autism screening?

[Heathcliffscathy]

really?

front page of guardian today

is there already a thread about this?, it's huge and very disturbing?

I'm here, soph. Just trying to digest it.

hi bubble

Sophable - there is a thread about it in the SN topic. I heard a news item on Radio 4 about it last week. I agree with you that it's disturbing and I was very alarmed by some of the comments made on the program.

It is very disturbing.

It is such a huge spectrum, for a start. The word 'linked' isn't reassuring.

yikes

I was going to start a thread about this but thought there must already be one? (Can't find one though, and I'm sure this isn't new news.)

It struck me that as far as I knew, the causes of autism hadn't been definitively pinpointed (ie genetic/environmental etc) so how could this test be meaningful?

Regardless of all the other issues...

What a hideous idea.

Autism is such a wide spectrum, that you couldn't possibly know whether the child would be high-functioning or at the more severe end of the spectrum. How on earth could you make a decision based on that? And more to the point, would doctors be encouraging women to terminate their pregnancies based on a positive result, even if the resulting child might be high-functioning?

I think it's very scary.

sounds potty

absolutely my thoughts fatti wrt nothing being definite about what autism is!!!

I read the Guardian report but tbh I couldn't see what in the report itself justified the big headline on the front page.

It didn't sound as if SBC's work went anywhere near to proving that high levels of male hormone were a definitive marker for autism.

you coudl argue there are differing abilities in downs children also,
i spose

It sounds like they are still quite a distance away from developing any sort of reliable test from the guardian article. As saying that high testosterone levels are associated with ASD traits is to my mind far too woolly to start off a screening program. Bear in mind they've not got a diagnostic blood test for autism in children.

Apart from the obvious ethical issues, I was also concerned by the BMA response in the last para of the article - suggesting that people ought to have amnio (which of course is not risk free) if drugs were developed which might counteract the effects of the testosterone.

how are they going to screen for it when they don't even fully understand what the hell it is?

yes, downs has a spectrum too. And yet 92% of women terminate babies with downs who are detected pre-natally.

I think that autism is something that scares people unnecessarily. A lot of people have absolutely no clue what autism is. At the higher end of the spectrum autism is really a difference rather than a disablity. Even those with learning difficulties can lead happy and productive lives.

It's probably to get people to have the MMR. Look, we tested your baby, and he doesn't have autism. Now give him this nice safe MMR, will ya?

SBC's work tends to relate to AS/HFA. He does think there's one cause (lack of theory of mind), but tbh I've never really seen any evidence than he knows much about severe autism at all. And almost everyone else is moving away from one cause and into subgroups etc.

I also dislike the value placed on AS and the total lack of value placed on the severe end of the spectrum. Makes me very uncomfortable. Especially considering that there is next to no research carried out on severe autism so there is actually bugger all known about it. A group that are already invisible. So lets just get rid of them

There was also news this week about environmental triggers of autism (from work done at the Uiversity of California Davis). Makes more sense imo to work on identifying the triggers rather than developing a search and destroy.

This work on testosterone etc has been around for years though. I remember it being mentioned when I was pregnant with ds2 (now 7) and he took part in a sibling study at the ARC last year on testosterone levels (well I assume that's what they were doing as they were measuring his finger length ratios).

actually that's a very interesting point.

If you had screening for autism (whatever the hell that might involve) which came back negative and your baby developed trates following the mmr, would that add more weight to the argument that there is a link? or would hospitals up and down the country be sued for wrongfully diagnosing a "normal" child.

And I seem to keep posting this tonight rather embarrassingly but it keeps being relevant to threads. My video about severe autism. Termination? No thanks.

ds3 (not autistic) tests 'positive' in all the autism biomedical type tests he's had. I'm sure he could have been with the right environmental trigger.

SixSpot and TotalChaos, absolutely: it seemed from the Guardian report at least, that all this study seemed to conclude was that high levels of iu testosterone causes "extreme male brain-ness" (if there is such a term!), rather than autism.

It actually concedes that from the c.230 children in the test, none of them had been conclusively or actually diagnosed as autistic. Wtf?? How is this an indicator that there is a realiable link between the test and autism then? The children are now between 8-10 yo - surely old enough to be diagnosed?

Not that I'm belittling the actual report.. just passing judgement on the media reporting of it

see that's the scary part. Would a test show a positively autistic child? or merely show one that might be prone to autism (given the right factors)? In which case women might terminate pregnancies based on a positive diagnosis of autism when in fact the trates may never emerge if the right triggers were not in place.

ridiculous. and scary.
how on earth do they think they can diagnose it this early when most of the people i work with (ASD tacher) have been dx earliest 2yrs, latest 15yrs
Baffles me.

That's the end of the spectrum that SBC works with though. His work is excellent, but only really applicable to AS.

Again that in a way is confusing wannabe- for the bit of the spectrum SBC works on then it probably is highly heritable -with parents with traits etc. However, more severe autism is known to be far more variable in terms of how it's inherited,seems to be more related to the immune system etc etc.

It's really not well understood enough yet. And certainly when talking about 'autism' you are talking about many different things.