New brain scan detects autism

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Well, there are many news outlets (1,000s plus) - just take a look at Google news or Yahoo news.

The above fibs were regularly reported in the news media for years - often in the form of headlines - vs what was in the news articles themselves which often tended to (not always) water down the headlines slightly.

Regarding the idea that all autism is only caused by vaccines, that was reported in the United Kingdom by a major medical journal (Lancet), later to be retracted over ten years later (earlier this year).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield

Many of the above (phony) headlines were given to the public in terms of radio news sound bites in cars or 5:30 pm national TV news broadcasts in homes.

As you know, sound bites do not deliver news in depth at all but a sound bite can give phony news to people in just a matter of seconds and many persons will accept the news as fact sometimes to find out later the news bite was not a fact at all and was not reported accurately.

Last edited by pgd on 11 Aug 2010, 5:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

It'l be interesting to see how it pans-out with them..

My study scheduled for the week of September 19th. I will also be visiting family in Pittsburgh (I was born/raised there) so I won't be back until Sept 30th. My internet access up there may be sketchy as best so I might not be about to post anything about it until I return.

Can't agree with you there, especially given the subjective, intrusive and often poorly executed means of current diagnosis. A random sample of 30 will yield a pretty reasonable picture of the sample's population. The fact that 90% of known ASD subjects were found using this objective, easily replicable method, even in this small sample is a tremendous find. After all, how can we be sure the 10% missed are in fact Aspies? Perhaps their psychological evaluation was incorrect.

Personally, I think a lot of the stigma Aspies face is due to the fact that it is thought of more as a psychological issue rather than a neurological one. This finding is tremendously significant, and I'm anxious for further studies because it may be the key to approaching ASD in a more productive and appropriate manner--from the healthcare professionals to the educators to society at large.



Not bad science reporting, but an early study and early findings. Methodologically, it would make sense if this initial sample is from a population most accurately diagnosed using current methods. Again, this would minimize the question of whether "uncaught" individuals had simply been misdiagnosed by the psychological investigations.

My guess is, and I'm anxious to find the published paper (which may still be under peer review or revision), this initial sample was male and only male Aspies (I think the article mentions Asperger's specifically). Female Aspies tend to slip through the testing process undiagnosed partly because professionals don't expect them to exist, partly because they present symptoms differently than male counterparts (on whom the differential diagnostic tools were developed), and partly because they are often better at 'masking' symptoms.

Inclusion of women at this point in the study would arguably add covariates into the experiment, which would drive the need for a larger sample. Based on the robust results and the small sample size, my guess is they used a very homogeneous group, where DX was pretty certain (for the NTs as well as the Aspies).

It is an interesting article, but quite mnisrepresented in media. It will NOT be able to objectively diagnose ASDs, and neither is it a step in identifying "the brain defect" responsible for ASDs. It is more or less a study using the same methodology as Aspie-quiz (multivariate statistics), and finding obtimal weight factors that can discriminate groups the best. The only difference is that this study used a population of 40, Aspie-quiz used 150,000. The full text article is available for free now: http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/30/32/10612. I've also commented on it in a blog entry: http://blog.rdos.net/?p=90

Looks like you nailed it:

http://trusttheevidence.net/carl-henegh ... /100811105

Actually that is as good as a great many useful medical tests, and far better than early versions of H. Pylori (90%), PSA (49%) and other recently developed routine tests. The positive predictive value in clinical practice will be high, even without refinement, because the test will be applied to people with suspected autism (i.e. where the prevalence of autism is very much greater than 1%, and probably exceed 50%) and will complement behavioural findings.

I can see great advantages in taking autism away from the subjective judgement of psychiatry and providing an objective test to distinguish between autism and other conditions with overlapping behavioural and cognitive symptoms.

My sister is the head honcho in MRI scanning at a top hospital in NE England, Supernumery Technician I think her job title is. Maybe she will do me one for free, but then again I'd have to speak to her and I haven't done that for 2 years. There's no animosity between us I just haven't had a reason to speak to her.