new theory on cause of autism...mixed feelings on this

Parent Cafe
41

A former next-door neighbor was an anti-vaxxer (also anti-schooler, so she homeschooled). She had a theory that all the vaccinations kids get actually hinder their immune systems. Her own family defied that, because several of her children had allergies, one severely (also believe she had asthma). (And of course her family benefited from herd immunity, thanks to the rest of us who got our kids the required vaccinations.)

But, I sometimes wonder if there isn’t something to the theory that those who’ve never had some illnesses never develop their immune systems to the max. I had measles, German measles, mumps and chicken pox. Some of my children had chickenpox, and one was young enough to get the (at that time) new vaccine. They were all vaccinated against the other diseases. Is my immunity from actually having had the diseases better than they got from the vaccines?

And then we have all the premies that are being saved today that wouldn’t have been 20, 30+ years ago. Do premies have a greater incidence of asthma, allergies, etc.?

42

My cousin with Down Syndrome was quite successfully mainstreamed into public schools back in the early 60s. He graduated from high school in the 70s, and was recently inducted into that high schools hall of fame.

He participated in Special Olympics all of his childhood up until his early 20s. There were enough children with Down Syndrome back then to have quite the Special Olympic events, ranging from local to national competitions. I know celebrities were often helping at those competitions. He had a picture with Loretta Swit when she was at the height of her fame in MASH.

43

back to the main idea which is that I hope that people who are in need of drugs like prozac,zoloft,lexapro etc… are not going to be scared off by this study (which is kind of weak)
even men who do not get pregnant can see something like this and if they are on the fence not take a drug they can benefit from! mental illness is still hard for many people to try and seek help for and between their own feelings of being “weak” and ignorant family and friends it can be an extra long journey to get to where they need to be. (pregnant woman of course are in a very unique situation and must be treated in a different manner if the ob/gyn thinks it is needed)

44

“And then we have all the premies that are being saved today that wouldn’t have been 20, 30+ years ago. Do premies have a greater incidence of asthma, allergies, etc.?”

I have 2 premies, who wouldn’t have been saved 10 years prior to their birth. I don’t know if they have a greater incidence of asthma / allergies, etc. Mine are (THANK THE LORD) healthy physically. Maybe not mentally, but that’s a function of their parents, not premie status :slight_smile: Anyway, the things that premies are at risk for are a whole different set of things IMO - brain bleeds, cardiac issues, etc.

45

“It is difficult to imagine these institutions when they no longer exist. Middle and upper middle class families in my suburban childhood usually arranged for their very severely disabled children to be raised in that kind of institution.”

My mom was a social worker for the mentally and physically handicapped for over 40 years. She worked in one of the state institutions and then continued once they moved them to group homes. It wasn’t just middle and upper class families that put their kids there. Mom used to take me to visit her “clients” when I was a kid so that they interaction with people outside of the there. Also she thought it was good for me too. Anyway there were people that really didn’t need to be there and could have functioned just fine with some help from their families and others that were so handicapped that they needed round the clock care. Some parents and families came to visit their kids on a regular basis and others never came. In some ways it reminds me of nursing homes. I think that at least from what I could see back then the people who worked there cared about the people living there and were doing the best they could with what they knew at that time.

46

Saying there is a “cause of autism” is the same as saying there is a “cause for cancer”. There are many types of autism and many types of cancer. My autistic son is likely going to college, if not, he’ll attend a trade school, maybe get married and have kids some day.

My autistic nephew will never date or live without adult supervision. It is a blessing that he can use the bathroom appropriately, and at age 20, he still will occasionally take off his clothes in front of others.

There are some very interesting stories about how it paid to get the autism diagnosis widened tremendously. To the point that my nephew would not have even fit the definition of autism because he can self-care to some extent. And now my son does, though he will hopefully live a “normal” life.

Medications have side effects. Yes, vaccines have side effects as well. But we need to look at individual cases and stop lumping kids together.

I was sickened to hear this woman say that she mourns what her children “could have been without autism”. What if her kids had a terminal illness? What if they had any of the myriad of much worse developmental delays?

http://www.wnyc.org/story/autism-death-sex-money/

" “I have sacrificed a huge part of who I am—given up my career, gone broke, accepted social isolation,” she wrote. “If someone had told me this is what it would be like, I never would have had kids.” "

How pathetic.

Let’s all say this together:

“You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.”

47

rhanco. I don’t think we can be too hard on people who have challenging children. This is another quote from this mother.

“When Diane spoke with us from her home in North Carolina, she told us about how raising her boys has made her “devoutly atheist,” about how her marriage has changed since the kids’ diagnosis, and about how she can both love her sons deeply and mourn the children she never met.”

She is being brutally honest.

I have a kid who will never get pregnant. It’s too risky for her and any child growing within. So she chooses not to take the risk. This is not pathetic.

The woman you mention loves her kids.

48

sax…I agree with you --we should never judge people for how they feel…walk a mile in another mans shoes.as long as those people do no harm to others or themselves…people have many reactions to what hand life deals them.

49

Maybe they weren’t popular here, but they have a long history of use in cuisines from other parts of the world, including West Africa and Southeast Asia.

50

When you read biographies, you often read about people who were “sickly” as a child. In a lot of cases, that probably means that they had asthma. That’s similar to Pizzagirl’s mention of people from previous generations being called “slow”, which was likely some form of autism or at least something that we’d have a formal diagnosis for now.

51

"I was sickened to hear this woman say that she mourns what her children “could have been without autism”. What if her kids had a terminal illness? What if they had any of the myriad of much worse developmental delays?

http://www.wnyc.org/story/autism-death-sex-money/

" “I have sacrificed a huge part of who I am—given up my career, gone broke, accepted social isolation,” she wrote. “If someone had told me this is what it would be like, I never would have had kids.” "

How pathetic."

I disagree. She’s being honest. It’s a hard life. I have a friend who has a 23 yo D who just graduated Yale and is Miss Accomplishment – and a 20 yo S who is non-verbal, not toilet trained, cannot be left alone, and requires lifelong care. It’s a horrible life. People in those situations need to be able to say it’s horrible.

52

A friend of mine once told me her father “didn’t believe in allergies”. I responded that my parents didn’t have that option as they almost lost my oldest sibling 60+ years ago because of severe food allergies. My mother is 82 and has had asthma all of her life.

I guess we were ahead of the curve.

53

“That’s similar to Pizzagirl’s mention of people from previous generations being called “slow”, which was likely some form of autism or at least something that we’d have a formal diagnosis for now.”

I think there is no question that today my uncle would have been diagnosed as mentally retarded, learning disabled, whatever. I don’t think he’s autistic / Asperger’s - his social skills are perfectly fine. But today, he would have been in special classrooms and had a lot more support. He just sort of fell through the cracks 60 years ago and drifted through life.

54

“Science magazine has a new story up that says the study about SSRIs did not correct for the increased chance of a mom with a disease that leads her to take SSRIs having a child with ASD.”

That’s very typical of these “association” studies. Some population is studied and they find a statistical link between a disease and some drug or food or demographic factor. And the scientists are usually careful to state only that there was an “association” between X and Y and not a cause and effect. But the resulting news story almost always blares out a big headline that “X CAUSES Y!!”, when actually X and Y could both be caused by some other factor that was not controlled for in the study. In this case the severity of the depression that the mothers were taking the SSRIs for. (If a cause and effect is plausible the scientists may actually believe it to be the case, but the typical correlation statistical methods will not permit them to claim it.)

Beyond that, since statistical significance is arbitrarily defined as a p value of 0.05 or less, that means that as high as 5% of the time these observed associations are merely due to random chance and are not even a real association, much less a cause and effect.

55

Also: when I was growing up back in the 50s and 60s I never heard of a single case of peanut allergies. Not one. But I knew several kids with asthma, including my own brother - although his asthma was triggered only by cats. He could walk into a house where a cat lived and would start gasping and wheezing within a few minutes, even though no cat nor any sign of a cat was anywhere in sight at the time.

56

I’ll be blunt. In the past, a lot of these kids (peanut allergy, asthma, cystic fibrosis, etc.) died young and rarely made it to their teens much less adult hood. Our advances in medicine, knowledge, etc have allow these kids to live longer.

I know when I look at old family photos of my own family or people I have met, the majority will mention a child or two who died young.

57

^ Absolutely.
Most children who have an allergy will have it present as a toddler. If they die then, welp, of course you’re not going to remember them in schools- ** they never made it to school.** I mean, look at the EpiPen- arguably the best thing that’s ever happened to those with severe allergies… it wasn’t even invented until the 80s.

(Also, studies have shown that people WAY over report allergies. So, yes, self-reported allergies are up but I don’t actually know of any studies which say actual allergies are on the increase. I’m open to those studies though.)

58

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this woman’s feelings. Just because other people have more severe problems doesn’t mean that your problems, or those of your family members, are inconsequential.

59

Here’s another article saying that the study in JAMA is overblown.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2015/12/antidepressants_in_pregnancy_probably_do_not_cause_autism.html

60

" I disagree. She’s being honest. It’s a hard life. I have a friend who has a 23 yo D who just graduated Yale and is Miss Accomplishment – and a 20 yo S who is non-verbal, not toilet trained, cannot be left alone, and requires lifelong care. It’s a horrible life. People in those situations need to be able to say it’s horrible."

Mourning a living child as if they were dead is horrible. An autistic child is not horrible. She can be honest all she wants, and I can disagree with her mourning a living child who will likely live through the next day.

Life is not a contest. A non-verbal child who requires lifelong care isn’t a source of horror. Giving birth to an anencepahlic baby is much worse. To think that comparing a child with autism with “mourning” a child with zero future, like an anencephalic or other child would have, well, that shows a serious lack of education or lack of empathy. A future of having even one smile is different than death, or being bed-ridden and non-responsive.

Ever hear of the book “Wonder”? The kid has a facial defect and has had many surgeries, and has missed a lot of school. Well, look up the medical condition on the Internet, and see pictures of children with the real disorder, not the fictional cases. I am not listing the condition here because if anyone is truly interested, they can look it up and find out more. The photo of one of the children is unbelievable that they survived birth, and there was nothing to do but let the poor thing pass away. (and to the topic at hand, some of those cases are thought to be related to prescription or illegal drugs).

Your counselor, your religious leader, your psychiatrist, your best friend, whoever you go to for help with dealing with day to day tragedies is the one to hear that you mourn your children so you can work through those feelings. I really feel that the story was a car crash, and the comments of many in the same or worse situations bear out that no matter what one’s lot in life, if one has the grace of having living children who have even a small degree of autonomy, as she clearly lists her children have, they need to look on the positive side for their children.

She needs significant help. And it is being projected as normal, yet many many MANY of us know that if we feel what she does, essentially PTSD, we would need to seek professional help and not chalk up near psychosis to “valid feelings”. I am not judging her, I am saying that my feelings are that her feelings indicate a need for professional help, NOT for sympathy.

Back to the topic at hand: Life is a cost-benefit analysis. If maintaining the health of the mother outweighs a small risk of birth defects, then the health of the mother wins. If the mother dies, her pregnancy will end. There are prescription drugs on the market with known and clear birth defects associated, and people still take the risk to have a child that they won’t be “one of the few”.

http://www.webmd.com/epilepsy/news/20100609/birth-defects-linked-valproic-acid

Autism isn’t a death sentence, and certainly there are other forms of developmental let alone physical disabilities that can be much worse. My nephew will never live on his own, and there is a real danger he will hurt himself or others. My brother lives with that but he and his wife aren’t putting on sackclothes and ashes, they are making legal arrangements so he will be cared for after their passing, they are making sure he has money to live on but receives proper government benefits. They bring him to events and in their case, they are lucky that he responds well to bribery like a 5 year old would (he is 20).

And by the way, pot use by the father is linked to genetic defects in sperm which may lead to disability in the child:
http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2012/06/24/Sperm-of-smoking-dads-can-hurt-child-DNA/UPI-53121340570130/