates that you must keep testing, because the only certainty you can achieve lies in falsifying predictions. That is why there still are people who keep finding new ways of testing that gravity still works as predicted; next time it might not - that is of course taking it to the extreme, but it is scientifically very valid to keep asking the question.
The vitamin-D hypothesis has been around for years. It would be interesting if a causal link, or treatment, could be demonstrated, e.g. a randomised placebo controlled trial of supplements during pregnancy. But there seems to be none of that yet.
I think you are getting things mixed up a bit. Randomised trials are meant specifically for testing the efficacy of new medicines. The method would work for vitamin D, of course, but it would be ethically unsound to deliberately expose groups of people to the well-documented risks that this deficiency would cause, and it would be extremely difficult to control the parameters, I think; you get vitamin D from many sources, such as exposure to sunlight, and you would have to keep large groups of pregnant women confined indoors for 9 months, and so on. Can't be done practically.
But it isn't really necessary. Firstly, I think we have confirmed that the correlation is real, not spurious, so presumably we now have a confirmed pattern of vitamin D deficiency correlating to a certain increase in the risk of developing autism. Secondly, other research seems to point to plausible mechanisms - we know something about what goes on in an autistic brain, and we know that vitamin D probably plays an important role in the development of certain features that appear to be important in connection with autism.
But you are right, this is not a surprising, new discovery; we are simply inching closer to understanding how autism develops.
And the vaccine contains mercury...
Oh wait, both those statements are bollocks.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
There's plenty of sunlight on Vega, so, problem solved.
Where is the racism? Africans synthesize a less D than Europeans, it's a particular problem in the winter with a lot less sun exposure.
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It would be 'ethical' to find a population that's already deficient, then supplement half of them.
Okay, let me give you a few cites so that you know where I'm coming from.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.o...
There was a time when we had a pretty awful approach to medical experimentatino on humans. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is one of the worst examples. There was another STD experiment called the Guatamalan syphilis Experiment. And by the way, given the nature of the experiments, good luck in getting cooperation from dark pigmented people as they have a well earned distrust of medical experimentation. And Black women in northern climates are probably the number one risk group.
You will probably really stand up for the experiments on children during the mid-1960's At the Willwbrook State School in Staten Island, a school for the mentally deficient, they intentionally injected children with Hepatitis in order to see if Gamma Globulin could cure it. That's pretty sweet and kindly.
http://ethics.iit.edu/eelibrar...
Anyhow, they rationalized it by declaring that since so many of the children became infected with Hep, it wasn't a big deal. Oddly enough, it was never made clear why they didn't test Gamma Globulin on the children who already contracted hepatitis.
In 1948 REsearchers gave over 800 pregnant women "vitamin drinks" that contained radioactive iron to examine the placental/ mother's blood transfer. At the Massachusetts based Walter E. Fernald State School, the AEC and Quaker Oats performed a experiment of given them oatmeal with radioactive Calcium in it to track digestion of Calcium. The students were told they were joining a science club.
There are a lot more, but when these abuses - and I seriously hope you would also consider them abuses, a lot of ethical concerns, and eventually ethics committees and regulations came into existence.
While there might be some clandestine stuff still going on, any program such as one that is aimed at studying autism causes is going to be closely studied for three reasons. One is that it's an obvious one, to possibly help children avoid becoming autistic. The second one is that it involves mothers and children at all, so it will have ahigh priority. The thirs is a bit of an embarrassment, because people who for some reason are heavily invested in the belief that vaccines cause autism, will want to debunk the experiments in any way possible. If you don't believe me, just look at what happened when they removed the original "cause of autism" th emerthiolate from vaccines, and it had no effect. So without any proof, the anti vaxxers just decided it was "something else".
Test it with existing data. If it's true, populations more likely to be vitamin D deficient (darker skins at higher latitudes) will already have higher autism rates. Do black folks in Chicago have higher autism rates than in the south? (Where we know the population migrated from, mostly less than 100 years ago.)
Data will be called racist, so compare dark skinned folks at different latitudes.
Good luck with African descent people to agree with any test like you suggest. They don't trust the medical profession in that way, and they have a good reason not to.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.