Autism Street

INSAR’s annual International Meeting For Autism Research (IMFAR) is convening in Philadelphia next week (May 20-22).

Thanks, in part, to a generous travel grant from the Autism Science Foundation, I’ll have the opportunity to attend - and of course I’ll be blogging about it over at LBRB.

For the most part, I plan to write about research, projects, researchers themselves, or talks that I find interesting and attain sufficient understanding, but I’ll also be sharing a little with LBRB readers, about the overall IMFAR experience upon my return. I’m also looking forward to attending the Autism Science Foundation’s “Science and Sandwiches” where plans for this IMFAR lunchtime edition include presentations “from six ASF-funded pre-doctoral students who will describe their new research projects”.

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Yep, I’m shilling for LBRB. The truth is, that I’m slammin’ busy at work these days (a very good problem to have). I’ll simply have to settle for pointing interested readers to some fresh reading - a couple of posts up from Sullivan, and one from yours truly.

Clinical trial of Donepezil for improving REM sleep in autistic children

Sullivan discusses his thoughts about a new clinical trial aimed at scientifically evaluating whether or not  donepezil can increase REM sleep in autistic children (possibly leading to improved cognition).

Trine Tsouderos and Patricia Callahan honored by the Association of Health Care Journalists for autism series

Chicago Tribune journalists, Trine Tsouderos and Patricia Callahan, were awarded first place by the Association of Health Care Journalists for their autism series Dubious Medicine. Sullivan (via Autism News Beat) brings you the details.

Does The NIH Want To Study Jenny McCarthy’s Son?

A new clinical study from the NIH wants to look at “recovered” autistic kids. Jenny McCarthy has complained on more than one occasion that no health authority seems to want to know how she “cured” her son. That looks to be a thing of the past now. Will Jenny step up to the plate and participate? Is she spreading the word to her Generation Rescue Followers?

Over at the AoA blog, Dan Olmsted is stil ranting about the Andrew Wakefield saga. This time it’s about some of the mainstream media’s coverage of the Lancet retraction. The Wakefield Inquisition: Case Series Insanity

I’m not going to bother trying to explain to Dan why he’s attacking a straw man - a likely false position of the Lancet that the retraction of Wakefield’s 1998 Lancet paper is grounded in statistical error due to “selection bias”. Instead, I’m simply going to present a few selected quotes from Olmsted’s piece, evidence from a document he states should have been read, and ask him to reconcile the contradiction (without resorting to conspiracy theory).

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Unless you live in a cave, you’re probably well aware of the GMC findings against Andrew Wakefield, the primary author of the 1998 Lancet paper that claimed to study children who were reffered to a hospital’s pediatric GI department with specific behavioral and GI sypmtoms following vaccination with the MMR. Among many ethical problems, by now you’re probably aware that the GMC concluded that the children in the 1998 study were not all referred, nor did they all have the GI symptoms as claimed in the paper. There was a partial retraction by several of the co-authors years ago, but the paper was officially retracted by the Lancet on February 2nd this year.

You’re probably also aware that the journal Neurotoxicology withdrew, what is now to many, Hewitson-Wakefield’s infamous “monkey study“.

Finally, it’s been reported that Andrew Wakefield no longer calls Thoughtful House his workplace.

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks for those who’ve been following news about Andrew Wakefield, and to say the least, it doesn’t look good for Wakefield.  Probably interesting to at least some, was the relative lack of any public statement amidst recent events, by Wakefield (or Thoughtful House, until very recently, and indirectly at that). Wakefield has seemed to remain pretty much silent. But, the silence is apparently over.

Where did Wakefield make what appears to be his first public statement in a couple of weeks? At the AoA Blog, in an interview with Dan Olmsted.

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Do yourself a huge favor, and invest the 22 minutes to watch and listen to this

Ted Talk by Aimee Mullins

about facing adversity. Carefully consider her message, and the potential impact of adaptation - you might just gain new perspective on “disability” along the way too.

My favorite quotes from the talk:

“We have to make sure that we don’t put the first brick in a wall that will acutally disable someone. Perhaps the existing model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself.”

“I think the greatest adversity that we’ve created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. Who’s normal? There is no normal. There’s common. There’s typical.”

What were yours?

There’s an interesting discussion going on.

By now, many are aware of the proposed changes the DSM for autism that will subsume Asperger’s and PDD-NOS.

Some have expressed the view that this is a good thing, yet others seem to feign agreement while also expressing some degree of contempt.

Amidst the apparent concerns of a few, there are voices focused on the ethical and human rights implications of opposing the DSM changes. Particularly, please read Angry Aspies, Please Go Away by Bev over at Square 8.

On a side note: I know Bev to be a person who diligently promotes acceptance and human rights for all autistic people, and she’s apparently an early adopter of the pending new definition - she’s already changed the title of her blog and description of its purpose (it used to be Asperger Square 8).

If you’re interested in a little more background, check out Conversations by ABFH over at Whose Planet Is It Anyway?.

In addition to Bev and ABFH’s places, more discussion can be found over at Left Brain Right Brain, where Bev’s post also caught Kev’s eye. While I was perusing the comments at LBRB, this comment from Daedalus2u stood out. It’s empathetic at first and thoughtful throughout, but if you ask me, it succinctly points out what is right in this whole thing as a conclusion.

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If there’s one thing typical of anti-vaccination trolls on the internet, it’s that they are fairly predictable. Amidst tons of logical fallacies, they’ll persistently ignore evidence, cite things that don’t say what they think they say, provide supporting information in the form of links to conspiracy theory stories, repeat things that have already been pointed out as incorrect, and pretty consistently ask for proof of a negative wherever they can. In addition to all that usual fare, it’s fairly common, that they’ll jump right into something about “evil toxins” when advocating against vaccination. A perfect example of this is persistent use of what I’ll call “The EPA Mercury Limit” canard.

In a recent article by Trine Tsouderos at the Chicago Tribune, the anti-vaccination brigade infested the comments like fleas. There was relatively little actual commentary on the article itself, the intersting points it raised, or the subject of the article - Boyd Haley’s new “dietary ingredient“ - OSR, that’s apparently being given to autistic children by parents who believe their childrens’ autism diagnoses are the result of some condition that is mecury-induced. Instead, anti-vaccine commenters turn the dialogue to vaccines, pharmaceutical industry conspiracy, and seem to spend more time attempting to appeal to fear than anything else.

One of the pervasive appeals to fear from vaccine rejectors is of course mercury in flu shots. They have to bring up flu shots most of the time, because they know (or should know) that mercury (ethylmercury specifically, present in the preservative Thimerosal, in multi-dose vials of injectable flu vaccines) has essentially been removed from the routine childhood vaccines that used to contain it. It’s been greatly reduced, or has been pretty much gone for seven or eight years now. The “Flu shots” is pretty much all they’ve got.

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