“If it seems like most of the people you know with autism are 22 or younger, that’s because most people diagnosed with autism were born after 1987.”

I suppose Kirby inadvertently neglected to summarize it this way: “If it seems like most of the people you know with autism are 22 or younger, that’s because most people diagnosed with autism were born after [the DSM-III-R was published in] 1987.”

“If it seems like most of the people you know with autism are 22 or younger, that’s because most people diagnosed with autism were born after 1987.”

David Kirby worded that pretty carefully, BTW, and I don’t think many people would disagree with it. (Although, technically, we don’t really know if autistic adults have gotten diagnoses en masse. It’s likely most haven’t.)

“If it seems like most of the people you know with autism are 22 or younger, that’s because most people diagnosed with autism were born after 1987.”

My mother,has a lifelong history of similar GI disease,as well.So do a lot of the mothers of children who supposedly “became autistic” after the MMR vaccines,a fact that is often overlooked.

The problem is,that,most of the research into GI disease in autism has been done by people with a well defined antivaccine agenda,and seem to view their studies as a way to prove this,other than a few exceptions like Tim Buie,at Massachusettes General,who clearly see GI disease in autism as a real problem unrelated to vaccines.Dr.Buie,unlike Thoughtful House,has included autistics over the age of 40 in his studies.

The Krigsman study is just more pseudoscience has come out of TH to prove the same old vaccines cause GI disease BS.One might have hoped there would have been some sort of backlash,against anybody associated with TH from publishing any more such “studies”,and most reputable journals would not have allowed this,but this may not be the case.

“sheldon101
April 23rd, 2010
02:16:58
And whenever any tells me how ethical Wakefield and the others were, consider this: They had to pick kids they did not think had Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis because it was a minor amount of inflammation they were looking for. Of the 12 kids, after the tests, none of them were diagnosed as having Crohn’s or UC.”

Or other medical conditions in addition to GI disease for that matter,and that may be important.

I am finally getting the workup I should have gotten many years ago,and my new doctor has many issues on the table to try and figure out the cause of my GI disease.Unlike Wakefield,Krigsman, (Or maybe even someone like Dr.Buie,I don’t know.)This doctor has put my autism completely aside,and is looking at it in the context of my other medical problems.He is looking at my lifelong history of lung infection,and is wondering if I don’t have either cystic fibrosis,or gastrointestinal tuberculosis,secondary to an undiagnosed primary immune disease.These are the first two of many things I will be tested for.The other hospital I went to was not willing to see me as anything other than someone with an autism,or psychiatric diagnosis,first and foremost,and this may be a big problem here.

The TB theory is unrealistic,by the way.

If we can find the cause of the GI disease in my family,it is very likely this might lead us to the cause in everyone,but to prove this exists,you do need to look beyond those who had the MMR vaccines.GI disease,definitely “autistic enterocolitis” a la Wakefield ? I don’t think so.

The same is true for Krigsman’s study of 143 consecutive colonoscopies of autistic kids—- none of them had Crohn’s or UC.

Just to show that there are limits, Wakefield has been dropped from the editorial board of Autism Insights. Krigsman is still on the board.

it would be amazing if no autistics had GI issues. Autism isn’t a shield for GI concerns.

What I find interesting is that Dr. Wakefield and his supporters don’t use Hornig et al. as one of their references. There are a number (25, I think) if kids with autism and GI disorders serious enough to warrant colenoscopies.

There is even a child with a positive test for measles virus. Two, actually, one control and one autistic kid. Both also had inflammation—but not of the sort that Dr. Wakefield claims is so common.

Unfortunately Hornig et al. don’t go into the details of the GI complaints of the children in their study.

But,

Most of you already know the background: Wakefield suggested that inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), Crohn’s disease, and ulcerative colitis were caused by chronic infection with measles virus—and, of course, because the nonspecific reagents he used to test for measles virus consistently produced false-positive reactions, Wakefield was repeatedly wrong. Then he took this a step further: “Following an incomplete immune response to an attenuated virus challenge early in life, or indeed less often a wild type infection, measles virus collects in the wall of the gut . . . [ASD] in children is associated with measles, mumps and rubella exercises (MMR) vaccination. . . [and produces] lesions in the gut indicative of the problems which arise in IBD and Crohn’s disease.” Clearly, Wakefield believed that ASD was related not merely to gastrointestinal problems in children with ASD, but to gastrointestinal problems that arose as a specific consequence of a chronic inflammatory response to chronic infection with an attenuated (vaccine) strain of the measles virus. [From Wakefield’s patent application available at http://briandeer.com/wakefield/vaccine-patent.htm Again, as Bustin and others have demonstrated, Wakefield was tripped up by the false-positive reactions produced in his notably nonspecific tests.

Thus, Wakefield’s hypothesis was that chronic inflammation due to chronic measles infection was the instrument responsible for ASD: the measles-induced inflammation lead to increased permeability of the gut wall such that unspecified dietary toxicants (“neurotoxic opiod peptides”) moved towards the brain, crossed the blood-brain barrier, and produced the symptoms of ASD. [http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120709186/PDFSTART] Yet again, Wakefield was wrong.

So what of it if some individuals with ASD do have GI issues? Clearly, the ONLY forms of GI disturbance that would be consistent with Wakefield’s idea would be those which arise from chronic infection with measles virus, and there’s simply no reason to believe that such infections are a factor in ASD. It doesn’t matter how many individuals with ASD have GI problems—Wakefield’s still wrong.