A Jenny McCarthy fan who likes her for her naughty bits,

...or

A Jenny McCarthy fan who likes her for promoting quackery.

On 2nd thought, I'm pretty sure which one is worse.

Cheers!

You know, the freakish sideshow you've been promoting for years, as if anyone could have missed the nutbaggery.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002312035#post106

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002692506#post2

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014148376#post35

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002312035#post25

Hey, I just read that Fionna Godley OPPOSED vaccination mandates in the UK when proposed by Offit on BBC Newsnight around the same time as those posts.

YES! That's British Medical Journal Editor in Chief Fiona Godlee representing the British Medical Association (no link to the primary source yet)... not just Barbara Loe Fisher/NVIC (blacklisted) types. OMG, on this matter they agree with each other! What'll you do? Hide it?

So please don't try to lecture anyone on sideshow nonsense, OK?

Can't find either the BBC Newsnight "programme" transcript or full video, but this is so unexpected I didn't mind looking into it briefly. You might be interested.

Trish Groves ?@trished 9 Apr 2013
@BBCNewsnight @bengoldacre Yet Paxo, bizarrely, seemed to frame @fgodlee as antivax. Was he poorly briefed?

David Colquhoun ?@david_colquhoun 9 Apr 2013
@BBCNewsnight Excellent interview about vaccination with @fgodlee and Paul Offit. At last BBC picks the right guests.

Related Conversation: https://twitter.com/Quovadis42/status/321767188065312769

So you are demanding another poster respect the credentials of people in your links...but totally dis a Fellow from the Royal College of Physicians and a Harkess Fellow?

Get real.

... and urge you to engage HIM on this matter and more. Be prepared. OTOH, you could just stay in your silo and sneer.

Give her some credit.

Truth is I thought she was better in her brief stay as an MTV VJ.

that the reason there are so many dumb people in the world is because circumstances changed over time and there are less opportunities for things to select them out. (I don't know why I posted that but it has always struck me as amusing and interesting)

I have always believed that autism would be genetic. It makes the most sense to me.

you were eliminated, thus creating a smarter gene pool. Today's easy life doesn't select out for stupidity.

my brother's behavior is very similar to my great-uncle's behavior

There must be a reason that the condition is expected "to soar" in the next few decades. Just a guess, mind you.

I mean, seriously, they suggested "family counseling"

never heard of autism back then

before it had a chance to breed, then how come we still have the gene so prevalent in today's society. I think it has a genetic component and an environmental trigger.

Not autism, but an early epigenetic study. It seems damage to prior generations increases incidence.

...but there was no diagnosis 60 years ago, and really no help even if there had been a diagnosis. However, when my sister's boy was first spotted in kindergarten (he's now 30) she did her research and a family tree and bingo! our family tree, and her husband's, is chock full of them...er, us (I'm moderately ADD myself). The fact that my sis and her husband are both engineers didn't exempt their children from the roll of the genetic dice.

I know ADHD and autism are apples and oranges, but, like so much else in medicine we are still learning about what is in the DNA. Things do "run in families." What that means for individuals is still unfolding.

in the late '50s-early '60s, who everybody said was "retarded" (the common terminology for any kind of developmental disability at the time). Looking back, I now realize he had severe autism. He couldn't carry on a conversation and had odd mannerisms, but he could instantly tell you the day of the week of any date you gave him. I think there was probably as much autism in the past as there is now, but it was not diagnosed as such but was included in a general category of "mental retardation" as it was then called.

now I work with a couple of autistic folk - there are different levels of functioning with autism, and certainly there are some very talented autistic people being overlooked for job opportunities

my autistic brother can handle routine tasks but no way could he live alone

It was all O-bama's fault.

the number of increased vaccines to children.

So it's GOT to be HIS fault !!!!!!

since she'd been ghettoized in the suburbs without a car and had to spend 24/7/365 with the kiddies. It just had to be all her fault!

Except it wasn't.

Trust the lack of transparency? Like the self-exoneration? Comfortable and confident? Or looking back will this be worse than the "refrigerator moms" saga?

The evidence about the what the study shows has been fully addressed.

It's time to stop pushing anti-vaccine nonsense, as if it's something else.

Thank you.

Expand your horizons, HuckleB. It's in your interest to learn when you're wrong, as you are.

You utilize all the scam anti-vaccine pages, and you promote their various "stories."

It's time for step down from this unethical practice of yours.

Every BS cliche the anti-vaxers use, you also use.

She works with Age of Autism, Mercola, GreenMedInfo, and all the rest of the anti-vaxers scam artists who are out to con people into making them rich by selling them worthless crap, and using ugly fear mongering as the trap for the sale.

Whoops. You blew it again. Ethics matter. The anti-vaccine movement is unethical, and that is being very kind.

1. Four references, read them again: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026329715#post125
Toss the Brogan link if you like. It is her professional opinion, not a study or case report, although her credentials and qualifications are top notch.

2. Find any EU country that has the same universal HepB birth dose policy as the US: http://vaccine-schedule.ecdc.europa.eu/Pages/Scheduler.aspx
HINT: Does NOT exist.

Are you calling all of those public health departments/officials inane names, too? And everyone in the EU public? Ridiculous.

3. Incidentally, Brogan doesn't work with AOA or I'd be familiar with her. Site search shows one interview: http://www.ageofautism.com/2014/09/dr-kelly-brogan-cdc-youre-fired.html

Ironically, during her very outspoken interview (which I just discovered) she discusses Dr. William Thompson (relevant to this subthread). Did you already know that?

She has, thusly, helped the AoA, and none of your anti-vaccine propaganda makes your unethical behavior better.

You really need to wake up.

You realize that no one bothers to read your links, because you have wasted the time of so many individuals that it's not funny.

The lack of conscience that you appear to possess is beyond the pale.

When I post information it's not purely "for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do." Get it? Apologies to William Blake. Unaltered quote available in jpg format on Twitter.

You can have the last word here. Let me guess: "YOU... "

Your con is up. It's time to go away for good.

seems she was right....

who woulda thunk

now her mom can deal with even MORE guilt

She should blame her grandparents....no, wait....

then does that mean that those genes are commonly found in people considered attractive as mates in current culture?

Are people essentially selectively breeding for autism, to make rates skyrocket?

or is it being better diagnosed?

I am a boomer. I can think of several people I grew up with who would now be diagnosed. Even when I had a summer job in a factory, a couple of the cleaning people could have been considered autistic. Back then, many others were hidden away by their families, given the catch-all label "mentally retarded," and shunted into group homes or menial jobs.

the diagnoses seem to be coming fast and furious these days, and the rate of diagnoses just seems to keep picking up steam. At the rate they're going, I expect the entire population to be diagnosed within the next decade or two.

Opera singers,

Masterful musicians

Winning card-players

Race-car drivers.

If we cannot do ALL of those, we must be "autistic"..if they only people valued in a society are people that can do all of those things. Obviously none of us can do all those things.

Bottom line, and try to understand this, our culture more and more rewards people who can graduate from a rigid verbally-based high school and go on to various types of specialized colleges. If you have a minor disablility that hampers that happening, some teacher and psychologist along the line will be glad to collect their salary saying the reason your kid can't do all of that is because of "autism related spectrum" of some sort.

A somewhat distant relative of mine was "diagnosed" with Autism related spectrum in first or second grade. She is now, 12 years later, an all A student in a major university on full scholarship with a double major, hoping to become a journalist, lawyer, or college professor.

So much for this "the diagnoses seem to be coming fast and furious these days".

They call it a spectrum for a reason - there's an enormous range of personality traits and functioning levels.

is now a full scholarship all A student in the sophomore year at college.

Saying that person had "Asperger's Syndrome" in preschool was simply wrong.

I say that the statistics are over-inflated for a variety of reasons, mostly due to improperly trained diagnosticians.

I probably would have been because I would get started on something and get really pissed if I had to eat or do something else. Even now in my late 60's still the same way. Last spring I had 3 plants to plant. The ground was semi moist and relatively easy to dig. I started digging holes for them and finally stopped after I had dug 12 holes. I used to write code and would start and stop after falling asleep at the keyboard maybe 36 or more hours later. I think they diagnose it earlier now.

and revised. I think there are highly active kids out there who are 'ADHD' who aren't. I taught forever and really only had two or three who were in my estimation correctly labeled. A lot of active kids got ritalin I am sorry to say.

Except, is it not true that retroviruses can alter the gene expression?

most research in these areas is still pretty conjectural, and little evidence has been assembled, except for fruit flies andand stuff like that.

But something triggers some things some times somewhere. We know this, as a basic tenet of evolutionar biology. It just does not happen randomly for a percentage of a population generation without a cause.

But as for Autism, (even-now, poorly defined, even for the most extreme cases, which all vary in diagnostic indicators); are we dealing with one specific genetic element, or several, or a variant cluster? Not a lot is really known for sure.

Perhaps, just "perhaps" we have a two generational dynamic, or a four generational dynamic, coming to play with 2-3% of the population, in this generation...... all of this implies hundreds more population dynamics research projects, environmental influence studies, all sort of research, none of which is likely to happen in the next 2 -10 years in the USA.

And any and all research should require that Andrew Wakefield should be offered the chance to come clean and admit he lied or face execution. Sorry, but that man set back legitimate research for 10-20 years.

The rates of autism have increased too astronomically and are off the scale in specific regions, like Northern California's agricultural region where rates have increased 300% in 7-10 years. No way it's just genetics. I'm going to track down and read the study now but I'm very skeptical.

So...

they can do just that, figure out if there is something in the environment that is switching on those autism genes, probably in pregnancy.

They now know that vaccines aren't doing it.

...are in amniotic fluid. Hundreds and hundreds of industrial chemicals. Babies in utero are exposed to more crap than was even remotely possible a hundred years ago. I think they must have a synergistic effect, including switching on latent autism genes.

That, plus the fact that so much more gets diagnosed.

They were labeled oddballs and weirdos and that made them my friends.

Autism and Asperger's are likely overdiagnosed at this point, the way ADHD and ADD were a few years ago. Add to this that we're only in the infancy of learning brain chemistry and structure and how our DNA might apply to them.

We just know vaccines are off the hook and it's time to put Wakefield and his followers into the ignorant crackpot file and move on with research that might start to make a difference.

...differently than most people.

I agree with the rest of what you said too.

no researcher would dare come to the conclusion close to blaming vaccines on anything, less they risk losing their ability to work in their field of study.

No saying he was right but the punishment they gave him will ensure that the next person that comes up with that conclusion as Wakefield would think twice before publishing their finding.

Just saying

His samples were tiny and taken involuntarily. His conclusions were determined by the fact that he was backing another vaccine, so there was money involved. His "research" was tainted at every step of the process.

Research done properly will stand on its own. While moneyed interests will try to suppress it, such research has a way of getting published in obscure places and then picked up by less obscure journals. Look at tobacco research as an example.

What Wakefield did (besides expose children to injury and death from preventable illness) is also force mainstream journals like The Lancet to look a little more closely at what they're publishing. Having to withdraw his articles made for a lot of very red faces there, it was humiliating. They won't make the mistake again with the next quack, at least one hopes.

Wakefield is the worst kind of quack.

Julie Louise Gerberding, M.D was head of CDC when they recommended the HPV vaccine for all. Then she became a Merck VP and head of their vaccines division. Gardasil has been hugely profitable Merck and is now recommended for boy and girls in the USA. In 2013, Japan’s health ministry withdrew their recommendation for HPV vaccine because of safety concerns.

Money is almost always involved.

The weed grows in the emerald triangle? The Napa or foothills wineries? The nut orchards that stretch from Oroville to Yuba City? The delta islands that grow asparagus? Apple Hill?

Practically everything here that isn't forested, paved or under water is agricultural land, and "under water" might still be farmland, because we grow rice too.

I'm calling bullshit, because the most basic criteria for your autism cluster would be its' borders, and those are astonishingly vague.

where they grow all the horseradish, way up by the Oregon border. Or the increase could be due to former urban dwellers moving up north for whatever reasons.

descends to sarcasm and hostility, but whatever. Will "Central Valley" do? And I was wrong about the increase in autism rates. It's much, much higher than I stated.

Mounting evidence suggests gestational pesticides exposures are strong candidates for the development of autistic spectrum disorders.[5] In California’s rich Central Valley agricultural region, a 600% increased incidence in autism was observed among children up to 5 years of age for births from 1990 to 2001, yet only one-third of the rise could be explained by identified factors such as changing diagnostic criteria for autism or a younger age at diagnosis [6]

Here are thee studies.
Boyle, C.A., et al., Trends in the prevalence of developmental disabilities in US children, 1997-2008. Pediatrics, 2011. 127(6): p. 1034-42.
5. Shelton, J.F., I. Hertz-Picciotto, and I.N. Pessah, Tipping the balance of autism risk: potential mechanisms linking pesticides and autism. Environ Health Perspect, 2012. 120(7): p. 944-51.
6. Hertz-Picciotto, I. and L. Delwiche, The rise in autism and the role of age at diagnosis. Epidemiology, 2009. 20(1): p. 84-90.

you were expecting something different? you shouldn't have.

A study that hasn't been discredited and one for which the author lost his license to practice medicine?

I'm skeptical too. I also immediately deny a JAMA peer-reviewed study when it conflicts with my own limited, non-academic, preconceived opinions and biases.

Granted, it's not really skepticism-- it's just our buffoonery. However, as long as we call it skepticism, our self-validation may continue without the pesky research studies getting in the way of labeling ourselves with something cool, trendy and anti-authoritarian... in our case, 'skepticism.'

in the face of multiple other peer-reviewed studies with other findings. One study doesn't mean much period. Thanks for the attempt at insult but my experience is neither limited nor non-academic. I've read hundreds of research studies on autism. I'm still not buying the theory presented in the headline.

My twin brother has it, his daughter has it, my youngest son has it, my father had it, his father almost certainly had it.

It certainly runs in my family.

something else now.

One of several such.

I agree with this.

...identified in the placentas of babies who have autistic siblings. See below for the Yale study.

http://news.yale.edu/2013/04/25/autism-risk-spotted-birth-abnormal-placentas

and he was different from the day he was born. I belonged to a group of brand-new first time parents, and everyone noticed that my son wasn't quite like any of the others.

He was born in 1982, so needless to say he wasn't diagnosed for quite some time. And then when I started sharing the diagnosis with friends, some of them would say something about a strange relative in their family.

Last edited Fri Mar 6, 2015, 10:38 PM - Edit history (1)

Some Autism is definitely genetic - if you have the genes you get the disease. A whole lot of the rest of Autism - not so much)

There was a much bigger study (I don't think they used twins) where they found a lot of genes that predispose one to Autism. However the authors were surprised that an environmental trigger was need to explain who got Autism.

If Autism was just genetic, why would Autism rates be much higher as you move to higher latitudes. There have been refuges from Africa (Somalia and Eritrea?) that moved closer to the arctic circle (Finland & northern Canada). When they started having babies they began noticing neurological problems that they had never seen in babies born in their homeland. It was Autism. If even a significant percent of Autism cases were determined genetically, there would not be a latitude dependence. The most important environmental trigger very likely vitamin D deficiency.

Vitamin D is neither a vitamin (it is a hormone) nor is it just important for the bones. It is an essential part of the immune system learning to not attack the self. A significant percent (maybe a majority) of Autism is autoimmune as is diabetes, multiple sclerosis and many other neurological diseases. Genetics directly causes a minority of the preceding diseases.

The root cause of all of this started just after WWII when 3 children died from large doses of injected active vitamin D. The AMA declared vitamin D toxic and set the daily requirement (200 IU) high enough to prevent rickets. Three years later it was pointed out the children that had died had the same genetic disease that affects calcium regulation but the warning was ignored and the limit was left at 200 IU/day. Thus the daily requirement was not based on science and therefore is part of Evidently Based Medicine. Since that time vitamin D researchers have figured out how much vitamin D is in the blood of people who are in the sun a lot and how fast it is made. A person with fair skin in a swim suit (no sunscreen) standing in sunlight that casts a shadow shorter than their height will make roughly 1000 IU/minute and will make 15,000-20,000 IU/30 minutes (a 75 day supply at 200 IU/day). Researchers recommend most adults need 4000-5000 IU/per day or more accurately they recommend a blood level of 50-80 ng/ml of vitamin D3. The Food and Nutrition board has finally set the tolerable upper limit to 4000 IU.

Because we are told to avoid sun exposure and the amount of vitamin D we are advised to get is 200-400 IU, perhaps 70% of the population is deficient in vitamin D. This matches with what has happened with the Autism rate (which goes up at the end of winter) as well as the greatly increased rate of all of the other autoimmune diseases. As long as you are low on vitamin D you are at risk of developing an autoimmune disease which explains why many people have 2 or 3 of them.

There is another environmental trigger that makes it much more likely you will develop an autoimmune disease. That trigger is stimulation of the immune system by infections and anything else that stimulates the immune system. The probably rarely happens if
one's vitamin D levels are in the healthy range (50-80 ng/ml). I doubt that mercury has much to do with triggering autoimmune diseases but any kind of stimulation of the immune system certainly does.

Good sources for vitamin D are at (links removed because of complaints HuckleB)

Thank you.

The sources I listed have information drawn from the science of vitamin D written in a non-technical style. If you follow links down within articles - at the bottom they list the peer-reviewed journal articles in Pubmed.

Over the years I have seen numerous genetic studies of various neurological diseases. What happens in most cases is there are some genes that will cause the disease but this is a minority of all cases. These same studies find a considerable number of other genes that predispose one for the disease but require an environmental trigger which often seems to be an immunological challenge leading to the formation of an autoimmune disease. A good example is diabetes. There are a purely genetic forms (MODY) as might be expected but the greatest number of cases are type 1 diabetes which is definitely autoimmune. The same is true for MS and other neurological diseases.

Claiming the vast majority of autism is completely genetically determined means you have to ignore clear evidence on the incidence of autism both by time of year and latitude. You also have to ignore populations living near the equator who have no experience with autism but sudden discover it in their children born in high latitudes (Finland, Northern Canada). I believe the sources I gave have references or you can just go directly to Pubmed.

Also I repeatedly hear about the increasing rate of autism is due to better reporting. The rate of all autoimmune diseases have been increasing at a rate similar to the reported incidence of autism. Genetically determined diseases do not show this kind of behavior.

Not cool.

Look closer and you will notice both sites advertise products that permit a person to test their vitamin D levels at home. This information was long requested by the readers and is an important service as people do not want to have to make a doctor visit just for the test and/or the doctor may not order the test even if you do go see them.

The vitamindcouncil.org site must be pretty poor at marketing because they advertise their own test kit and the banner ads at the top of the page advertise test kits from 2 other competitors. Note the banner ads are on the very specific topic of vitamin D so they do filter what ads they allow to be posted.

I could have left the links out but they seem to be the best sources of information on the net for vitamin D information. Both are doctor run. They both seem to get most of their revenue through donations.

Here is another site: (Link removed because of a complaint by HuckleB.) which is all about the journal articles but it too has an ad for vitamin D. Do you know of any better sites for vitamin D with no ads?

I presume I can post a link to another DU post without it being called a marketing link even though there are ads that do not appear to be controlled by DU.

Last edited Sat Mar 7, 2015, 12:01 AM - Edit history (1)

It's not cool, and it's not supported by the consensus of evidence.

I removed all of the links because they were detracting from the main reason for my posts. I put them in to save time for people who wanted more information.

Now that I have done that it would be nice if you could respond to what I posted in more than one line generalities.

Please show where the consensus of evidence explains why autism rates increase in the late winter/early spring and also increase as latitude increases. Also where does it account for populations that have moved from near the equator to near the arctic circle begin having children with autism for the first time in their cultural memory?

The consensus of evidence has indicated increasing rates of autism are just due to better diagnosis. Ummm, can you show me where that is evidence rather than just opinion? If an appreciable number of cases of autism are autoimmune, it would match what has been happening with incidence rate of the majority other autoimmune diseases. Below is an example for another autoimmune disease.

This video on the epidemiology of type 1 diabetes (an autoimmune disease) which like autism also has a rapidly increasing incidence rate. Here's the presentation by Frank Garland Phd. at UCSD :
http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=15771
The part at 38 minutes adds some important information to the incidence rate graph for type 1 diabetes in Finland. I would be very interested in any problems you have with the video.

For about a decade I dealt with a family member with Ataxia (a rare neurological disease). The consensus of evidence at the time was that the vast majority of cases were caused by genetic mutations so after a first round of tests, genetic testing began but all were negative. Researchers have found a number of genes that do cause the disease but after the first few more common mutations they were finding mutations that only applied to a few families. Meanwhile anyone who had not had a positive genetic test was given a label of Sporadic Ataxia. The number of sporadics was over half of all cases and the medical consensus was they would eventually find the mutation. Good luck with that, after a decade there has been little change in the percent of total cases that are directly genetic. However there was one Ataxia specialist (all are neurologists) in the UK who was checking for and finding many cases with an autoimmune disease that causes Ataxia. He was not considered part of the medical consensus in the US and to this day many neurologists to not check for that disease which of course leads to statistics that say it is extremely rare. My family member had that autoimmune disease. Many if not most people with Sporadic Ataxia are never tested and never find out what caused their disease. I like to call this "Evidently Based Medicine" - when you look under the hood you find decisions were made by highly respected, powerful doctors based on opinion with little or no scientific evidence and strong resistance to considering contrary evidence.

You can revise the links all you want, but pushing pseudoscience is harmful. Please don't do it again. Thank you.

You accuse me of pushing pseudoscience but you have not given any example that is in your opinion pseudoscience.

I did post another link to a video, are you complaining that the video is pseudoscience or a marketing site?

It appears that you formed your opinion based on a links I posted and have not bothered to look at any of what I posted after that point.

I have been through this before for close to a decade. I have had neurologists specializing in Ataxia ignore glaring evidence for years. At the last national meeting I went to, I sat down with one of the most respected Ataxia specialists and showed him a graph of years of blood and motor skills tests that made it very clear my family member had an autoimmune disease that was causing the Ataxia. He had to admit that was the case but still doesn't bother to order the right test for his own patients.

If you think consensus of opinion is the end of the story, perhaps you should spend some time listening to the Ted talks or Science Friday programs. Medical paradigms have been falling like bowling pins but not to the advantage of the anti-science crowd. In the last two weeks we finally discovered that all the avoid cholesterol advice turned out to have never been based on science - just opinion.

If you think I am so off base, you could flag my posts as abuse.

They are what they are.

the sole cause. My grandmother thinks her osteoarthritis was caused by food allergies - which I don't dismiss out of hand, but even if true it's only one of multiple factors involved.

Could there be an environmental component to autism? Certainly. But the best evidence we have (thus far) shows that it has a stronger genetic component than anything else. You mention that rates seem to be much higher in Northern European populations - I don't know how much of that is just better diagnostics, but it may be something worth looking into. As far as immigrants from Africa noticing autism in their children, again, it probably has a lot to do with better healthcare systems - or it could be a result of said immigrants inter-marrying with Europeans. None of these things are mutually exclusive.

The evidence you've presented is flimsy at best, I'm sorry to say - and the fact that you seem so damn sure of these dubious conclusions probably accounts for a lot of the hostility in people's responses.

Sorry I came on too strong. I have been meaning to respond to various posts on ASD for quite some time but
finally decided to on this one. Prior to that I was too busy posting in other worlds so I never did much DU posting.

I got leading Ataxia experts (neurologists specializing in Ataxia) to admit that my relative's Ataxia was autoimmune. I convinced them by showing them a graph of 26 gluten (specifically anti-gliadin IgG & IgA) antibody blood tests taken over 7 years along with 6 years of Ataxia motor skills tests (specifically the SARA scale). In the graph it is really obvious how the motor skills improve as the antibody levels drop below a certain level. Ataxia experts had assumed that most Sporadic (unknown cause) Ataxia cases would turn out to be genetic once they found all the mutations. After 10 years the number of Sporadic Ataxia cases is still near 50% and most of the genetic forms were found in the first dozen or so most common genetic mutations. A similar trend seems to have occurred in most of the major neurological diseases.

I have been there and been repeatedly told by experts in the genetics of the disease(s) in question that the vast majority of cases are directly caused by genetic mutations. When the studies are investigated more closely most of them only explain a chunk for 30%-40% or so as directly genetic or so with an often bigger chunk that has predisposing genes but needs some environmental trigger for disease symptoms to show.

Rates of autism increase in late-winter/early spring in higher latitude locations. This includes the US and Europe. This is on a yearly basis so when more cases are found per year, a larger percentage of them are still late-winter/early spring in higher latitude locations. This is not a pattern you would expect if the great majority of ASD cases were directly genetic.



In one of the posts above I alluded to a prior larger genetic study into ASD:

https://www.autismspeaks.org/science/science-news/largest-ever-autism-genome-study-finds-most-siblings-have-different-autism-risk

"The largest-ever autism genome study reveals that the disorder’s genetic underpinnings are even more complex than previously thought: Most siblings who have autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have different autism-linked genes."
...
"The findings challenge long-held presumptions. Because autism often runs in families, experts had assumed that siblings with the disorder were inheriting the same autism-predisposing genes from their parents. It now appears this may not be true in most cases."
...
"In the new study, the researchers sequenced 340 whole genomes from 85 families, each with two children affected by autism. They found that the majority of siblings (69 percent) had little to no overlap in the gene variations known to contribute to autism. Less than a third (31 percent) of the sibling pairs shared the same autism-associated genes."
...
"Known autism-risk genes showed up in 42 percent of the families participating in the study."



So directly genetically caused ASD only applies to 42 percent of the total and inheritance of the same genes only applies to 31%.



In a quote from the study starting this thread "Autism is almost entirely genetic in origin, new research has suggested, with between 74 and 98 per cent of cases down to biological make-up.

A study conducted by the Medical Research Council looked at 516 twins, and found that rates of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were higher in identical twins who share the same DNA."

The following is quote from the Pubmed abstract of the study:

"Design, Setting, and Participants:

We used data from the population-based cohort Twins Early Development Study, which included all twin pairs born in England and Wales from January 1, 1994, through December 31, 1996. We performed joint continuous-ordinal liability threshold model fitting using the full information maximum likelihood method to estimate genetic and environmental parameters of covariance. Twin pairs underwent the following assessments: the Childhood Autism Spectrum Test (CAST) (6423 pairs; mean age, 7.9 years), the Development and Well-being Assessment (DAWBA) (359 pairs; mean age, 10.3 years), the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) (203 pairs; mean age, 13.2 years), the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) (205 pairs; mean age, 13.2 years), and a best-estimate diagnosis (207 pairs)."


Unless I missed it, they didn't actually look at the genes, they used an "estimate" of them with various assessments. The other study I mentioned above is whole-genome (exome) sequencing.



Why does any of this matter? In the not too distant future they will be able to treat/cure many genetic diseases with the incredible new genetic tools that are now available such as CRISPR. But for patients that do not have a direct genetic cause for their disease those tools may not work. For patients who have a direct autoimmune cause, there may be treatments available today. Failing to investigate potential autoimmune causes for any of these neurological diseases could result in years of damage that might have been avoided.

During the decade when I was dealing with Ataxia, I have had contact with a dozen or so people with the same autoimmune form. Many were not tested at all until years after first symptoms and as a result have continuing disability that might have been avoided if they were checked when they first saw a neurologist.


nomorenomore08, sorry for all the text above but you did use the term "flimsy" so I thought I should make a better case.

And I don't think the genetic component is all down to one gene either - if it were, I doubt that gene would have survived all these years.

I just don't know. I'm no expert, but a lot of these apparent conclusions make me skeptical - especially the idea of autism rates peaking during a certain time of year. But as we all know, autism is a complex and highly diverse condition, and knowledge of where it comes from and how it develops is still in its infancy.

Everything from "eccentric" engineers to people who were entirely dysfunctional in ordinary society, back in the dark ages when these sorts of family secrets were kept hidden as some kind of moral failing or punishment from God.

It's not a stretch to speculate these traits persist in the population because they are frequently beneficial to both the individual and communities that are accepting of this diversity. The same is true of LGBT people. Communities that rejected this sort of natural human diversity, who tortured their eccentric engineers, homosexual artists, etc., were stagnant places of little progress.

Autism seems to be one of those traits like sickle cell anemia that has a positive side, and a negative side. The good side of sickle cell anemia gene is that it makes people more resistant to malaria. The bad side is that it can be deadly.

And I say that as someone who most likely has a touch of Asperger's himself.

coming out just about every month.

The study described in the OP is just one more; they seem to come out almost monthly.

But the fact is, none of them have really prove anything.

Autism may be caused by environmental factors. Autism may be caused by genetic factors. Autism may be caused by environmental factors that cause genetic changes.

You have a good point, though. Those who profit from poisoning and significantly damaging the environment have something to gain by promoting the results of research that claim that autism is a genetically inheritable syndrome.

However, they're important and latest conducted by UCal Davis which is no slouch re: research.

It is very difficult to prove anything re: pesticides and cancer/autism/neurological disorders due to the near impossibility of maintaining controls. However, I think this UCal research is significant and even if we're not working in or living near fields that are heavily sprayed, if we're eating food that is sprayed we're getting pesticides through the food chain. Don't think it isn't happening. I'm 62 y.o. and when I was in K-college, NO ONE I knew or even heard about had cancer except lung cancer from smoking. Childhood cancers were virtually unknown. Now it's the norm.

Linked to as-yet-unidentified environmental factors altering gene expression. Basically that it's both environmental and genetic.

I'm agnostic on whether the possible environmental pressures might include vaccines - that's for the epidemiologists to decide.

And you sure won't get any BS from me for that very prudent suggestion!

Members only.

Whereas many of the diseases vaccinated against are well-known to be potentially lethal or disabling.

There is correlation, like those in the study group are more or less likely to have some effect than a control group. Then there is actually understand the mechanism that causes the effect and the ability to demonstrate that mechanism by a controlled experiment.

In the case of vaccinations, they were widely used long before we understood the mechanism for their effect. Small-pox variolation proceeded the germ theory of medicine by more than a hundred years.

An example of understanding the mechanism in the case of vaccines is oral polio vaccine (OPV). Is its known to have the ability to revert to a form that can achieve neurological infection and cause paralysis.
http://jvi.asm.org/content/78/24/13512.long

This from NRDC with confirmation from EPA

of genetic issues...

If Autism is one thing, I will eat my hat.

which may not even have the same cause(s).