Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article mostly makes me shake my head, but it does have some merit. Just not the merit they're crossing their fingers and praying it has.
A perennial concern in some autism circles is trying to make autism into a medical diagnosis. To that end, millions of dollars have been poured into trying to find biomarkers, or biologically testable differences. The kind of things that blood tests would pick up, so you could just give the person a blood test and then rubber stamp the person autistic or not based on the results.
...Naturally it isn't even slightly that simple. Autism is not really in your biology, it is your neurology: your brain, not your body. In addition, there are a lot of factors that go into whether someone is autistic or not. The increase in the autistic population is not a question of heavy metals or flame retardants getting into our bodies, so much as it is the culmination of those plus air pollution, degenerating systemic nutrition and diets, a better understanding of neurology and what autism can look like, and even genetics.
Genetics. As it turns out, autistic traits have been in the human genome for a long time. Autism itself may have been a survival mechanism, gifting humanity with specialists in valuable skills (such as reading the stars in order to navigate by boat).
The article stresses the "over 50%" success rate in detecting autistic people. You know what else has about that success rate? Flipping a coin. This is not a good test of whether someone is autistic or not. Such is their desperation to find a medical test to diagnose a neurological difference, that 53% becomes something to be boasted about. Yikes.
Coin flip aside, this isn't a completely merit-less study. You see, autistic people come with a variety of biologically unusual features. It varies on the person, with under- and over-sensitivity to sights, sounds, smells, and even touch. Some autistic people do poorly unless they're on gluten-free, dairy-free diets. Some of us have unusual food allergies, or other amped up allergies (like my allergy to the algae that grows in my back pond...).
If the researchers here have come up with categories of biomarkers, those categories could be used to figure out what diets, allergies, and sensory issues might go along with those categories. Basically, blood tests could be used to improve autistic lives without years of painstaking arguments with doctors, subjective reports, disbelieving specialists, etc.
What we need now in autism research is not more diagnostic tools, but ways to improve existing autistic lives. Maybe someday researchers will actually listen to us on that point...
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
Today's article mostly makes me shake my head, but it does have some merit. Just not the merit they're crossing their fingers and praying it has.
A perennial concern in some autism circles is trying to make autism into a medical diagnosis. To that end, millions of dollars have been poured into trying to find biomarkers, or biologically testable differences. The kind of things that blood tests would pick up, so you could just give the person a blood test and then rubber stamp the person autistic or not based on the results.
...Naturally it isn't even slightly that simple. Autism is not really in your biology, it is your neurology: your brain, not your body. In addition, there are a lot of factors that go into whether someone is autistic or not. The increase in the autistic population is not a question of heavy metals or flame retardants getting into our bodies, so much as it is the culmination of those plus air pollution, degenerating systemic nutrition and diets, a better understanding of neurology and what autism can look like, and even genetics.
Genetics. As it turns out, autistic traits have been in the human genome for a long time. Autism itself may have been a survival mechanism, gifting humanity with specialists in valuable skills (such as reading the stars in order to navigate by boat).
The article stresses the "over 50%" success rate in detecting autistic people. You know what else has about that success rate? Flipping a coin. This is not a good test of whether someone is autistic or not. Such is their desperation to find a medical test to diagnose a neurological difference, that 53% becomes something to be boasted about. Yikes.
Coin flip aside, this isn't a completely merit-less study. You see, autistic people come with a variety of biologically unusual features. It varies on the person, with under- and over-sensitivity to sights, sounds, smells, and even touch. Some autistic people do poorly unless they're on gluten-free, dairy-free diets. Some of us have unusual food allergies, or other amped up allergies (like my allergy to the algae that grows in my back pond...).
If the researchers here have come up with categories of biomarkers, those categories could be used to figure out what diets, allergies, and sensory issues might go along with those categories. Basically, blood tests could be used to improve autistic lives without years of painstaking arguments with doctors, subjective reports, disbelieving specialists, etc.
What we need now in autism research is not more diagnostic tools, but ways to improve existing autistic lives. Maybe someday researchers will actually listen to us on that point...
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
No comments:
Post a Comment