Talk:Causes of autism

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Contents

[edit] Orphaned references in Causes of autism

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Causes of autism's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "IOM2004":

Reference named "T-in-vaccines":

Reference named "WHO":

Reference named "CDC":

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 08:55, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Could it?

Is it possible that meningitis could? cause light autism, if contracted at a very early age? 217.210.0.19 (talk) 18:32, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

no 82.24.244.201 (talk) 10:42, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Autoantibodies and pathology

A recent edit made this change:

"As autoantibodies have not been are not always associated with pathology, are found in diseases other than ASD, and are not always present in ASD, the relationship between immune disturbances and autism remains unclear and controversial."

However, this change disagrees with the cited source, Wills et al. 2007 (PMID 17804535), which says (my italics):

"Various antibodies to self-proteins have been reported in patients with ASD in the past. However, it must be emphasized that these autoantibodies have not been associated with pathology, are also found in diseases other than ASD, and are not present in all subjects with ASD. It is not abnormal to detect autoantibodies in normal healthy controls, although elevated titers have usually been associated with pathogenic states of disease, possibly representative of ongoing immune activation. Factors acting in concert with autoantibodies, such as genetics and environmental, may be at play in such a heterogeneous spectrum of disorders."

We have to make sure that all the text in this article is properly source; please see Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Reliable sources (medicine-related articles). For now, I've reverted the change. Eubulides (talk) 22:06, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Wills disagrees with several researchers who have found autoantibodies, that is the bottom line. I can cite the other authors, but it's a disagreement, not a matter of not having proper sources. Sources are going to disagree. I think my edit was more fair to the current state of knowledge than the old one. Singh found autoantibodies, obviously Wills does not believe he found them. Another researcher found some indication of autoantibody, not to brain tissue but a folate receptor, check PubMed on it. I will go ahead and cite my sources now if I can get it all together. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.61.134.252 (talk) 02:55, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I don't see the disagreement. Wills says that autoantibodies have been reported, which is the same thing the other researchers are saying. (And that's what Causes of autism says as well.) Regardless, we can't have the text disagreeing with the cited sources; if there are other reliable sources that disagree with Wills on this point, they have to be cited specifically. Again, please see Wikipedia:Reliable sources (medicine-related articles) for the kinds of sources that should be cited for medical facts and figures. Eubulides (talk) 04:38, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I think you are overdoing the need for citation, or else you are very unfamiliar with the subject matter. Two of the co-authors with Wills in the paper you cited above have now found autoantibodies which ARE closely associated with pathology, ie, found in autistics at more than ten times the rate they are found in controls. Some authors have found even stronger associations with some autoantibodies, not necessarily brain antibodies, some are antibodies that block receptors for molecules that are involved in brain metabolism, but anyway, autoantibodies. You are right in your paragraph above, I misstated, what I meant to say was Singh associated nerve system autoantibodies with disease, but the point now is, there are many many papers with findings of autoantibodies which do associate them with the condition itself.

Wikipedia policy is that every claim that is challenged or is likely to be challenged requires a source. Please see Wikipedia:Verifiability. Please don't introduce material without supplying reliable sources. None of the claims made in the previous comment are sourced; and none of them contradict what was in the article. My own expertise in this material is irrelevant; what matters are the sources that can be cited. Eubulides (talk) 17:09, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

If the material was controversial, then sourcing it would be important, but the bottom line is, whether the studies were good or not I can't say, but there is no doubt that the statement that autoantibodies have not been associated with autism is not true at this point in time. There are many papers on www.pubmed.gov showing just exactly that. Do a search "autism" and "antibodies" and you will find them. You are not helping keep Wikipedia accurate by replacing accurate statements with inaccurate statements just because you have a two year old source that most likely the authors of the source paper would say is no longer true. Just the opposite, you are misleading the readers.

Here is a paper with mostly the same authors saying the opposite of what they did in 2007

Brain Behav Immun. 2009 Jan;23(1):64-74. Epub 2008 Jul 30

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.232.10.38 (talk) 18:59, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

No, that paper (Wills et al. 2009, PMID 18706993) confirms what the authors were saying in 2007. Its last paragraph says "At present, the pathological significance of elevated levels of autoantibodies to cerebellar protein(s) in ASD is unclear. These autoantibodies may be pathologically relevant, or merely an epiphenomenon of abnormal central nervous system development or brain injury in children with ASD." Eubulides (talk) 05:41, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Sorry, I do not have access to the full text of PubMed articles and so did not see the last sentence, it's not in the abstract on PubMed as far as I could see. But, even given that they do not definitely state the autoantibody causes the disease, would those same authors be willing to repeat that quote you insist on, no autoantibodies have been "associated" with disease? I admit I have not asked any of them, but it seems unlikely to me. The main point of that paper was that the autoantibody is rare in controls and common in patients. There is a very high "association". They were not yet willing to say it was causative, but still, I think you are misrepresenting the current state of knowledge by insisting on an old quote which is certainly misleading, at the least. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.232.10.38 (talk) 13:39, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps you're right about "associated". I did a brief search and found a review published in next month's Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders which says that recent studies have been "contradictory", and I rewrote the discussion to match this new source (that diff includes some of your changes). This removes the claim about no association, and uses the very latest high-quality review available. I hope that's good enough. Eubulides (talk) 16:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Age of Parents

It appears that some of the increase in autism is correlated to the increasing age of parents:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/04/AR2006090400513.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/07/autism-birth-order-parents-age


You can find pointers to scientific papers on the relationship between the parent's age and risk of autism by searching for 'age of father and autism' on this website:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez


Here are pointers to some of the studies from Australia, the USA, and from Isreal, which reached the same conclusion:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19781913?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19278291?ordinalpos=6&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18945690?ordinalpos=8&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18796466?ordinalpos=9&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum —Preceding unsigned comment added by Cjshaker (talk • contribs) 02:30, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

This is already covered in the last paragraph of the Genetics section. That paragraph cites a meta-analysis and a review, which are better sources for this sort of thing than the primary sources and news articles mentioned in the previous comment. For more on this, please see Wikipedia:Reliable sources (medicine-related articles). Eubulides (talk) 04:02, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Mercury, Inflammation, Autoimmunity, etc.

PMID 19106436 A comprehensive review of mercury provoked autism.: "Hg has been found to cause immune, sensory, neurological, motor, and behavioural dysfunctions similar to traits defining/associated with ASDs, and that these similarities extend to neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters, and biochemistry. Furthermore, a review of molecular mechanisms indicates that Hg exposure can induce death, disorganization and/or damage to selected neurons in the brain similar to that seen in recent ASD brain pathology studies, and this alteration may likely produce the symptoms by which ASDs are diagnosed. Finally, a review of treatments suggests that ASD patients who undergo protocols to reduce Hg and/or its effects show significant clinical improvements in some cases. In conclusion, the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence favours acceptance that Hg exposure is capable of causing some ASDs." The full article is free: [1]. This review is from October 2008, however.

Other useful reviews (with only abstracts available, it seems) not yet used in this article (or even on Wikipedia), with dates from January to September 2009, are PMID 19161050, PMID 19758536, PMID 19650428, and PMID 19640207. MichaelExe (talk) 21:15, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Mark Geier, a coauthor of PMID 19106436, is a junk-science promoter and clearly is not a reliable source. I'll add the other papers to my list of things to read; clearly we shouldn't cite them purely because of their abstracts. Eubulides (talk) 21:47, 30 November 2009 (UTC)
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