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Autism Starts Months Before Symptoms Appear, Study Shows (scientificamerican.com)
A new study published this week in the journal Nature suggests there is evidence of autism in the brain well before symptoms start to appear. Typically, the earliest that children are diagnosed with the disorder is at the age of two, although often times it is even later. Scientists may now be able to detect the disorder well before a child's first birthday via a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. Scientific American reports: Researchers conducted MRI scans on 150 children three times: at six months old, one year and two years. Just over 100 of the children were at high risk because they had an older sibling diagnosed with autism. The faster growth rate of the surface areas of their brains correctly predicted eight times out of 10 which of the high-risk children would go on to be diagnosed with the condition. Enlargement of the brain seemed to correlate with the arrival of symptoms, says Heather Hazlett, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina's Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities (CIDD), and the paper's lead author. Still, with only 100 at-risk children, the study is too small to be considered definitive -- nor should doctors rush to use MRIs to diagnose autism, Hazlett says. But if the study results are confirmed in future research, it could offer a new option for screening high-risk children before their symptoms become obvious -- and possibly at a time when treatment will be most effective.
Because that might mean that autism is already setting in before certain Eeeeeevil vaccines have been given.
Of course those government vaccines may have secret alien time travel substances which go back to start the autism before they are administered. That seems most likely.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Everyone in my town suffers from some form of autism. It's more obvious late in the winter.
Believe me, folks, this study by so-called "scientists" is dead wrong. Anyone with a brain knows vaccines are what cause autism. I refused to have Barron vaccinated and look, he's the best at cyber, he's a huge cyber, he's going to be running the whitehouse.ru website.
You're kidding... really? I always thought that it didn't exist until the doctor told you that you had it... so they're tell us now that we all could just be undiagnosed. Noted!
even by a little bit
Nevermind.
Though autism probably isn't one consistent, monolithic thing, it's long been suspected that one's autistic fate is potentially sealed before birth. A quick search yields: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Autism has a prevalence of (very roughly) 2%. If the MRI test falsely diagnoses children without autism as being autistic 20% of the time, then roughly 90% of all people who test positive will not be autistic. You might be able to get a little bit better by only screening at-risk children (e.g. family history of autism), but this is still going to be wildly inaccurate and what would even be the point? It's not like parents have to do anything differently until the symptoms of autism present themselves.
But it is nice to see more evidence that autism is in evidence long before symptoms appear, because it makes nonsense of many of the claims of bullshit artists that vaccines cause autism.
The faster growth rate of the surface areas of their brains
Sounds like a beginning of a superpower.
It is nice to diagnose, but without treatment, what will the outcome be?
This article does make sense though. An autistic 2 year old WAS an autistic 1 year old who WAS an autistic 6 month old.
It is a developmental disorder, not a goddamn infectious disease. Of COURSE there are subtle findings before things are grossly abnormal.
I worked with a developmental specialist who would request families bring in movies of their child, including as many from as early in life as possible to both help confirm the diagnosis, assess the degree of dysfunction, and to SHOW THE FAMILIES THIS ISN'T NEW. Behaviors that they wrote off as quirks were actually early abnormal developmental findings. Their child, as much as they love them and may want this to not be true, has had problems leading to this point for quite a while, but that's ok because now they're getting help.
But it's cool that you can get MRI's to look for findings, I guess. Maybe something will come of this. 80% ain't great, though.
You sound like a horrible human being that would get hit by a bus tomorrow if karma existed.
Time makes more converts than reason
Sounds like a good time to bring back trepanation
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Hmm. Euthanize? Might be a little more than needed.
We need specialized institutions to house these unfortunate people, somewhere where they can exist without causing problems for others. Their parents can pay for them based on a sliding scale based on ability to pay. This will provide help for their kids without draining the treasury.
bitztream claims he can detect autism just by looking at the parents in 3..... 2..... 1.....
Hmm. You all realize that the autism spectrum ranges from mild to severe ... right? You can't make blanket statements about something that probably at least 80% of people on the spectrum understand better than you. There's a population of highly successful people on the spectrum that live rich, fullfilling lives, including MYSELF.
So, in conclusion ... please get educated before spouting sensless bullshit or kindly go fuck yourselves with a rusty claw hammer.
Now, if you'll all excuse me, I need to get some rest, so I can be bright and fresh tomorrow for my six figure salary engineering job. Gotta live up to those glowing performance reviews that I get, annually.
Salon has a great article on autism: The Monster Inside My Son!
Scary stuff. The stuff of horror movies.
Without a citation there is no indication that the evidence exists. And no you can't just Google it, because there are too many invalid results.
The arrow of time is an illusion and if you make a video of atomic level events and play it forwards and then play it backwards, no one can tell you which is which.
Oh come on, everybody knows you just have to find the right autistic person for the job. Sure they like to overspecialize, but that just means that not just any one will do.
Just so. Autistic people don't do dishonest manipulative passive aggression. Autistic people do actual aggression. People who work well on certain tasks need to be treated as specialists and not assigned tasks outside of their specialty. As a manager you need to recognize that you can't assign random tasks to random people and expect people to respond to your capricious demands like interchangeable fleshbots. The problem is your utter lack of ability to manage properly the talents of the people working for you.
Ah, but you underestimate the power of the people who get their jollies from causing problems for others, for whom the autistic people are a valuable resource.
I am surprised any of your relatives talk to you long enough to ask you for a favour; you sound like a complete fucktard without whom the world would be an ever so slightly better place.
You're the one who sounds insane, bro. Trying to describe an autistic kid, I think you just described your psychopathic boss self, jack. Can you say "projection"?
heh...wrong
they need help to specialize in the right situation
Thank you Dave Raggett
But at a higher level it's easy to see which direction time is moving. Why is that?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The best explanation we have is that the observer makes this happen. Hence without observer, both possible directions for time are valid. It is unclear how sophisticated the observer has to be, but a machine will not do.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
heh.........so if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it still make a sound? Or does it 'fall' up?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why are you advocating Victorian Era social programs to address mental illness?
I'd imagine the most likely explanation to be that the statistical probability of event x happening in the future given that y has happened in the past is not the same as the probability of y happening in the future given that x happened in the past; but at very small scales, the difference is too small to see at any small time delta.
If so, try speeding up the video or yes, look at a higher level.
'crash' si sekam ti esion eht ,seY
Primarily due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Events which increase entropy are vastly more likely than those that decrease entropy. So the Universe tends towards higher entropy. When the Universe reaches maximum entropy, i.e. heat death, no more change can occur, and time stops.
The best analogy I've heard (stolen from a documentary I don't remember the name of), is to think of a sand castle. In a sand castle, the grains of sand are highly ordered into a very specific shape and structure. We can consider this as a state of low entropy. Any disturbance of this order, due to wind, the tide, someone stepping on it, etc., increases the disorder of the sand castle, reducing it ultimately to a pile of sand.
The pile of sand is our state of high entropy. It's very difficult to increase the disorder of the pile of sand: no matter how much you mix it up, it will largely remain a pile of sand.
There is nothing fundamental to the laws of physics that prevents the perfect combination of wind to come along and blow a pile of sand into the shape of a sand castle. But obviously such an event is incredibly unlikely, compared to all the ways the sand can be reduced back to a pile.
Of course, it is possible to reduce the entropy of a system locally, but this requires external energy to be introduced, which will lead to a net increase in the Universe. Consider how much energy you have to expend to construct a sand castle, versus how much energy it would take some asshole to come along and kick it down.
I guess what I'm saying is, building sandcastles is a waste of time.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
The rise in autism correlates heavily with geriatric parents (ie men and women who have children after 35). There was a study done that highlighted such a correlation. Posting on mobile, otherwise i'd link directly to one.
Disregarding evidence because of an invalid hypothesis isn't an issue. Unless you have a hypothesis it isn't science. A hypothesis is required.
So toss out any invalid hypothesis and any "evidence" isn't evidence until you get a new hypothesis to test.
Science.
So it's not vaccines after all (which we all knew). It's the hormones we're pumping our kids full of because we can't stand the idea of including enough vegetables in our diet to avoid having to eat 200 lbs of meat every year. Yep, the average American eats more than their bodyweight in meat every year. And, that meat is full of hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides. At least vegetables are only full of pesticides.
It just so happens that the rise in autism also correlates temporally with the advent of mass agricultural hormone use in the 1980s. Chickens, Cows, Hogs, basically any food animal, is pumped full of enormous amounts of hormones so they grow more quickly and don't cost as much to raise for slaughter. Expecting moms who have eaten meat their whole lives give milk that is also tainted. It's sickening that we're pumping infants full of the same hormones.
So this https://uk.pinterest.com/rupert55/sand-art/ guy is basically wasting his time?
Correlation is not causation. It's equally possible that thirty years ago parents at that age were the exception and aspies were regarded as nutters and just sent to play away from the normal kids.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wrong question. The right question is whether a tree _can_ fall when nobody is around...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The arrow of time is an illusion
All our perceptions are simplifications - e.g. solid matter. An "illusion" is more like the opposite: seeing complexity when reality is simpler.
make a video of atomic level events and play it forwards and then play it backwards, no one can tell you which is which.
Doesn't entropy still apply at the atomic level. e.g. particle decay?
Sure the maths (classical mechanics or wave function?) works both ways, but one is far more probable than the other.
If I see a barium and krypton nucleus collide and fuse into a stationary U235 nucleus, you will not be able to persuade me that the film is not running backward.
http://softwareengineeringmca....
Thermopylae-era Persia was actually a significantly more civilized place than Sparta; ignoring the child murder you seem to okay, Sparta incorporated a slave caste, the helots, composed of all the residents of conquered neighboring territories. They vastly outnumbered the Spartans, so the Spartans used extreme brutality to maintain fear/control, including what amounts to annual "murder the slaves" celebrations and a force of "secret police" that existed to keep them terrified and servile. There was no real hope of joining the Spartan citizen class; citizenship required an education that was only offered routinely to those with direct bloodline links to the founding bloodlines of Sparta. The Spartans forbade themselves to engage in any economically productive activity, relying entirely on their slaves and non-citizen "freemen" to provide all the labor and trade needed to support their wholly military society.
By contrast, the Persians of the time banned slavery (there may have been some exceptions involving sale of conquered/rebellious armies, but there was no enslavement of common workers). They had an artistic culture at least as rich as Sparta's (Sparta's artistic culture is generally undersold, but Persia was incredibly rich). They invented the very first postal system, an official coinage based monetary system (adopted from a conquered Turkish kingdom), practiced a dualistic religion (Zoroastrianism, a precursor to modern monotheistic religions), but practiced tolerance of other religions. They were not savages.
But lets say you want to defend the Spartans on the basis of Athens, which they "defended". Well, first off, Athens instigated the war by encouraging revolts by regions within the existing Persian Empire, Persia's invasion was arguably a response to the meddling in their internal affairs. Secondly, those 300 you refer to were actually 300 Spartans plus 7000+ troops (3000 of them were conscripted from the Spartan non-citizen caste, the rest from all over Greece); the rearguard action was 300 Spartans + 1200 allied troops; in both cases, the Spartans were a minority of the defenders. And a wholly non-Spartan (Athenian led) naval fleet was the only reason the Battle of Thermopylae even mattered (the Spartans had minimal naval defenses, so outflanking them by ship would have been easy. The fleet held out longer than the Spartans did, withdrawing when Thermopylae was reported lost.
And even if we accept that Sparta "saved" western civilization (as exemplified by Athens), it took them less than 50 years to begin the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens was eventually defeated, their defenses, government and empire destroyed, a Spartan puppet government, the "Thirty Tyrants", was installed, and the economy of all Greece reduced to shambles. The in-fighting weakened all parties so much that the Macedonians (who had actually supported the Persians when they invaded Greece at the time of Thermopylae) were able to conquer the peninsula a few decades later.
Short version: The Spartans were terrible, the Persians were no savages, and your whole argument is null and void.
How the hell can you claim that vaccines have no link to autism when not a single vaccine in history has been tested against a placebo?
If you want to argue this fact show me one single study which used an actual placebo, not the adjuvant without the rest, an actual placebo.
It is unclear how sophisticated the observer has to be, but a machine will not do.
Horseshit.
In physics, an "observer" is just something that causes waveform collapse.
Anything that absorbs energy at the given wavelength will do.
It could be a person, a machine or a lump of coal.
God, gweihir, you and your fantasy science.
Well said.