(1) This isn't Nature, it's SciRep. Don't get distracted by the URL.
(2) Nature is an extremely high impact factor journal. However, it's ... not really a medical journal. Nor a psych journal. Nor a developmental peds journal. It's a basic sciences journal. What I mean to say is, even if this were Nature, it'd be a super high-impact journal that isn't actually read by clinicians who would be best positioned to criticize the study.
(2a) For instance, their bowel transfer prep involved a clean-out with a two week course of vanco. The only bowel bugs it's used for are c. diff colitis and staph aureus enterocolitis. The reason it's really only used for that is because it really doesn't touch any other common bowel inhabitants. It's useful for those because it doesn't absorbed very effectively, so if you've got C Diff sitting in the bowel lumen, great, send a wash of vanco down the pipe. But, uh, for any other bugs in the gut? It's not even second line. So, how weird that it would be used to knock out pre-existing gut flora and "suppress pathogenic bacteria." C Diff and MRSA are not the leading pathogenic gut bacteria. The pre-existing flora are predominantly anaerobes.
(3) An unblinded, uncontrolled trial of a disease whose symptoms are highly subjective in measure? Excellent. I'm sure they took measures to ensure they weren't influenced in their subjective analys-
(3a) Oh. The senior author has a bunch of patents out trying to commercialize probiotics for autism.
(3b) Oh, they used the PGI3, CARS, SRS, and ABC scores. I guess if you fill out enough bubbles you can overcome the fact that those are still subjective enough that they're shit for an open-label trial. Whoops.
I don't mean to be overly dismissive. It's a fine pilot. The results are interesting enough that I'd want to see a real study tackle this. My comments are mostly aimed at the prevailing sentiment here taking this at face value.
> Further research with a placebo-control arm is warranted
IIUC they don't have a control group. They don't have a control group!!! Reading again your comment, you wrote this in point (3) and (3b), but it needs a few more exclamation marks.
> What I mean to say is, even if this were Nature, it'd be a super high-impact journal that isn't actually read by clinicians who would be best positioned to criticize the study.
More importantly, the peer-reviewers are likely scientists, not physicians. This can make a subtle difference in how and what they review.
But you did a great job listing out some of the shortcomings!
As for one of the senior authors filing a patent for commercialize probiotics for autism, shouldn't there be a mandatory disclosure in their papers that have a conflict of interest?!
Publishing companies tend to create many journals for different (sub-)communities and also numerous other reasons. Nature Research (the company) has next to Nature (its most well known journal) many smaller ones, like Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications or in this case Scientific Reports. Some are well regarded (e.g. Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications).
Scientific Reports has a comparatively low impact factor, which has furthermore dropped every year in the last few years.
Impact factor measures the average number of citations a published paper receives. Its impact factor of 4 is not very impressive. The main Nature journal has an IF of 41 (Nat Biotechnol has 35 and Nat Comm has 11).
In this article the patent applications are disclosed in the Competing Interests section. The readers can draw their own conclusions from those. It would be very unusual for a journal to not demand a declaration of conflicting interests.
I was going to ask, this sounds overly dismissive, but then I read your last paragraph.
Also I know SciRep is fairly new but isn't it still under the Nature umbrella? ie. There's still some peer review; the study is likely to be legitimate.
The authors are pretty explicit about the weaknesses in their study and I think that the flaws are reasonable for a pilot study.
I'm surprised the authors didn't say anything about their conflict of interest though.
Showing a link between autism and the gut microbiome would be incredible. Obviously more work needs to be done before anything is concluded but this is a really interesting result.
Agree, and furthermore, dismissing any single paper result without replication is the right approach for most scientists and (I'd argue) almost all non-scientists.
The publication incentives are extremely messed up and in favor of exciting results that aren't true.
That was my impression as well. The tone seemed to be "we turned over a couple rocks and we think we noticed a couple things. We want to share that hike in the Autism woods."
The number of subjects was small. They even added: "We note that due to the open-label nature of this initial trial, all of the assessments are subject to placebo effect..."
The problem is that this kind of studies should be discussed only inside medical centers where the next more reliable studies are designed. The discussion with general public degenerates because most people don't understand the difference between a preliminary study and a good clinical study. You will see in a few days a press article in a major newspaper with the title
"Fecal transplant cure definitively autism forever, scientist say" and I will cry.
Regression to the mean is briefly touched on (although they don't call it that) near the end of the "Results and Discussion" section.
tl;dr: "In this other observational study, many subjects with autism didn't improve over time on a different metric, so the improvements in our metrics were probably because of the treatment and not spontaneous. Also, we asked the parents if there was any regression to the mean, and they said no."
I have a very mild form of autism but I would say that I suffer from autism. I'm very sensitive to which environment I can be productive in and I need very clear protocols for human interaction. It's fine for engineering but I want to work more with people too (that's generally how you advance career-wise) and I have big problems knowing when to keep quiet in meetings and what topics for discussion are poor choices, even though I'm close to 30 years old now. If I could just be "normal" I think my life would improve immensely.
I say "I think" because I'm not sure if I would like losing the things that make me "me". A friday night just reading all kinds of odd books to learn new things is totally fine by me right now and even though I have problems regulating my emotions I can now, after decades of coping, channel them into passion to get stuff done. I do however think my childhood would've been much easier if I was somehow treated as a young child; the years of being bullied and not making friends have taken its toll on me, something I struggle with to this day in business settings when I have to deal with unfamiliar people.
My story is pretty much the same as yours, but I have an extra ten years on you. I've been able to get it under control (my career is really taking off now at the age of 39) by practicing it like any other skill. Mostly it's the art of omission; I consciously suppress my impulse to interrupt people in meetings and conversation by preparing a response in my head until they finish. This has the effect of making people think of me as a good listener, and also gives me time to cut their argument to shreds if they are spewing nonsense (the old maxim "don't interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake"). Also, it's good to be thought of as the quiet smart guy. On the topic of inappropriate topics, I just don't say anything that isn't related to work in public conversations. Once you start getting close to people in a company you can usually talk about anything in private. All the "acting normal" can take a toll on you, though.
I know I have to get it under control like you, but it's super hard and it looks so effortless for other people. They can just sit there, take in all the nonsense people are spewing with a straight face and then send an email to the appropriate people about it. It takes me all the efforts in the world to do something like that, and it would exhaust me for hours afterwards.
It is easier doing it now at 29 than it was at 19, though. Maybe 10 more years of practice is all I need.
Never formally diagnosed but I had similar difficulties to yours and it had been brought up to me multiple times that I probably had some form of ASD.
I am a dev and probably had quite similar experiences to yours in meetings in my first couple office jobs. What made a profound difference for me was adopting empathy as an intellectual practice. I have never once "experienced someone's feelings as if they were my own" so I long regarded myself as being naturally deficient in empathy, but it also didn't seem very important to my engineer mindset.
The habit I cultivated was to simply compile lists of rules, not written, just in my head. Things to say, things to not say, and how to say what you need to say and when. How people react, etc. It meant paying close attention and making guesses in a way that did not come naturally to me at first. It took a lot of effort to build up these habits. I did not realize just how self-focused and self-centered I was as a human being.
After doing this for a while, without really trying, general principles emerged from my compiled rules. These, combined with my efforts at paying attention to people, really turned things around for me in a profound way. People really began to warm up to me, and most importantly, my interactions almost completely stopped being surprising and painful, due to me knowing a lot more about how to get along unselfishly. I avoided learning this for a long time, because I think I assumed I would end up spending my days just pleasing other people. A silly worry in the end.
The rules I compiled were an important middle step. It was applying the rigor and attention I usually reserve for interesting codebases or videogames, to getting along with humans. In hindsight it is perhaps not so surprising that with diligent effort I acquired a skill, but I cannot overstate how much I wish I had done this sooner.
I don't want to oversell it. It wasn't that I became an amazingly charismatic wunderkind, yet for the impact it made on my life, I may as well have. With great effort, in my mid 30s I reached the social starting line where most people (from my perspective at least) were lucky enough to begin.
It could be that I only managed this because my autistic behaviours had a different root cause or milder expression than someone else's. It could be that some forms of autism are purely viral and other ailments merely resemble it. In short, I don't know that anyone else can benefit from this, but am inclined to think that many could.
Also, FWIW, I wouldn't attach too strongly to this idea of "me" that you mention. I have had similar feelings in my journey, and the answer I found was to trust that whatever nebulous merit exists in this "me" concept, it will survive my efforts to improve myself towards a more healthy sociability. Your "me" might be holding you back.
Incidentally, per the main topic, as a result of my other health issues gut flora had entered my radar and I've encountered a lot of similar, potentially promising, claims about the brain gut connection. I personally think there's something important there to be found but we haven't had the right studies done to really sort it out. If this study was an important step in that process, great I guess, but like others have said, I would have preferred they had done a more useful study on the subject, that would propel our knowledge further, faster.
For all the mystery surrounding ASD, one thing I feel absolutely certain of, is that it is causing a lot of suffering that will become unnecessary once it is more thoroughly understood. The sooner the better.
I have diagnosed ASD, and such a thing would be incredibly helpful to me. I know that this is a hard ask, as it would imply a lot of writing, but could you tell me your rules? It would be incredibly useful to me.
"If someone is about to give birth, don't say "I hope it doesn't claw it's way out and kill all of us" in the hospital room with the expectant mother"
I really struggled to find appropriate outlets for my humour for a lot of years...
"When people you know say "hello" what they are really saying is "are you still friendly since the last time I've seen you?" so just say Hi with a hint of warmth if you can manage it, because people are never going to stop greeting you anyway, there is no way to recoup the cost so might as well let them know "yeah, we're still cool""
For a while, I had the charming habit of refusing to return greetings, because I felt they were bothersome, inefficient and unnecessary.
The rules themselves are each tailored to some particular misstep I have made. The principles that emerged really were kind of basic stuff good parents, teachers or Mr. Rogers teaches you. That being less selfish is wise, paying attention to people is rewarding, and that there is a very big difference between listening to someone and waiting to speak. The principles are only words, and the rules are too specific to my own experiences to really translate. What matters is the intuition I had been building up from the moment I decided for myself that this problem was worth the effort.
Prior to the study, 83 percent of participants had "severe" autism. Now, only 17 percent are rated as severe, 39 percent as mild or moderate, and incredibly, 44 percent are below the cut-off for mild ASD. https://newatlas.com/fecal-transplants-autism-symptoms-reduc...
Prior to the 18 patient study of rapidly growing teenagers, with subjective rating scales performed by unblinded investigators, 83 percent of participants had "severe" autism. Now, only 17 percent are rated as severe, 39 percent as mild or moderate, and incredibly, 44 percent are below the cut-off for mild ASD.
How many would have been expected to get cured without any action at all ? (because Autism does mostly resolve itself, either "for real" or because the patients learn to mask it well enough to "not have symptoms")
Those labeled as "severe" aren't remotely likely to have their autism "resolve itself". Those labeled severe have the types of behaviors that tend to remain through the years. Children who are prone to self-injurious behavior, in my experience (two kids with autism, lots of exposure to other severe cases in the community), don't tend to outgrow it.
Those that you see able to 'mask' their symptoms are generally on the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes referred to as 'high-functioning'. That requires a level of self-awareness that many of the lower functioning spectrum seem to lack.
One of the major problems with autism diagnoses is that there are lots of people who see the higher-functioning members of the autism community as the norm, whereas there are a fair percentage that are essentially permanently disabled that will likely be unable to contribute to society in a measurable way.
> Autism does mostly resolve itself, either "for real" or because the patients learn to mask it well enough to "not have symptoms"
Having worked with autistic youth before, that's simply not true. First, autism is not a disorder that can be cured but worked with. Second, it doesn't do it by itself, but _can_ get better, with different approaches, and most of them involve hard and persistent education work. Lastly, the part of the spectrum that can look as if they were "normal" is a rather small proportion of the whole ASD.
Ah come on, be fair. Every psychiatric disorder has a pretty high chance of getting resolved without any action from outside. Very few people actually succumb to them.
Furthermore, especially with psychiatric disorders, there is a high percentage of patients that aren't helped, but exactly the opposite, by treatment. That systematically get worse because of treatment.
(I do not claim this is easy or pleasant for the patient, merely that it happens. Furthermore in the more common cases where treatment makes the patient worse it is also incredibly unpleasant, unfair and entirely terrible for the patient)
(and of course you could correctly claim that this is even true for cancer, and it is. However for cancer the percentage of patients that get better without treatment is something like 0.2% up to 4% depending on the cancer, whereas for psychiatric disorders the amount of people that recover without treatment is easily > 90%)
Originally I posted a longer response, but it's not worth breaking down because the original content is complete, unfounded nonsense. It's the kind of thing you'd read on an anti vax facebook page.
No, the vast majority of those with psychiatric disorders do not recover without treatment
No, there is not a high percentage of patients that get worse because of treatment
Either a source needs to be posted or the comment should be deleted because it is completely false, not adding to the discussion, and incredibly dismissive of those experiencing psychiatric problems or seeking psychiatric treatment
It depends on how they selected the subject of the study [1] and how accurate is the evaluation at the beginning and the end of the study [2].
That's why they need a control group, that is selected at random, so you hope that the cure rate in the control group is the same than in the main group if they didn't get the treatment.
Also, the groups must be double blind so when the doctors evaluate the results don't know if the patient has been treated or not, and they use the same criteria.
[1] Did they select only the mild case? Did they exclude the mild cases? Average age of the group? How much personalized help they can get to interact with other persons? Did other part of the study affect them? (Something like a minimal medical attention when they visit a nurse each month for minimal checks.) And a few more, that probably nobody know ...
[2] Some symptoms are crystal clear, and some are more fuzzy.
Re double blind etc.. Not for pilot studies where one errs on the side of excluding null results in order to get the required funding to study something properly. Without pilot data, one judt wont get the grant that would play for the clinical trial
But two years is a very short time. I have a mild form but it still took me decades to get to where I am today. People don't suspect I'm autistic and are surprised when I say it, but I'm absolutely exhausted from a day of masking it at work if there's a lot of meetings with new people.
Not really. It's common to accept papers based upon some function of Interesting & confidence, as long as the papers are very clear about their significance (or in this case, lack of a control). this kind of preliminary study is important in being able to make a case for funding a much larger formal study.
It has been hypotesized that autism increase in the last decades might be correlated with the increase in the use of pesticides. Early damage in nervous system that leads to a permanent particular architecture in the brain and all the stuff.
Some gut bioma could theoretically be slightly better than other to deal with it. Some bacterias could be more efficient metabolizing some damaging products in our diet into other not so bad or even inocuous. Is teorethically possible.
Both problems could be related and in this sense is a pretty interesting field. They could just give to an artificial gut bioma in a petri dish some diluted compounds, (or just give some autist children organic cultured fruits and keep it in a pesticide free environment) and see what happens
Is there any evidence that the amount and types of pesticides used today are more damaging than those used 30 years ago? Or 60 years ago?
Gut feeling: regulatory environment is a lot more strict these days, so we're probably a lot better off with today's pesticides than whatever straight-up toxic chemicals were used in the past. I bet if we started looking we'd see things like arsenic and similar used in the past.
It's basically Springer-Nature's answer to PLoS One. As long as it's not obviously crazy, anything goes.
This doesn't look very convincing though. Without a no-treatment or sham treatment control, the results could be placebo effect, reversion to the mean on their metrics, or due to the antibiotic treatment rather than the transplanted gut bacteria, or a just a statistical fluke with this small population.
One thing that stands out to me is the lack of difference in developmental age between 8 weeks and 2 years after treatment. I find it hard to understand how that would occur under the model where this treatment does something.
Slight clarification: The journal is called Scientific Reports, which as you correctly emphasize is very different than the journal Nature even though they are owned by the same company. The articles are still called "articles" though.
In fact, "Nature" isn't even in the office journal title, unlike basically every other journal owned by the Springer Nature publishing company, e.g., Nature Communications, Nature Chemistry, Nature Methods. This highlights that it's considered to be a significantly lower tier in prestige, and the acceptance rates are much higher. Which is why I've published there :D
But the results are very strong. In the treatment group, almost 1 in 5 patients went from severe autistic symptoms to normal (clear). And almost 2 in 5 patients went from severe to mild.
This begs the question, is any other treatment known to produce such strong results?
Given the method of measuring the results I'm not sure we can know anything about how strong the results are without a control group. It seems there is a deal of subjectivity in interpreting the results, and when this is the case crazy stuff can and does happen, regularly.
The study evaluated the severity of autism symptoms (using subjective questionnaires) before and after the treatment, but didn't compare those results to a control group of people who weren't treated the same way.
It's like finding a couple dozen people with the flu, feeding them chicken soup, and then reporting that a month later they feel healthier, so the soup must have helped. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but you didn't measure that so you don't know.
I asked as an aside to the matter of control group - what is considered "given" about "the method of measurement" ?
According to this professional medical trial, the recorded ASD scores are "based on the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) rated by a professional evaluator"
You should have specific knowledge of that evaluation in order to criticize it as relying on "subjective questionnaires" and shouldn't introduce doubt by simply stating something as "given".
It would be interesting to see if this has similar effects on other candidates that have other mental symptoms classified as mental illness. ADHD, ODD, OCD, Bipolar, Depression etc.
I have two children with combinations of these symptoms and it's staggering how many of the symptoms could be interpreted either way depending on the classifying doctor's specialty.
The methodology is so weak that it's impossible to know whether the results were strong or not.
Studies of psychological conditions are notoriously hard because much of the quantification is subjective, but this study wasn't even blinded and had no control.
Well i could tell uou from data i am working with that improvements in ASD are not that frequent and not of such magnitude. Obviously this could be an issue with their coding, but just for context, those changes are not typical seen in other cohorts. Proper funded study now needed. Longitudinal clinical trials are not cheap.
Any study attempting to show or imply causation needs to control for confounding variables; this is statistics 101. Usually you do this with an aptly named control group.
If you don't have that control, you're left with "either my results are meaningful or else (very likely) there is a confounding factor." Great, that's not very useful.
Neither of these studies did they control for who was exposed to the actual disease.
As far as I have found, the only experiments that did do this were completely unethical, and have not been repeated in modern western science: (that I know of)
The control group was exposed to the actual disease at the same rate than the treatment group. The idea is that both groups get almost the same treatment.
If the groups are big enough, you expect from statistic that both groups would have a similar number of ill people without treatment and a similar number and type of "sede effect"without treatment. So the difference can be atribute to the drug/vaccine, if statistically significant.
A study were all the participants are exposed on purpose to the disease is very difficult to justify, with or without control group. Perhaps a vaccine for a strain of cold, that is an illness with a very low rate of deadly complications?
Maybe offtopic, but reinforces the gut-brain connection: The purported benefits of the ketogenic diet [1] to some epilepsy patients seems to be mediated by the gut bacteria [2].
I can't help but eyeroll at that dumb trope of people unwilling to accept the genetic link as someone actually autistic but it brings to mind a socratically trolling joke.
"Doesn't this imply that being neurotypical is the actual disease and we have the means to deploy a cure for it?" Not a serious position but one to hopefully get people thinking about norms.
Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s optimal, nor does just because something is optimal mean it’s what people want for themselves, nor does just because something needs to be tolerated means everyone should want to bear such things for themselves.
Things that appear genetic could be related to family traditions that children follow when parents, environmental issues that are common along family lines, bacteria shared among parents and their children, ect.
It is more something highlighted by the psychology of popular "theories". There ino consistency in blaming autism on "refrigerator mothers", heavy metals, vaccines, and diet except for what they are not - environmental instead of genetic. It is reaching and in a frenzied, hysterical denial like Continuum Magazine ending after all involved died of AIDS complications.
That sort of behavior suggests that they already know the answer is more likely than not genetic but they refuse to accept it because they don't like the implications. There are many things which should have broken said links but haven't - otherwise they would have played out already.
I think its because autism is something that gets thrown around everywhere these days. Im sure many are diagnozed with ADHD or similar condition on the autistic spectrum when in reality its probably more related to diet, upbringing etc.
Autism can be genetic for sure. But I think many are diagnosed on the spectrum to hastely.
It is on the first sentence of the Abstract: autism-like behaviors
>> Many studies have reported abnormal gut microbiota in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), suggesting a link between gut microbiome and autism-like behaviors.
That sentence seems to suggest that the study includes (also) "autism-like behaviors". I am not trying to redefine Autism Spectrum Disorder as I don't have knowledge to do so.
Yes, but my point is that a general state of malnutrition can give the same symptoms as autism, ADHD etc. I think the lack of gut bacteria could be more a symptom than a cause if you know what I mean.
When I was a child everybody thought I was autist when in reality I was just malnurished because I had a single mother who was up over her head in responsibility. If you dont eat right and maybe even live largely off sugar, you are bound to have attention span problems and blood sugar and mood like a roller coaster.
> Can't wait to see hysterical autism moms doing home enemas with feces, hopefully some anti-vaxxers stories as well trying to mitigate having to get their kid vaccinated for kindergarden.
Not fun for the children, but any case like this would bring it over the top and hopefully create a bigger uproar.
I've been pondering that the term "anally retentive" to describe a pattern of behaviour (totally unconnected to Autism) associated with strong disgust reflexes might itself be a symptom which happens due to poo retention, orderliness and extreme clensiness which reduces the diversity in gut bacteria.
I always figured this was to do with stress levels. More stress = higher muscle tone, more retention and less bowel motion.
But yeah, you could be right, I see there could be a feedback there.
That sounds quite far fetched and completely unfounded in facts.
Btw Freud was wrong and his model of child development have been disproven for a hundred years now. Don't pay attention to stuff like "anal retentiveness", it's an inaccurate model of real psychology.
You intended it as a joke, but it's the kind of garbage that anti-vax fear-mongerers are likely to latch on to. Those flames don't need to be fanned. We have enough cases of measles as it is.
I don’t think as many “anti-vax fear mongerers” are as “anti-vax” as you think.
Many (most?) people that are labeled as “anti-vax” actually believe things like:
1. Giving the MMR to infants is potentially highly problematic until circa 18 months old
2. The default position is to wish not to inject organomercury and other potential toxins (of which knowledge is necessarily limited) into your blood
3. The annual flu vaccine’s efficacy is dubious in the very best case, and actually leads to weakened immune system in the most likely case
4. It’s not OK to inject material from aborted human fetuses (don’t argue with me - if you don’t believe me, just ask the scientist who created the Rubella vaccine... or read the paper, or watch the interview with him where he says this himself)
So, it’s not that “anti-vax” people disbelieve in the idea of vaccines, as much as it is that they don’t blindly trust unproven science to the point of willingly injecting fetal material and toxic chemicals into themselves and their children.
Certain vaccines, no doubt, have a place in society, but:
1. Nobody should be forced to inject anything into themselves (esp difficult to imagine a presumably liberal professor, who presumably supports a woman’s “right to choose” because it’s “her body”, having a different stance on this)
2. Let’s not hype up all vaccines, just because some of them work well - that’s not how science works
In my personal experience it's the other way around.
Pro-vaccine people are the irrational ones that dismiss science. They call people terrorists, threaten jail and removal of children from parents among many other statements intended to instill fear.
The Autism debate is the chernobyl nuclear disaster of free speech in America. You can't even talk about why people don't want to talk about why they don't want to talk about what causes or treats autism without people starting to hyperventilate.
It's more that there's been study after study after study showing no link, and the guy saying there is a link was trying to find a market for his vaccine instead of the standard MMR vaccine and has instead shifted his focus to making money off of his books and movies.
The guy is literally profiting over increasing the death rate of children.
Surely you can provide a citation? Though if anyone claims they have proven such a link, then either they are lying, incompetent or mathematicians. Because nothing gets proven in other fields.
The reason I won't post a link about this topic is because I get rabbid responses, threats and accusations, and lots of down votes.
I have posted links to real data, doctors, scientists and papers before and all of it is rejected because of some reason.
It's not a fight I am up for right now.
I recommend doing a search for CDC vaccine doctor witness 2019. I am sure you (or someone else) will come back here to accuse me of something anyways.
Yes, I am jaded, it's disgusting how unscientific people get when you question vaccine safety. (even though billions have been paid out in damages caused by vaccines... sigh, yes billions)
Edit: If you want to hear from a very respected doctor who has studied the science behind vaccines and won't take another vaccine ever again, look up Dr. Suzanne Humphries. Most people won't actually listen to the data she presents, but just attack her out of spite and fear.
Scientists and researchers are constantly saying wrong, untrue things when they are not restrained by the rigor of the peer review process. It is not a scientist's informed opinion that matters, what matters is what they can show.
If you do not understand this, I can see how you might receive criticisms and feel they are unfair. But deploy an actual credible source of information, and not someone's opinion, and see the difference it makes.
None of those studies controlled who was exposed to the disease. This is unethical by modern standards and is stated as a comment in your link.
Notice the results from the study in Asia: (your link)
>"25 (2.5%) of 1017 infants assigned to receive vaccine and 20 (2.0%) of 1018 assigned to receive placebo had a serious adverse event within 14 days of any dose.
The most frequent serious adverse event was pneumonia (vaccine 12 [1.2%]; placebo 15 [1.5%])."
The infants getting the vaccine vs placebo within 14 days had almost identical results.
Regarding the Monsanto story, that's why we have peer review and journals that do not allow you to publish just by paying. If Monsanto managed to get a corrupted study published in a credible journal, that would be quite a scandal. If this is real, I would be genuinely interested in seeing it.
As to your other point, there are studies done for -every- approved vaccine. You aren't just wrong, you could scarcely be more wrong if you tried.
This is a common misunderstanding with all of these tests. _None_ of them test for defense/protection against the disease itself. They only test for indicator of immune response.
I looked at the test in a previous comment above, the results between placebo and vaccine are similar.
There were no controls on _any_ of these tests on who was exposed to the disease.
The second link says they had an "immunogenic response" (the only tests ever done for vaccines) but then ends with this:
>... vaccine was ineffective at reducing the natural infection rate in semi-immune African adults.
Monsanto effects on scientists brought before the courts:
>Wisner, who said the trial would include commentary from 10 current or former Monsanto employees, also read aloud internal corporate documents obtained during the case. In response to one critical study about glyphosate exposure, Donna Farmer, product protection lead, wrote in an email: “How do we combat this?”[0]
Peer reviewed journals do not defend or protect studies that are never published in the first place.
This is an ugly way to argue. When debunked, instead of owning anything you add new arguments, moving on as if it had any bearing on the previous points. I see now why you don't want to "fight" people here.
You do not deserve to complain about not wanting a fight when you behave in such a way.
> Peer reviewed journals do not defend or protect studies that are never published in the first place.
Obviously. That's why studies which are not published in quality journals are not considered credible by the scientific community.
You ever talk to a flat-earther? Or an Obama birther? How about a climate change denier? If you aren't willing to pay much attention all of these positions can be defended. But as soon as you ask for a credible source, you get the same thing you tried earlier "I don't want to fight, I just want to spread BS freely." If they do deploy some sort of source and you show them what's wrong with it, they just move on, exactly like you tried to do multiple times in this thread.
Nobody gets to be right all the time, so I don't blame anyone who doesn't have enough time/interest to educate themselves for falling for these ideas. Where it becomes pitiful however, is when someone is shown over and over again and they do nothing but dig in and move on, instead of accepting when they got it wrong.
If your insistence ever successfully convinces someone not to vaccinate their child, who then goes on to needlessly spread infections in their school, then you can no longer say that your ignorance is harmless.
In my meager experience most people like you will just dig in further and further until the day they die. Not all though. Continue to vigorously defend your ignronace if you want - it's your choice, but you can't say no one ever tried to tell you better. Whatever harm you manage to cause with your position, you fought hard to keep causing it.
Relying on peer reviewed journals as the only source of valid data/information is a logical fallacy, it's an appeal to authority. So I don't think that is a valid debunking to claim "not in a peer reviewed journal, so it's not true".
In the video link below the interviewer asks: "Is there a danger vaccinating populations? As we do today?"
The doctor being interviewed is someone who is medically qualified to study this subject, and has spent significant time studying vaccines. I think she has a scientifically valid point.
Now you've changed your tack to take on the publishing process itself. That was a mistake.
> it's an appeal to authority
You are misusing the phrase "appeal to authority." Citing a published paper is absolutely NOT an appeal to authority, it is the polar opposite, and the distinction between those two things is the fundamental property of the scientific method.
With published papers, you don't have to trust in authority because the methodology and data are right there to be examined by all. The peer review and credibility are valuable and have weight because anyone caught falsifying data would lose their entire career in an instant. This is also why we don't just accept any old journal, as many simply allow anyone to publish as long as they pay.
To see an example of what an appeal to authority actually is, we need look no further then the second half of your comment. Linking to an interview of an expert in her field giving her opinion is what an appeal to authority actually is. Ironic.
You tried to paint an equivalence between our sources, but all you did was reveal that you do not understand how scientific progress is made. This is no longer an argument, at this point I'm educating you on what you should have learned before ever taking a stance on the subject of vaccinations.
If you can't even accept why credible, published papers carry more weight than appeals to authority, and can't understand what an appeal to authority is after it has been explained to you twice, then conversing with you is pointless.
>You are misusing the phrase "appeal to authority." Citing a published paper is absolutely NOT an appeal to authority, it is the polar opposite, and the distinction between those two things is the fundamental property of the scientific method.
It is a perfectly valid argument if you are saying it's _only_ method of scientific proof.
Why are you trying to talk about scientific proof? You don't even know how science works. Cat's out of the bag.
You know what? I'm done getting played. I gave you the benefit of the doubt, I and others gave you every opportunity to learn, but all you can do is dig in.
This is my last reply, if you want the last word that badly after this you can have it. If that is enough to let you think you won, then you can enjoy that too. Just remember that this subject is not like other debates in life.
You can let your stubbornness express itself most of the time quite harmlessly, but if you ever convince someone who doesn't know how to verify the science for themselves, the consequences are on you.
No joke, no exaggeration, you really are a bad person.
A retracted paper (a pilot study at that) from a journal is not proof against the paper's results. It's only proof that the paper was retracted.
Also, it looks like (from your link) it was retracted because of a "twitter storm"... not a scientific basis.
3.) Her actual views summarized pretty well:
Consider her scientific perspective in the video below on the topic of vaccines. (only 20 minutes, it's worth 1 viewing, even if you disagree in advance)
Homeopathy is not debatable, it is obvious bullshit. Not noticing that more or less immediately, as a MD at that, is a pretty good sign that someone is really bad at anything science. Taking studies published in a predatory journal seriously is another sign, though perhaps not as strong one.
None of this is proof that her views are wrong, but they are clear signs that she is bad enough at anything science that she is not worth listening to.
Not sure if you realize this, but Wakefield's original assertion (and the only way that he was able to get legitimate scientists aboard for his wild, fraudulent ride) was to claim to have found a connection between the vaccine and what he called "non-specific colitis", which in turn caused autism, he said.
So that plot twist has already occurred.
Meanwhile, the connection between gut disorders and autism has received very little study after his wacko paper was retracted. With the relatively sudden (ie, in the space of a generation) proliferation of HFCS and hydrogenated oils (one or the other of which is in - or at least was in - nearly everything that has more than 5 ingredients), it seems like a very legitimate target for research.
The fact that the vaccine connection has been debunked does not, as I understand it, also debunk the connection with gut disorders, which the other scientists had apparently independently observed and written about. People have been pointing this out for nearly 5 years now (ie, see [0]), but it seems that research is only now venturing out. People are terrified to be even vaguely associated with Wakefield, even if they don't share his conflict of interest or willingness to lie.
Well I'm glad the parent posted that, because I'd not heard the info from your comment before, only that Wakefield was connecting thiomersal (a mercury containing compound) with autism; the compound then being removed in USA with no downward change in autism cases.
In response to the link, blaming Wakefield seems counter-productive, we need to take a more nuanced approach to disagreement and avoid "throwing the baby [area of research] out with the bathwater [discredited hypothesis]". Seems like there's a socio-political problem that needs fixing there and blaming Wakefield for our response to his fraud seems to go too far.
He actually made the same gut bacteria connection to autism patients that this new research found. His paper had to be personally signed off by the 13 other researchers working on it. It was retracted by the publisher due to a conflict with a sponsor but was never scientifically denounced. He then checked the safety records around the vaccine and said he cant recommend the vaccine based on the testing. There are tons of people currently associated with him and you can hear him out any time with any number of recent appearances
So people are glibly conflating insufficiency of result with bad intent. I always understood that from mainstream news. You have to know how to read the news :) Once you predict the bias, herd-following, yellow journalism etc. you can filter it out.
(2) Nature is an extremely high impact factor journal. However, it's ... not really a medical journal. Nor a psych journal. Nor a developmental peds journal. It's a basic sciences journal. What I mean to say is, even if this were Nature, it'd be a super high-impact journal that isn't actually read by clinicians who would be best positioned to criticize the study.
(2a) For instance, their bowel transfer prep involved a clean-out with a two week course of vanco. The only bowel bugs it's used for are c. diff colitis and staph aureus enterocolitis. The reason it's really only used for that is because it really doesn't touch any other common bowel inhabitants. It's useful for those because it doesn't absorbed very effectively, so if you've got C Diff sitting in the bowel lumen, great, send a wash of vanco down the pipe. But, uh, for any other bugs in the gut? It's not even second line. So, how weird that it would be used to knock out pre-existing gut flora and "suppress pathogenic bacteria." C Diff and MRSA are not the leading pathogenic gut bacteria. The pre-existing flora are predominantly anaerobes.
(3) An unblinded, uncontrolled trial of a disease whose symptoms are highly subjective in measure? Excellent. I'm sure they took measures to ensure they weren't influenced in their subjective analys-
(3a) Oh. The senior author has a bunch of patents out trying to commercialize probiotics for autism.
(3b) Oh, they used the PGI3, CARS, SRS, and ABC scores. I guess if you fill out enough bubbles you can overcome the fact that those are still subjective enough that they're shit for an open-label trial. Whoops.
I don't mean to be overly dismissive. It's a fine pilot. The results are interesting enough that I'd want to see a real study tackle this. My comments are mostly aimed at the prevailing sentiment here taking this at face value.