The autoimmune hypothesis is yet another autism hypothesis that is advanced primarily by parents, because it offers more hope than a neurological etiology. A lot of people hold strongly to the hope that autism is just a set of symptoms that are triggered by something tangible and readily treatable like a nutritional deficiency or a food allergy, rather than a permanent difference in brain structure. The available evidence points very clearly in one direction - genetics.
It also bears repeating that what we call "severe autism" is really "some amount of autism comorbid with very low IQ". Autism is routinely overdiagnosed in preference to a more accurate diagnosis of intellectual disability because parents prefer it, again because it offers more hope, largely due to the popular trope of the autistic savant.
Parents of severely disabled children naturally hold out for any source of hope and I don't judge them for that in any way, but we can't let that get in the way of the science that really is their child's best hope. There is no evidence for the hygiene hypothesis.
Do you have any basis for saying the autoimmune hypothesis is "advanced primarily by parents?"
I ask because I have a son with autism, and I have met leading immunologists in famous medical schools who subscribe to this hypothesis. That doesn't make the hypothesis right, but it is taken far more seriously than your comment would imply.
Second, "severe autism is really some amount of autism with very low IQ" part is also wrong in my opinion. Autism can be so severe that it makes IQ irrelevant (even in cases where it can be demonstrated to be high). The analogy here is with other mental illnesses like schizophrenia - when it is severe enough, it masks every other trait of that person, including IQ. That does not mean "severe schizophrenia is really some amount of schizophrenia combined with very low IQ". There are many severely autistic individuals who also demonstrate high IQ in specific areas (but still cannot lead anything close to a normal life), directly contradicting your statement.
I expect a little more thoughtfulness on a top comment in HN.
The basis for my comment on the autoimmune is relatively poorly documented, because by definition it happened outside of academic literature. A bit of intelligent Googling will turn up a great deal of lay discussion that substantially pre-dates the earliest peer-reviewed publications on the subject. It is clear from perusing the relevant discussion forums that there are a great many parents who are advocating the autoimmune hypothesis; While this of course has no bearing on the validity of the theory itself, it is highly pertinent when considering the theory's prominence in the mainstream media.
As regards autism and IQ, your analogy to schizophrenia is completely inaccurate. Someone with high IQ can develop strategies to ameliorate essentially every aspect of their autistic symptoms - learning social and communication skills, structuring their life to deal with overstimulation, participating in behavioural therapy to minimise repetitive and autostimulative behaviours etc. Schizophrenics are by definition unaware that their delusional beliefs are delusional, whereas any intelligent autistic can be made aware of their social deficits and behavioural quirks and can learn to adapt around them.
As you said, some autistic people have high IQ in some areas but are still unable to live a normal life, but this is because their cognitive problems render them unable to overcome their autism symptoms. A specific cognitive impairment is still a cognitive impairment - strong arms do not nullify paraplegia.
While it may be the case that there are some individuals that have high IQ but severe levels of impairment, they are very much outliers. There is no generally-accepted classification for the severity of autism symptoms, but it is worth noting that those systems which simply use IQ are not obviously less useful than more complex schemes; IQ correlates as strongly with functional impairment as any other factor.
> Schizophrenics are by definition unaware that their delusional beliefs are delusional
delusions are not necessary for a schizophrenia diagnosis
also, during periods of convalescence, on hallucinations: "they may learn to ignore them, or treat them as benign accompaniments of everyday living" --http://www.schizophrenia.com/family/delusions.html
I don't think it's an entailment of schizophrenia that the sufferer is unaware that their beliefs are delusional. Even with that awareness, a schizophrenic idea can be very compelling. Even people who don't suffer from schizophrenia can get irrational ideas that interfere with their life despite decent self-awareness about these ideas.
While schizophrenia can have many very strong symptoms and is obviously not 'psychogenic' (e.g. in a Freudian sense), schizophrenics can and do learn skills to help them feel better and pass better and intelligence is an asset there.
I will agree that autism seems MUCH vaguer than schizophrenia as a diagnostic category, but that is also true of most other psychological disorders...
You said: Someone with high IQ can develop strategies to ameliorate essentially every aspect of their autistic symptoms - learning social and communication skills, structuring their life to deal with overstimulation, participating in behavioural therapy to minimise repetitive and autostimulative behaviours etc. <End quote>
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There are severely depressed people with very high IQ and they are fully intellectually aware of their depression, they try hard to compensate for it, doing all the types of things you mention in the context of autism. Tragically, for at least some of them, nothing seems to work.
My point is that it is more complicated than what you are asserting.
I have Aspergers, and I feel the same way that Autism might be incurable for those who already have it. This research may help future generations, but I'm not hopeful that it will help me.
I am probably going to get downvoted for being realistic about it, but if you don't have autism you really don't know what its like. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, and I would do anything for a possible cure, but I can't allow myself to be filled with a false hope that someday I can live a normal life.
Normal is after all a common average and in that is overated by the masses. Remember if 99% of the human population was a psycopath then what would normal be then.
If your saying normal people have a smoother life then I'll admit I'm starting to become jelous, but if i lived on a island alone with no communications then in that I guess everybody would have a smoother life alot of the time :).
I read jdietrich's comment about "severe autism is really...is really overdiagnosed..." not as "is always" (which you seem to have chosen to interpret it as) but "is more often", which doesn't contradict your "autism can be...that it makes" response: I seriously doubt that jdietrich is claiming that no such people exist, and thereby the fact that "there are many severely autistic individuals" doesn't show the statement to be false.
Of course, it may be false, but so could anything people say, even when backed up by "sources"; however, I really do feel the need to point out that it isn't false only because there are exceptions, as the word "overdiagnosed" only implies "more often than is warranted" and doesn't in any way leave out the possibility that it is sometimes correct, or even that there aren't "many" cases: just that the number of people who are diagnosed is larger, and possibly still much larger (even with "many" real cases), than the number of people who truly have the issue and should be diagnosed.
(To be very explicit: nothing I have said here relies on specific information about autism, nor can it, as I know absolutely nothing about that disorder.)
A quote: "...several epidemiological studies were conducted supporting this concept and generating novel ideas for the underlying mechanisms that were then followed up by use of well-defined animal models and human studies."
There is inadequate evidence of a link between the hygiene hypothesis and autism, which is what the article was about. I agree that there seems some fairly good support for the hygiene hypothesis and immunological problems, like allergies and asthma.
EDIT: replaced "no evidence" with "inadequate evidence", as lutusp noted, the article is claiming a correlation, which is at least weak evidence.
> There is no evidence of a link between the hygiene hypothesis and autism, which is what the article was about.
The article shows a correlation between the hygiene hypothesis and autism. A correlation, by itself, could mean anything or nothing, but it is certainly evidence.
Are you using "evidence" as a synonym for "proof", as in law? I ask because science doesn't work that way.
This correlation may simply evaporate with further work, or reveal some connection not now apparent, but saying there's no evidence for the correlation is simply false.
To understand why this is true, consider rain and puddles. A naive alien, seeing a correlation between rain and puddles, might conclude that the puddles caused the rain, or the reverse, or both rain and puddles are caused by an unevaluated third cause.
Because A might cause B, or B cause A, or A and B be caused by C, and without researching the true cause-effect relationships, the observed correlation means precisely nothing. No. Thing. It is not weak evidence, it is not evidence at all.
And "hearsay and anecdotes" are not any kind of evidence of interest to a scientist. The plural of anecdote is not data.
He is not talking about causation or not. He is talking about using evidence to affect his (subjective) posterior probability of the truth of a statement.
Of course he is. Here's a quote from the post to which I replied:
> There is inadequate evidence of a link between the hygiene hypothesis and autism ... the article is claiming a correlation, which is at least weak evidence.
But the above is false. A correlation is not "weak evidence" for a cause-effect relationship, or a "link", as the poster put it. We need to be perfectly clear that a "link" suggests a cause-effect relationship, but without specifying which way cause and effect run.
A correlation is an observation that can only lead to further work, and it is never, in and of itself, evidence of a cause-effect relationship, absent discovery of a mechanism.
This reminds me of one of my pet peeves about science journalism -- use of the word "link" to describe a correlation. It's tendentious and misleading. There are lots of studies that find "links" between utterly unrelated things, by simple data mining (searching for coincidental correlations devoid of meaning). Such meaningless correlations are often published as though they mean something, and they're nearly always described with the word "link" or another tendentious word.
> There is some evidence that autism may be caused by an immune disease; One publication speculated that the lack of early childhood exposure could be a cause of autism.
The hygiene hypothesis has wider use than just autism - that a bunch of allergy and auto-immune stuff is caused by excessive cleanliness. There is strong evidence that might be true. But the link between autism and excessive cleanliness is, to quote one link that you provided, "speculative".
The abstract of the other study doesn't mention ASD; maybe I'm missing something?
(Just to be clear, because sometimes I'm not: The hygiene hypothesis is strong and important when talking about allergy and maybe auto-immune diseases; I need convincing that there's any link to ASD.)
Yes -- but my remark is about the hygiene hypothesis, not about autism. Read the post to which I replied. The poster said "There is no evidence for the hygiene hypothesis." I replied to that specific remark.
> The hygiene hypothesis has wider use than just autism ...
What? The evidence for the hygiene hypothesis is strong in many areas, but as to autism, it's mere speculation.
> But the link between autism and excessive cleanliness is, to quote one link that you provided, "speculative".
Yes -- and on what basis do you think I have taken any other position?
> The hygiene hypothesis is strong and important when talking about allergy and maybe auto-immune diseases; I need convincing that there's any link to ASD.
So does everyone else. There's no basis for this assumption in present evidence.
The comment you responded to was clearly talking about the hygiene hypothesis and autism. I'm not sure how you read it otherwise.
Since the post you responded to was saying that there is no evidence for the hygiene hypothesis (as a cause for autism) and you then replied to say that there was strong evidence for the hygiene hypothesis it's a reasonable assumption that you're still talking about causes of autism.
"The autoimmune hypothesis is yet another autism hypothesis that is advanced primarily by parents, because it offers more hope than a neurological etiology."
I haven't done any research on this, but at the same time virtually every other chronic illness is caused, causes, and/or is exacerbated by chronic inflammation, so if inflammation during pregnancy doesn't have any effect on neurological development it would be extremely surprising.
Yep. Reading the article I was a little put off by how banal the hypothesis really is. Inflammation, including neuroinflammation, is involved in many pathologies. Whether it is a cause or a symptom is unclear, partially because it is unclear what is going on in neurons exposed to stressors that causes their dendrites to recede. If inflammation is the main cause and best treatment vector for autism, autism is in the same boat as Alzheimer's and other difficult-to-treat inflammation-related neurological conditions.
Thank you for this. Trying to pin Autism down to a simple cause is foolish. Not only is autism often (thusfar not 100%) caused by a malfunction in the genes it is implicated in thousands of different genes and not even necessarily inherited (in large part being due to denovo mutations). Nonetheless the brain is a wide surface area of attack, there are many ways to assault it that could result in impaired intelligence.
Worth noting is that the connection between inflammation, intelligence and health could be more related to the heritable trait of how stable or robust your phenotype is to noise (mutations and stochastic alike).
What I also find interesting is that the fear for a disease being genetic will likely flip in the next 2 decades. Genetic diseases will be more easily corrected than diseases that will evolve a slip right under your nose.
> Trying to pin Autism down to a simple cause is foolish.
Foolish unless true. We just don't know, and it's too soon to be abandoning theories. Science doesn't proceed by categorically denying possibilities before they've been fully investigated.
> Genetic diseases will be more easily corrected than diseases that will evolve a slip right under your nose.
On the contrary, genetic diseases will with rare exception remain incurable.
1.) We are not disagreeing. Anyone who wants to pin it to autoimmune effects is missing the genetic causes, anyone looking for simple mendelian causes is missing out on multiple gene susceptibilties or denovo mutations, etc.
2.) This is a testable hypothesis and will be known in time. I believe that we will have a good enough understanding and control over genetics such that effective therapies even for adults will be possible in the stated time frame. Also notice I used the word correct not cure, not a mere play in semantics but a subtle change that strongly alters meaning.
> This is a testable hypothesis and will be known in time.
Wait -- if resolution requires the simple passage of time, then it's not testable, indeed it's not really a test. A "testable hypothesis" means a notion that's subject to practical test in the present. Waiting for a future yea/nay outcome isn't, strictly speaking, a test. More of a waiting game.
> I believe that we will have a good enough understanding and control over genetics such that effective therapies even for adults will be possible in the stated time frame.
Gene therapies have a pretty terrible track record to date. Nevertheless, if your "time frame" is 100 years, then I would have to agree it's likely, based on Clarke's First Law:
Quote: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
> Also notice I used the word correct not cure, not a mere play in semantics but a subtle change that strongly alters meaning.
Yes, agreed, and if this era arrives, treatment recipients will have to be told that their improved condition by no means implies that their offspring won't be similarly afflicted.
>It also bears repeating that what we call "severe autism" is really "some amount of autism comorbid with very low IQ".
Ah, that... actually explains a lot. I've worked with several people with Autism diagnoses, and yeah, they were nerdy... really nerdy and socially inept, but also smart, productive individuals able to lead independent lives; People I'd be happy to call friend. Yeah, I have to go out of my way to figure out how to effectively communicate with them, but it's worth it. If I had a kid that grew up to be like them, I'd be proud.
I hear people talking about autism like it's this terrible thing, and I don't really understand, Your kids could very easily turn out a lot worse than the Autistic people I know.
Of course, if any of these people were low-IQ, or really, anywhere near average, they'd have a difficult time indeed.
>If it's genetic, as you assert, then what hope is there?
Recognizing what their specific problems actually are, there is significant variation in the strength of the particular difficulties individual autistics face.
Teaching autistics to work around their disabilities; there has been significant progress on this approach for recognizing and dealing with other peoples emotions, for example.
Getting them the support they need for problems they cannot work around.
> If it's genetic, as you assert, then what hope is there?
Um... plenty? Tons of genetic diseases are treatable. This is where Genzyme, for example, makes most of its money. Cerezyme for Gaucher's disease or Fabrazyme for Fabry disease to name two.
Does anyone have references to studies regarding this? The author has a long history of advocating a link between parasite load and auto-immune disease (c.f. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29wwln-essay-t.ht... from 2008), and since the Wakefield scandal I'm generally skeptical of non-journal articles attempting to link autism and inflammation.
The article is advertisement for the author's book, and I can't find any indication that the author has an educational background in biology. Based on his book's Amazon page, he's a journalist.
include free full-text download links, so we can follow up on this.
The author has a long history of advocating a link between parasite load and auto-immune disease
Yes, I also checked out the author as I submitted this article. He has postgraduate training in science writing, has worked for The Christian Science Monitor (a dodgy publication for medical reporting), and has been published in other professionally edited publications for his freelance science reporting. I thought the submitted article had enough caution of statement and names of actual researchers to be worth discussing here. The article is certainly far from the last word on the subject, but may point to a line of research that will be helpful in SOME (but certainly not all) efforts to reduce the incidence of autism in the future and to help children after they develop autism.
AFTER EDIT:
Some readers here may be interested in looking at the original case report by Leo Kanner that first described autism.
A fair question. It's my understanding that the Christian Science Monitor attempts to be phenomenological and "objective" in all of its reporting, and some readers have long prized that publication for precisely those characteristics. But it's important to note that the Christian Science Monitor is the house publication of the Christian Science religious denomination, and that the denomination has a view of health and disease that is not mainstream and not evidence-based. (I write this as someone who has visited the Mother Church in Boston and has heard about both the denomination and the newspaper at their headquarters offices as an interpreter for officials from China who were studying religious diversity in the United States.) Thus, on this story I was much more inclined to submit a link from the New York Times (different editorial tendencies) than I would be to submit an article by the same author from the Christian Science Monitor. Most journalists benefit from submitting their work to an editor.
The CSM is not an organ for the Christian Science church. Is there some reason we believe the guy who wrote this post is a Christian Scientist?
You called this piece into question in part because of a past affiliation with the CSM. The CSM is a credible journalism venue; it's not fair to attribute fundamentalist Christian Science beliefs on people who happened to have worked there.
Right; this is a lengthier restatement of what I just said. The CSM isn't L’Osservatore Romano. It's a serious (if lately diminished) news venue.
Anyways, my point is simple: fundamentalist Christian Science devotees might lack credibility in medical debates. But people who have merely at some point in their careers affiliated with the CSM do not.
It's strange to give NYT a free pass, though, which has had its own scandals with both fabricated stories and a penchant for editorializing its reporting. CSM is at least as serious and careful and unbiased.
This article from the Economist is a sort of a round-up of recent work on the medical implications of our gut bacteria, including autism. It has more information that you might use to broaden your search:
A long term antibiotics prescription messed up my gut bacteria, leading to problems with drowsiness and yeast infections. Strong priobiotics (100B+ cells daily) reverse these probems, which return within days when I stop the priobiotics. I can't speak for autism, but I can tell you first hand that gut bacteria do play a role in our health.
If the immune-response hypothesis pans out (it's only a correlation at the moment), it would lead to an irony of modern times -- a modern household's level of cleanliness can cause:
* Asthma
* Autism
* Allergies
* Immune system dysfunctions
All these conditions are now "linked" to the "hygiene hypothesis," the idea that we're not doing ourselves any favors by creating near-sterile living environments. A quote from the article:
"Scientists have repeatedly observed that people living in environments that resemble our evolutionary past, full of microbes and parasites, don’t suffer from inflammatory diseases as frequently as we do."
I emphasize about the linked article that it represents a correlation, not a cause-effect relationship. We won't be able to say with any certainly what causes autism until we can trace its evolution step by step, from a specific environmental stimulus to a biological mechanism, with all the steps fully described. We're not yet close to that goal.
You're posing a false choice -- between well-understood public health threats on one hand, and sterile environments on the other. There's a large, unexplored territory between the two.
The TL:DR; I get from this is: "we're clean freaks, and thus our immune systems go wonky and start attacking good things because they lack bad things to go after, including unborn children that get autism as a result"
This totally validates my need to go play in the mud and eat sketchy food from carts on the street.
We're "clean freaks" because we've learned that there are harmful microbes and parasites in the world. Millions die/have died of disease such as cholera and typhoid that are spread chiefly by poor hygiene. The parasites we don't get as a result of having clean water and sanitary sewers are on balance harmful to us.
I'm not sure I buy the "hygiene is harmful" argument or that we've gone overboard with it. I think a lot of other factors that have changed in the past 60 years might factor in, including a misguided government/agribusiness lead food pyramid that is way out of balance with our pre-civilization diets, as well as the introduction of highly processed and sweetened food that for many of us forms the majority of our diets.
> I'm not sure I buy the "hygiene is harmful" argument or that we've gone overboard with it.
You can be hygienic and still cultivate behaviors that increase your exposure to safe levels of microbes. For instance, I always wash my hands after using the toilet but I’m less concerned than most about the use-by dates on food products and prefer to make decisions based on my sense of smell and taste. Not sure if that’s a good example.
There's a pretty wide gap between the level of hygiene required to prevent something like cholera (hint: basic plumbing to move your poop away from where you live) and the overly compulsive level of cleanliness I see amongst so many today. Numerous household cleaners with crazy anti-bacterial formulations, people obsessively covering their hands with alcohol-gel. These products are driven more by advertising and people's need to find things they can control in their lives than they are preventing any real amount of disease.
There's ample evidence that children growing up at a farm are on average healthier and with a stronger immune system than children growing up in the city.
Indeed, hygiene is not harmful, but we have gone overboard with it. As with most things in life, going to the extremes is bad for your health.
Without getting into too much detail, my wife had complications during her pregnancies. My older son (3) is autistic. My younger son might be as well. I'm not sure of the science behind what is being discussed here, but the specific elements it discusses match up with certain things that occurred during the pregnancy.
Oddly off-topic and yet on-topic for HN, I'm working on a startup idea to assist families with special needs. I've been trying to go it alone, but not having a partner is tough. No one to speak with, no one to work with. If anyone is interested, even if it's just to chat, email me (found in my profile). I'm bad at asking for help. =/
My mom had a serious liver infection during her second trimester while carrying my older brother. He turned out autistic. After years of dressing down people about vaccines and other snake-oil causes of autism, she forwarded this article to me with one line, "This must be the reason." FWIW.
Anyway, I came two years later without complications. I also exhibited many odd behaviors that worried my parents at first, but wound up not being autistic.
Hang in there and keep your chin up. Your younger son might be fine.
> Hang in there and keep your chin up. Your younger son might be fine.
He is fine. I know that's not what you mean, but regardless of the diagnosis, he is a wonderful child, and I would not have him any other way. My worry isn't for my children, but for the way society treats those with autism.
I would like to remind HN that autism being a syndrome, it is likely to be several distinct illnesses with different genetic and environmental factors.
That's not correct. If something is a syndrome it is more likely to be a single distinct illness rather than multiple distinct ones.
I.e., suppose 50% of people suffer headaches, 50% suffer nausea, and 50% suffer aching back. Further, suppose 12.5% (= 50% x 50% x 50%) of people suffer all three symptoms - in this case, the three symptoms put together are NOT a syndrome.
On the other hand, suppose 40% of people suffered headaches, nausea and aching back together. In that case the three symptoms together are a syndrome.
A syndrome is probabilistic evidence that there is an underlying cause of multiple co-occurring symptoms.
You are right, I should have written more explanations. Autism is quite special in that the symptoms are behavioral: impairments in social interaction and communication, restricted interests and repetitive behavior (this list is on Wikipedia). These are very different from aches and other simple physical manifestations. In fact, when we try to look for simpler symptoms, the set of symptoms becomes blur, in that no other symptom can be found always present together with to those core behavioral ones. The variety of more physical manifestations of autism hints at a variety of root causes. E.g., gastrointestinal issues are common but not always there. Cerebellar anomalies too. etc...
Sorry, I wrote that up fast, if you are interested you can write a reply, I'll try answering tomorrow, it's late for me now.
Really, I must insist: a syndrome is a set of clinical symptoms. "Austism" describes a set of symptoms. "Autism" does not describe an illness with a well-defines root cause. Hence, my comment: autism is a syndrome, and there could be several distinct illnesses (several root causes) that lead to autism.
Greg Cochrane mentions that here, http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/paternal-age/ , in the context of the influence of paternal age on mutation rates, and excessive numbers of mutations having negative influences on fitness and health.
It could be that men with some medical condition are both likely to father an autistic child and to postpone child-rearing for health reasons. Heck, the autism itself in a very mild form might be such condition - a mildly autistic man could be likely to pass more severe autism to his children, and have problems finding a mate.
The comments do not inspire much confidence either. To be honest I'm disappointed in Radiolab for being clearer, and addressing some of the crazy there.
It worked. He has now gone a year and a half without medication, and is in massively better shape than he was on the (expensive and only marginally effective) medications.
I suffer from psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. For the most part the psoriasis is not a big deal, it's disfiguring, but only on my legs, and it itches to the point that I'm perfectly capable of scratching long past the point that I'm bleeding. The psoriatic arthritis is another matter, untreated I live somewhere between 5-7 on the pain scale, shaking hands is nerve-wracking (please, no bone crusher handshakes - I do suffer from hand squeezy death) and I can barely walk.
On meds I'm basically fine. I use Humira which if I understand correctly is a human monoclonal antibody glued to a receptor that interferes with something to do with T-cells. I.e. it causes a specific immune suppression that massively reduces the process that causes the psoriasis and arthritis symptoms - oh and I'm 100x more likely to get skin cancer.
I've been off meds for over 6 months now with very limited impact on my life. All I did was cut out refined sugars and grain from my diet.
I discovered this by accident (too lazy to refill my prescription, then realized that I hadn't refilled in ages and yet wasn't in pain)
I think that there's a huge load we don't understand in the relationship between inflammation and autoimmune conditions; there are many things that are involved
Just my 2¢, I love science so please disregard my anecdotal ramblings
It's worth mentioning the GAPS diet here I think: http://www.gaps.me/. It seems that autoimmune/inflammatory problems are being associated with more and more diseases.
I have multiple sclerosis and acquired hookworms about 3 years ago as an attempt to prevent further relapses. HN isn't exactly the place for this, but if anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer.
If the hygiene hypothesis is correct, then month of birth/conception should have an effect on the risk of autism. Here is a report about a study which found that autism is most likely in children conceived in winter: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/05/news/la-heb-autism-w.... There was another study which "debunks" the month of birth claim, but I cannot find a link to it.
On the other hand, perhaps due to school schedules in the US, or perhaps highly intelligent people having less sex in the summer time due to other correlations, winter conceptions correlate to higher academic success as well.
What I find most interesting about this article is that it offers a way to diagnose autism with something more than behavioral symptoms. I don't know if it will be reliable, but it might be something parent with kids on the fringes of autistic spectrum would want to try. There's always advice floating around that their kid is fine, just a little slow etc. If we can do brain scans and find out if their levels of inflammation are above normal, there would be more certainty.
> And yet, a trial is under way at the Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine testing a medicalized parasite called Trichuris suis in autistic adults.
Montefiore representin'! (Too bad they failed to mention the names of any of the people involved at Montefiore/Einstein so I could walk over to their lab and look at their posters or talk to them.)
Except that autism doesn't have a single mutation that has been identified. Even if it did, autism is not purely a negative: for those who are able to cope it produces world views that can allow us to escape local maxima.
Eradication seems an odd goal. Treatment and support are more realistic and less creepy-eugenics.
Your comment is untrue. As the author of the submitted article notes about a related proposed explanation for autism incidence, "First, in the broadest sense, the epidemiology doesn’t jibe." And that has always been the problem with the lawyer-profit-motivated hypothesis about vaccines and autism: it never matched the epidemiological evidence.
I'm merely arguing that vaccines could possibly bring out or affect the severity of the symptoms of autism. None of the studies seem to study the severeness of autisms... just the rates, which would be unaffected if autism is already determined by a different factor (apparently age of the father may be one).
It's so scary to see how many people refuse to open their minds to possibilities outside their preconceived notions. The responses in this thread are a prime example.
"You should have an open mind, but not so open all your brains run out."
In fact, the "hygiene hypothesis" is almost the diametric opposite; vaccines, by challenging our immune systems, would reduce the risk of autism. Not that it does that either, studies have repeatedly found no correlation between vaccination and autism.
Question: What of the chemical load that a vaccine or schedule of vaccines might carry? What if immune dysregulation has a tipping point? The tipping point could be a variety of things, including a vaccine. A second question: What if we need the full blown disease, along with the fever to properly train our immune systems? Mr. Manoff's article may have been well-written and fascinating and short on citations but it will raise important questions that need to be asked and answered without fear that everybody will skip their vaccines and we will all die of polio. I am certainly NOT directing this last sentence at you Mr. Swift. I am generally noting with a view to the entire discussion above that sometimes the scientific guild, like all of us, has allowed fear of what might happen to shape their answers to important questions.
> If this is true, then it makes sense that vaccines could trigger the symptoms of autism.
No, that is false. That theory has been demolished by the many studies designed to compare outcomes between those who do, and do not, receive modern vaccinations:
A quote: "In early January, the British Medical Journal called the 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield, which proposed a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, gastrointestinal problems and autism, 'an elaborate fraud.' According to Fiona Godlee, the journal's editor-in-chief, 'It's one thing to have a bad study... In this case we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.'"
I ask you to educate yourself on this issue before posting discredited claims in a public forum.
With an account created within an hour of this submission I have to ask if you are trolling this forum?
Everyone is entitled to opinion, but when discussing articles like this it's fact and science that matter.
Comments like your cost lives.
We're already seeing increase in measles rates in the UK from the fallout of the MMR scare mongering around 10 years ago.
Please understand that parents who perceive any risk to their children will always err on the side of caution. When that perceived risk is based on lies and assumptions you stand the chance of exposing that child to other known and proven risks.
Those studies simply compared rates of autism in vaccinated populations... so if vaccines are merely bringing out the symptoms in people who already have autism then it still makes sense.
This is false, because many careful studies have compared populations, otherwise identical, that differed in one particular -- one received vaccinations, the other didn't. The outcome is that there is no difference between them.
Think about this in everyday terms -- consider the financial advantage, the scientific prestige, that would accrue to someone who located such a link. Wealth, fame, the unrequited love of women. But even though this issue has been studied repeatedly, no one has been able to show a scientific correlation between vaccines and autism.
Andrew Wakefield pretended to show a link, but his motives are now obvious -- he received thousands of dollars in consulting fees from a group of lawyers trying cases related to this issue, and he sought a patent on a vaccine of his own design, a vaccine that would have enriched him if there was such a link. These facts call his objectivity into question. And examination of his "scientific" work shows a repeated pattern of fraud and deception.
I suggest that you think like a scientist. Scientists don't say what you have, in essence: "if it hasn't been disproven, that's an argument in its favor." Scientists only count positive evidence as support for a hypothesis, and there is none for this issue. Indeed all the studies come to the same conclusion -- there is no link between vaccines and autism.
If autism was something we had genetic or biological tests for, this would be a valid concern. Presently, however, we don't have a biomarker for autism - the studies determine whether children have autism by looking at their symptoms. If vaccines did cause a significant increase in symptoms, we should expect it to move some number of individuals from "undetectable" to "detectable" and we'd see that in the numbers.
There is the narrow possibility, which may well have been looked at but hasn't been discussed, that vaccines could make autism worse only when it is significant to begin with, so nothing is crossing the threshold between not-quite-autism to autism, but I don't think we have any more evidence cause us to expect that relative to the simpler hypothesis that vaccines have roughly the same impact at any degree of autism: none.
Thank you for being the only one to understand my point (which you pointed out in your second paragraph) and not just knee-jerk down voting. My account was automatically censored by the HN algorithm for exploring a controversial viewpoint.
As for the bio-marker there are a number of things that could be looked at: flue/bascterial infection during pregnancy, age of father, anti bodies in mother, rheumatoid arthritis genetic markers in mother, asthma markers.
I have to disagree that it is a narrow possibility. So much of the future of a child is determined during the formative years. Intentionally aggravating an at-risk child's immune system over and over again is something that needs to be very closely researched. To not do so at this point given all that we know seems very unethical.
I think what you're trying to say is not just a direct "stuff in vaccines triggers autism" but more to the point that if the lack of exposure to germs/diseases/pathogens can lead to an immune system response that can cause autism, then vaccines contribute to creating that "too clean" environment, by eliminating those diseases.
That's not how vaccines work, though. They create immunity through controlled exposure to the virus. If they were contributing to the "super clean" environment, then they would be preventing exposure.
I could see how one might think they're potentially related, but it's quite a jump to suggest that you shouldn't vaccinate for that reason. Besides, the article is talking about in-womb development, which is a much more plausible vector for autism, considering what we know about it.
If you say that, people will hate you. (and all that goes with it)
But, I think it's a range of epigenetic factors that trigger an auto-immune response to have autism expressed according to some genetic program. Vaccines with their adjuvants are but one trigger - and it should be patently obvious that this might well be the case from the article.
It also bears repeating that what we call "severe autism" is really "some amount of autism comorbid with very low IQ". Autism is routinely overdiagnosed in preference to a more accurate diagnosis of intellectual disability because parents prefer it, again because it offers more hope, largely due to the popular trope of the autistic savant.
Parents of severely disabled children naturally hold out for any source of hope and I don't judge them for that in any way, but we can't let that get in the way of the science that really is their child's best hope. There is no evidence for the hygiene hypothesis.