Reply to 1/20 children in Northern Ireland have autism

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Reply to "1/20 children in Northern Ireland have autism"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s going to get worse. I am a school psychologist and when I look at the younger siblings of students at the school I am at really worried about how many if them are in strollers staring at screens. Phones and tablets are an effective and cheap babysitter. It’s a low income school where kids don’t have the opportunity to get signed up for activities where they interact.

If there are kids on the spectrum who are borderline with a lot of socialization with parents, siblings, friends, quality pre-schools, attending story times, etc. they might not ever have enough symptoms to have issues or get diagnosed. Now add COVID lock down to that mix where kids didn’t socialize at all for a year not even with cousins. We are seeing kids who are coming in to K with lower language and socialization skills across the board. It’s really, really concerning. [/quote]

I do NOT think though that you can screen time your way into autism. you can screen time your way into poor socialization, but not into the fundamental brain differences, visible on MRIs, that exist in the brains of true autistic individuals from birth. [/quote]

That’s not how autism is currently diagnosed. If you don’t have a chance to socialized and have experiences using language and instead are staring down at screens almost all your waking hours then when given tasks in the ADOS-2 you are not going to do well. [/quote]

researchers are actually well on their way to using brain imaging studies to dx autism. they have already been using them to ascertain that there are in fact 4 distinct subtypes of asd, each with very different neuro mechanisms.

https://www.bbrfoundation.org/content/four-subtypes-autism-spectrum-disorder-are-distinguished-helping-explain-individual[/quote]

lol no, no such thing. it’s well known that brain imaging is a wild goose chase. https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/brain-imaging-do-over-offers-clues-to-fields-replication-crisis/[/quote]

That’s… not at all the takeaway of that article. Did you read it? [/quote]

If you think that article shows brain imaging is “well on its way” to anything useful … well [/quote]

Sorry but I think you are being slow here. 
Autism never was one single thing. The idea of ‘autism’ is a construct we made up bc we couldn’t think of anything better/ didn’t know better yet. The purpose of mris in autism research is to find out what brain differences correlate to what behavioral difference. Them not finding one singular autism mri marker is the whole point. Of course it isn’t surprising there isn’t one. Of course ‘autism’ isn’t just one thing. The whole point of all this is to find out what all these things actually are and then solve for the subjectivity and random bs and actually use science [/quote]

That’s all interesting and will soak up research funding, but it will not produce anything translational to actually help people. [/quote]

Aside from the fact that the study you shared was only looking at one specific brain difference among many many many they are researching as markers for all kinds of asd traits, do you honestly think this is as good as it’s going to get? If you think in 100 years, we’ll still diagnose neurodiversity with a human in a room essentially guessing you are crazy (and also why you seem to want that to be the outcome is bewildering) 
We are in the infancy of our understanding of all this and we are totally failing right now. I for one will celebrate a time where this gets a hell of a lot better [/quote]

I think we are throwing scarce research dollars into areas that give professionals career advancement but will never result in any therepeutic benefit. This is unfortunately how a lot of medical research goes - and it’s even worse for social science research that cannot be conducted through a RCT. Just look into the history of Alzheimers research.

Taking a step back, a lot of this research isn’t intended to help people with autism at all. It’s intended to demonstrate how they are different, an oddity of human development, not how they can be helped. All geared towards a deficiency model.

Finally, autism is a social-communication disorder. It is *always* going to be diagnosed with reference to clinical impairment and symptoms, not biomarkers.

To the extent you are bullish on biomarkers, what do you think they will be used for? Prenatal diagnosis and abortion of autistic fetuses. If I’m wrong and we develop good biomarkers, then we will abort all of our future engineers, most creative artists, and out of the box thinkers. [/quote]

You mean the Alzheimer’s research that’s yielded new drugs that inhibit the build up of specific plaques in the brain that they uncovered as a mechanism for Alzheimer’s using…. Research? 
I am bullish on brain scans yielding definitive information about the changes in the brain that lead to neurodiversity leading to greater understanding of its constituent parts and sub categories, leading to more targeted and effective therapies and drugs. You can’t create a drug without first knowing what you are solving for. If mris show that people with greater proclivity towards repetitive behavior have overactivity in a certain area then that’s the mechanism scientists need to target with therapies. 
I honestly can’t understand why you need this to be explained [/quote]

Yes exactly - the Alzheimer’s research that wasted decades of time & money and produced zero results and a major scandal about faked data and approval of very expensive but useless drugs.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alzheimers-inc-when-a-hypothesis-becomes-too-big-to-fail/?amp=true

You seem pretty naive about the state of biomedical research. That’s a nice just-so story that “fMRIs will show an overactive brain region that can be targeted with medication and therapies!” But far from what anyone can reasonably expect to happen. 
[/quote]

Actually I’m a journalist who covers health. 
And don’t dredge up a 2021 article then tell someone they are ill informed. Cursory google news search shows the fda just approved a drug based on the same mechanism. But apparently medical research is a total waste of time [/quote]

You’re a health journalist and don’t know about the major controversy surrounding Aduhelm and the amyloid hypothesis? What kind of journalism do you do - reprint university and drug company press releases? [/quote]

Dude - I cover controversies in healthcare (and beyond) every day. That is the nature of news. It doesn’t mean science should stop. 
Oye. [/quote]

Nobody said science should stop. I said science should focus on therapies instead of wasting time on research that will likely never result in any benefits. And moreover I expect a supposed health journalist of all people to be familiar with the replication crisis, short comings of fMRI, and the search for biomarkers. Anyone who credulously repeats “we will identify the autistic brain through imaging and create targeted treatment!” has falled for a press release pitch. [/quote]

DP.  We participate in longtudinal research at NIH.  Pre-COVID, my DS went every year for a re-evaluation and an MRI.  I'm glad they're not soley focusing on therapies.  While insights may be slow in coming, it's all part of understanding the brain and functioning.  I have no idea if autism could ever be diagnosed using brain imaging and don't care if it never can be. This research may not help my kid directly but it's likely to contribute to better understanding his disorder as well as other disorders.  [/quote]

I’m glad it gives you hope. But how much better would it be if they actually delivered evidence-based therapies to your kid and studied how well they worked. [/quote]

It's not hope. It's science. It's statistically likely that research into the organic causes and structure of a disorder will lead to improved understanding and treatment of the disorder. [/quote]

the naivety here is breathtaking.

[/quote]

It’s ‘breathtakingly naive’ to think that neuroscience will advance? 
That seems like a reach. [/quote]

To believe that there is some kind of manifest destiny that garbage, non-replicable  fMRI studies (aka neuroscience) will lead to a cure for autism … yes that is naive and uninformed. [/quote]

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