...does not cause autism. That's it.
I had been neglecting to read Cremieux Recueil, one of my favorite stats guys. But I was cued to check out his latest on the HHS dropping their declarations of what causes autism. It's just madness. There is decades of abundant evidence that there is no connection, and we can go back and relook at the data old and new with fresh eyes and see the same thing. Vaccinations do not cause autism. This nonsense is already causing the reemergence of measles and it's just starting. Ann Althouse is taking a "you made your bed" point-of-view that this is an opportunity to demonstrate Tylenol safety, because we are going to have tremendous before-and-after numbers with many participants. I think that is overly-optimistic. They are already ignoring clear information now, more information will not change their minds.
Death will change other people's minds. Eventually.
Update: Douglas2's objection noted. And ad hominim is a bad sign, yes. Cremieux's belief is that the increase in diagnoses follows from increased funding to treat that diagnosis, something cynics have been suggesting for at least a decade. I would put it differently. There would not be a clamoring to fund for ASD diagnoses if there were not something happening at ground level. The increase in 25% in a year likely includes some pent up demand, and some shifting of special needs children to slots where there is money to treat them. But the money does create demand. The beds at my acute hospital were very few and very expensive. If we opened a new unit of 24 beds, it would be about 6 months of sighing with relief before we were bursting at the seams again with a waiting list just as long.
With all that said, the choropleth map below does seem to fit with the idea that one year your kid had "autistic traits," and the next was diagnosed with autism. That is not a cause of autism, but a cause of society's response to the symptoms. Put part of the reason we are having a panicked search for causes, even minor and indirect ones, is that there seems to be so much more of it. We notice the symptoms more, it seems different from what we remember from our own childhoods, and we learn that there is significant genetic influence, which we can't fix. So we look for things to blame that we might have some control over.
Genetics cause autism.
ReplyDeleteI wrote to my very conservative family employed by DOD on February 25, 2025 that no matter they thought of Musk's "email reports" that Elon was a flash in the pan and would not be a problem for long, whereas RFK would do far more and longer lasting damage. He is Trump's biggest mistake.
ReplyDeleteYour statement "There is decades of abundant evidence that there is no connection" is too strong. What is being debated in the scientific literature is not whether there is any association, but if there is causation.
ReplyDelete_IF_ the effect disappears with proper controls, as the one study using partly the Sweden prescription register does, that would be pretty strong evidence against causation, but I'm not yet finding Cremieux's criticism of the criticism of that study persuasive. The use of ad hominum accusing the Harvard guy of of motivated reasoning is a red-flag to me.
One side is full of voices crying out in the wilderness saying "shouldn't we mention this to pregnant women?" "We _should_ mention this to pregnant women!" (Much like many of us would warn under 26ers about the correlation between cannabis use and e.g. bipolar-disorders before recent research).
The other side is saying "No, unless we see causation we shouldn't make a thing of it, because mothers will overreact and not use it when it is really warranted".
I haven't been closely following the studies finding correlations with this or that. I do know that no one has come up with any convincing theory of causation. We're still flying blind.
ReplyDeleteGenetics has a lot of evidence for being a lot of the cause, and maybe even all of it.
ReplyDeleteI'll just throw this out there... how about other genetic diseases undiagnosed at an early age? For example, celiac... would extreme bouts of pain possibly elicit abnormal behaviors and reactions to unexpected stimuli? No, no... it's just colic.
ReplyDeleteDonna, thank you for the reminder. When I worked on one of the top neuropsych units in the country with very damaged, often poorly verbal adults, the internists and other general medical staff used to joke that they created about a third of the cures by discovering sources of pain (feet, teeth, digestion being prominent) that the patient was unable to articulate clearly but was shown to resolve the behavioral problems when treated. Such things are very possible.
ReplyDelete