pD- I read a lot about the history of scientist, and there is plenty of indicators of autism-like tendencies in major historical personalities. What I consider more significant is how contemporary society reacted to mental differences. I find this line about an early American paleontologist especially interesting: “The Indians considered him crazy, and therefore holy.”

It always amazes me though that the same people will take on opposing arguments eg. only rich kids are diagnosed, only poor kids are diagnosed, according to the point they want to prove.

Given two potentially equally valid positions the only equivocator in the case of judgement on a particular hypothesis is the bias or hunch of the judge, so as in everything it comes down to opinion rather than evidence.

However, there has to be a variable they missed, because a 6:1 relative risk would be painfully easy to pick up in the population – and we’re just not seeing that. On the other hand, the upper edge of the confidence interval is 0.52 (about 2:1), and that might be approaching the realm of possible.

My guess – and I said this when I made my “modest proposal” to study the vaccine-autism “connection” – is that the people who don’t vaccinate their kids may be those with autism in the family tree who have been made fearful of vaccines by the Ignorati. Thus, the “GOV” and “TM,TS” groups may have “poisoned the well” against their own hypothesis.

I’d love to know how much traction the “vaccines-cause-autism” (and especially the “MMR-causes-autism”) hypothesis has in Poland – I have no idea.

Prometheus

I suspect the simplest explanation here is some kind of “diagnosis” bias. In particular, it would not be surprising if quite a few kids with wealthier and otherwise more “respectable” parents are undiagnosed where poorer children with the same symptoms would be diagnosed.

I think you’ve got the bias the wrong way about there. Wealthier families are more likely to gain access to a full assessment of their child acting “odd”, and will seek it because in many districts a formal diagnosis opens up supported special education opportunities and extra considerations for formal examinations that make it more likely their child will eventually end up in a good college/university. Poorer children are likely to be all chucked into the ADHD blanket diagnosis and just dosed on Ritalin, which although it’s highly effective for a minority is unlikely to be the best medication for most of them, and is certainly not likely to be as effective as a proper special education program with a teacher trained in how to interact with not-neurotypical kids.

On the paper…did it list any inclusion or exclusion criteria, e.g., “family history of autism”? I’m just thinking that it would be rather odd and obviously potentially confounding to include siblings with and without autism.

Rich people aren’t crazy. Crazy with money is eccentric.

Hehe.

To go nearly completely off topic, a few years ago I read “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. It was a great read that I would recommend to anyone. Anyways, your quote reminded me of it, because, it turns out, a lot of the groundwork for things like geology, palentology, and other sciences were done by people who happened to be born rich and just a bit ‘eccentric’, who took a liking to a particular field and had the time and resources to poke around a lot. You might consider checking it out.

– pD

a quick skim of the paper indicates no. They don’t note if they were younger siblings. They do list a number of risk factors:

Other potential risk factors of autism (mother’s age, mother’s
education, gestation time, medication during pregnancy, perinatal
injury, and Apgar scale score) were examined and those that
appeared to be associated with autism (P ! 0.2) were carried
forward into multivariate models. The statistical significance was
defined as P ! 0.05. Statistical analyses were performed using
STATA 8.0.

It would seem odd for them to list those risk factors and ignore family history of autism.