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ASPartOfMe
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13 Aug 2019, 3:17 am

Is Autism Really a "Genetically Based Brain Wiring"? by Robert Chapman PH. D. Neurodiverse Age

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I often hear other neurodiversity advocates refer to autism as a different "brain wiring." This is a rather unclear term, and I am not fully sure where it originally came from. But I take it the point is that we have something different about our neurology that makes us autistic—some kind of essential difference that provides the basis of and legitimization for our autistic identity.

In turn, this claim is often accompanied by the further notion that "autism is genetic," a claim which is often justified with a link to some newspaper article or another that reports how a new study has "shown" or "found" that autism really is genetic after all.

There is something obviously right in these claims, but they can also be highly misleading, especially when taken together. It is true that autistic people often share various cognitive tendencies that seem to have a strong hereditary basis. But if we understand the claim to be that all autistic people share a genetically-based neurological essence, this framing encounters two highly significant issues.

The first is a scientific problem, namely, that such biological essentialism is not supported by the evidence. In fact, there is no known biological basis that is clearly definitive of autism at all. True, some studies have indicated certain tendencies in neurological functioning or structure, but often these findings are based on very small samples and are not reproduced; and in fact, each autistic brain is unique, rather than being the same as other autistic brains.

And the same problems emerge with so-called autistic "risk" genes. Over 1,000 have been identified, and they rarely come in the same combinations or through the same epigenetic processes, making it very hard to claim that there is anything like a shared genetic basis for autism.

The upshot: Although there are very general population tendencies when it comes to autism, there is nothing like an essential, defining neurological or genetic marker shared by all autistic people as individuals. So the claim that any two autistic people share the same "wiring" as each other, unless they have somehow gone to a lab and been tested to verify this, is unsupported by science. Equally unsupported, then, is the (often implicit) notion that shared wiring is what grounds our shared identity or political voice (I'll return to this below).

The second problem is more political and ethical. This regards how biologizing and essentializing categories such as autism tend to reinforce social processes that are at odds with the emancipatory aims of the neurodiversity movement. As the authors of a 2011 review article on the biologization of human kinds summarised, evidence consistently shows that:

"People’s understanding of genetics with relation to life outcomes is shaped by their psychological essentialist biases – a process termed genetic essentialism – and this leads to particular consequences when people consider the relations between genes and human outcomes [...] genetic essentialist biases have played in eugenic ideologies and policies, and [...] these biases shape and are in turn shaped by contemporary discussions of genetic research."

Biologizing and essentializing human kinds (whether race, gender, or disability) in popular discourse ultimately function both to support a thing like eugenics and to increase stigma. And these, of course, are precisely the kinds of things that the neurodiversity movement has emerged to resist.

I certainly do not conclude from this that the neurodiversity movement is inherently flawed. But I do believe that certain proponents need to be more careful about the biological reductionism that they have too often uncritically adopted from biological psychiatry. Here we need to follow those such as autistic sociologist Damian Milton, who has long resisted such temptations.

For Milton, the notion that autism is "scientifically valid as a natural kind" is untenable, and we are "unlikely ever to find […] a simplistic explanation of what autism ‘is’ at a biological level."

The alternative view holds the classification of autism as a human construct that emerged within certain power dynamics and a specific social and historical context, rather than being a natural grouping that we simply discovered.

In this view, autistic people can have a shared voice, and shared interests, but these are not based on some kind of shared biological essence. Rather, they are based on our similar social positioning, our emerging culture, and our irreducibly complex manifold of psychosocial similarities, in what we might call our shared autistic form of life.

There is a historical cause for hope here, too. For all the previous major civil rights movements (regarding race, gender, sexuality, and so forth) managed to overcome not just the pathologization of whichever group they were concerned with, but also essentialism and biological reductionism.

This took some time, and much debate, in each case. But just as (most) feminists have come to reject the notion that there is a biological essence of any given gender, so too can more neurodiversity proponents come to reject biological reductionism and essentialism when it comes to neurominorities. Or at least, this is what will need to happen for the emancipatory aims of neurodiversity proponents to become fully realized.


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14 Aug 2019, 2:27 am

I'm puzzled by the title of this thread. The quoted article did NOT even attempt to make any case at all against what I understand to be the "ND movement’s brain wiring argument." The latter argument, as I understand it, is:

Our brains are wired differently from NT brains. Hence it is very stressful and bad for us to try to make us behave exactly like NTs. And any attempt at a total "cure" is likely to be more traumatic and/or potentially more damaging than it is worth. It is better to accept us, accommodate us, encourage our strengths, and develop treatments for those specific aspects of our condition (and/or co-occurring conditions) that cause us the most suffering.

The quoted article did not deny any of the above. Instead it denied a very different idea, namely, the idea that all autistic people have fundamentally the same wiring. As far as I can tell, most neurodiversity proponents do not make that claim, although a few do.

Based on the scientific literature that I've read over the past year and a half, and based on my experiences with other autistic people both here on Wrong Planet and in the in-person support groups I've been attending, it seems pretty clear to me that autistic people differ from each other as much as we differ from NTs. We don't have any particular wiring in common; we have only the common experience of being, in one way or another, neurologically freaky enough to have intrinsic difficulties relating socially to NTs. Various subgroups among us have other things in common, e.g. sensory sensitivities (or sensory under-sensitivities) and attention difficulties. But it's been clear to me for a while now that there is no single underlying essence of autism.

Anyhow, it seems to me that the emerging scientific consensus that autism is not just one condition, but thousands of different conditions, strengthens the argument against the goal of a "cure." Finding and then administering highly customized complete "cures" for all those thousands of different conditions would be an extremely expensive endeavor. It would be much more cost-effective -- as well as much less traumatic for us -- to accept us, accommodate us, encourage our strengths, and develop treatments for those aspects of our conditions that cause us the most suffering.


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14 Aug 2019, 3:39 am

The "different wiring" "different operating system" explanation is simply a popular laymans interpretation that doesnt apply to biology.

The simple truth is science doesnt fully know the mechanics behind what causes autism and how an autistic brain differs from a NT one.

There have been a few clues in recent years such as extra synapses, or for some different brain structure on mri scans for instance, but its still very much the chicken and egg scenario.

Is the autism the cause of the brain malformation in MRI or is the malformation the cause of the autism?

The fact that not all autistic brains show malformation hints at the latter explanation.

So the official bottom line from neuroscience as discussed in an article in spectrum news is at present there is no common identifier for autism.

Discounting the idea of any cure or effective treatment ignores the many successes by science recently. The suramin trial, (official) stem cell research, genetic advances and the most sucessful of all the recent stomach bacteria transplants that saw an improvement in autistic symptoms.

The idea that autism will never be treated is basically a defeatist argument that ignores the science.

Every month or so there is new advances being published. Maybe one day the negative parts of autism can be stripped away leaving the positive triats alone.


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14 Aug 2019, 12:21 pm

carlos55 wrote:
The "different wiring" "different operating system" explanation is simply a popular laymans interpretation that doesnt apply to biology.

Of course it's only a metaphor. We don't literally have wires in our brains. The point of the "different wiring" metaphor, and likewise the "different operating system" metaphor, is simply that we are different enough from NTs that any attempt to make us exactly like NTs would be traumatic and unlikely to be successful.

carlos55 wrote:
The simple truth is science doesnt fully know the mechanics behind what causes autism and how an autistic brain differs from a NT one.

There have been a few clues in recent years such as extra synapses, or for some different brain structure on mri scans for instance, but its still very much the chicken and egg scenario.

Is the autism the cause of the brain malformation in MRI or is the malformation the cause of the autism?

The fact that not all autistic brains show malformation hints at the latter explanation.

How does it hint at the latter explanation? To me it just implies there are different kinds of autism, some of which vary from the norm in more extreme ways than others. We already knew that.

carlos55 wrote:
So the official bottom line from neuroscience as discussed in an article in spectrum news is at present there is no common identifier for autism.

Correct, and probably no common total "cure" either.

carlos55 wrote:
Discounting the idea of any cure or effective treatment ignores the many successes by science recently. The suramin trial

Suranim -- a potentially very dangerous drug with lots of longterm side effects. See this Spectrum News article. And, in any case, 5 boys would hardly be a statistical sample of even one specific kind of autism, much less the thousands of different kinds of autism.

carlos55 wrote:
(official) stem cell research, genetic advances and the most successful of all the recent stomach bacteria transplants that saw an improvement in autistic symptoms.

Sure, insofar as many (not all) "autistic symptoms" are largely just ways of coping with stress, and insofar as many (not all) autistic people also have gastrointestinal problems that cause them even more stress than just the stresses of living in an NT-dominated world, relieving those gastrointestinal problems would, of course, also reduce those "autistic symptoms" -- without necessarily affecting the underlying neurological condition at all.

So, relief of gastrointestinal problems is not at all likely to be a potential "cure" for autism. But it is certainly a good thing, as is anything that reduces stress -- including the accommodations that the autistic rights movement asks for.

carlos55 wrote:
The idea that autism will never be treated is basically a defeatist argument that ignores the science.

Every month or so there is new advances being published.

As far as I can tell, there have been "new advances" being published every month or so for at least the past decade, if not longer. Most of them end up going nowhere, because subsequent studies refute them. Probably that's because too many of these studies are aimed at curing "autism" in general, as if it were one single condition, using sample sizes that are vastly smaller than the number of different kinds of autism.

carlos55 wrote:
Maybe one day the negative parts of autism can be stripped away leaving the positive triats alone.

There have been surprisingly few, if any, studies focusing on the most disabling aspects of the most severe kinds of autism. For example, I don't recall ever hearing about even a single study trying to determine why some autistic people are unable to learn any kind of language-based communication. Instead the focus has been on a quixotic search for a magic pill, or a magic injection, that would completely "cure" all kinds of autism.


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15 Aug 2019, 12:24 pm

1. I could give an opinion on how all these recent advances could work but it would be an unqualified one and highly speculative.

2. With full respect to you and your opinion as far as im aware your not qualified or a leader in the field of neuroscience / genetics so simply saying its impossible to create treatments for autism is just as unqualified an opinion and speculative too.

3 i was giving reports of sucessful experiments / trials in the field of autism research all seperatly conducted in a fairly short number of years. These were reported as sucessfull
around the world among respected independent news outlets by the scientists involved. By sucessfull i mean had an impact on the severity of autism but more research is needed.

3 As mentioned this is not a cure the simple point is many in ND claim that autism is an immovable object, this clearly shows scientific evidence that it may not be as immovable as often claimed.

4. I watched a documentry on autism on a US channel VICE in the UK where a genetic scientist who was working with autism expects gene therapy trials within 10 years. I dont know if that will happen but its his expert opinion. In the documentry they said because (official) autism numbers have been rising more money is going into research within the last few years and most of what we know about autism has been gained in the last 10 years.

5 Autism has been around officially for 70 years or so but its only in 2014 anyone bothered examining an autistic brain under a microscope to reveal extra synapses.

6 Of course we need more accomodation for autistic people but ford motor company dont build special schools for autistic kids neither do Pfizer, roche or cambridge gene lab, in short medical science is what they do and its doesnt effect gov spending in these areas.


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16 Aug 2019, 8:09 am

carlos55 wrote:
1. I could give an opinion on how all these recent advances could work but it would be an unqualified one and highly speculative.

2. With full respect to you and your opinion as far as im aware your not qualified or a leader in the field of neuroscience / genetics so simply saying its impossible to create treatments for autism is just as unqualified an opinion and speculative too.

I'm certainly not a "leader in the field of neuroscience," but I do have sufficient general scientific literacy to read and understand Spectrum News and to understand what constitutes valid scientific methodology.

carlos55 wrote:
i was giving reports of sucessful experiments / trials in the field of autism research all seperatly conducted in a fairly short number of years. These were reported as sucessfull
around the world among respected independent news outlets by the scientists involved. By sucessfull i mean had an impact on the severity of autism but more research is needed.

And, in my previous post, I linked to a Spectrum News article expressing the doubts of other scientists about one of these experiments.

I should also point out that even neuroscientists (some of whom, apparently, don't have much if any contact with autistic people outside the lab?) sometimes fail to notice crucial little details that would be obvious to any scientifically literate autistic person (or parent thereof). For example, we tend to have more obvious "autistic behaviors" when we are physically uncomfortable and/or under stress. And this effect needs to be (but, as far as I can tell, all too often isn't) taken into account in the design of any experiment which purports to determine whether treating some physical malady (such as constipation or diarrhea) also reduces "autistic symptoms" in some other, purportedly more fundamental way.

carlos55 wrote:
3 As mentioned this is not a cure the simple point is many in ND claim that autism is an immovable object, this clearly shows scientific evidence that it may not be as immovable as often claimed.

What some of these experiments "clearly show" is not so clear, as explained above.

carlos55 wrote:
4. I watched a documentry on autism on a US channel VICE in the UK where a genetic scientist who was working with autism expects gene therapy trials within 10 years. I dont know if that will happen but its his expert opinion. In the documentry they said because (official) autism numbers have been rising more money is going into research within the last few years and most of what we know about autism has been gained in the last 10 years.

As I see it, the most important thing that has been learned is that autism is not just one condition but thousands of different conditions.

And, as noted in another Spectrum News article, in which another expert voices skepticism about another experiment:

Quote:
“When one dives into a pool of kids with a complex phenotype, a home run is finding an explanatory defect in, say, 10 percent,” Gargus says. “One never sees a real study where one goes in and, lo and behold, it explains everything.”


carlos55 wrote:
5 Autism has been around officially for 70 years or so but its only in 2014 anyone bothered examining an autistic brain under a microscope to reveal extra synapses.

6 Of course we need more accomodation for autistic people but ford motor company dont build special schools for autistic kids neither do Pfizer, roche or cambridge gene lab, in short medical science is what they do and its doesnt effect gov spending in these areas.

True, but autism research funding organizations can make decisions on whether, for example, to prioritize "curing autism" (in general) or whether to prioritize studying, as I would recommend: (1) the most severe specific problems of the most severely disabled autistic people and (2) educational psychology for various kinds of autistic children generally.


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17 Aug 2019, 6:07 pm

ASD is a spectrum disorder of the brain, its called a spectrum disorder because symptoms can range from almost undetectable to severe.

When you consider something effecting the function of the brain with all its different executive functions with a spectrum of severity, then factoring the different range of personality types, all with different experiences and environments you have something that gives the illusion that there are multiple disorders at work that you wouldn’t see in any other organ that has a simpler function.

Thousands of Autisms would mean thousands of different disorders, all with different origins, but creating similar core symptoms. There has never been any solid evidence of this reported and there is very little reference of multiple autisms as a plural rather than a spectrum, apart from a couple of obscure books on a google search and by those using the term as a way to describe the spectrum i.e. high / low functioning, Asperger’s, PDD-NOS, BAP.

The only reason why autism has not been researched until recently is because of numbers of cases, until the last decade it was considered a rare condition that didn’t affect that many people. Until the 90s the only reference to Asperger’s was in a history book.

Leaving aside the reasons for the increase in numbers to 1 in 59, this now makes it a fairly common condition giving the incentive to act upon it by NT`s because they are nearly always the decision makers and because of what is seen as its disabling symptoms, large economic & social cost.

You state only the most severe autistic kids should be studied but if one reads the reports for all these trials, only those on the more severe side of the spectrum were used such as those who were non verbal rather than aspie programmers from Silicon Valley.

I could probably give several reasons why autism should be left untreated but hundreds of why treatment should be developed. The main one being health & safety, many westerners including us British, have a smug view of our comfortable lives, our accessible food, health care and welfare system that protects us from the Darwinian realities of life on earth. What about those that don’t have these protections, what happens to poor Asian & African autistic kids born from parents that cannot look after or protect them? Born in environments where they are expected to grow up fast and take care of themselves, what happens to them? how long do they survive for?

Even over here not being able to live independently is an existential risk, as any help can easily be taken away at any point for a number of reasons including death of parents / relatives, stroke of a pen caused by a spiteful & incompetent official or gov cuts caused by economic crisis.

I favour the 360 degree approach, more assistance, opportunities & understanding but also effective treatments for those that need / want it.


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18 Aug 2019, 3:30 am

carlos55 wrote:
ASD is a spectrum disorder of the brain, its called a spectrum disorder because symptoms can range from almost undetectable to severe.

When you consider something effecting the function of the brain with all its different executive functions with a spectrum of severity, then factoring the different range of personality types, all with different experiences and environments you have something that gives the illusion that there are multiple disorders at work that you wouldn’t see in any other organ that has a simpler function.

Thousands of Autisms would mean thousands of different disorders, all with different origins, but creating similar core symptoms. There has never been any solid evidence of this reported and there is very little reference of multiple autisms as a plural rather than a spectrum, apart from a couple of obscure books on a google search and by those using the term as a way to describe the spectrum i.e. high / low functioning, Asperger’s, PDD-NOS, BAP.

Figuring out the right search terms can be a bit tricky, but using "autism genetics thousands of different conditions" I just now found the following:

- New Gene Studies Suggest There Are Hundreds of Kinds of Autism, Wired, November 25, 2014, according to which:

Quote:
“What we’ve learned in the last five years about the underlying genetics is that there are hundreds, if not a thousand or more, different genetic subtypes of autism,” says geneticist David Ledbetter, chief scientific officer at Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pennsylvania.

The "hundreds" in 2014, when the above was published, have grown to "more than a thousand" in 2019, judging by the following:

- New approaches to study the genetics of autism spectrum disorder may lead to new therapies, Canadian Association for Neuroscience, May 24, 2019, according to which:

Quote:
More than a thousand mutations and other forms of genetic variation affecting several hundred genes have been linked to ASD.

Scientists are still, of course, trying to find common neurological mechanisms amongst as many of these different subtypes as possible. The last-quoted article deals primarily with one such common mechanism among "some" of the many genetic subtypes of autism:

Quote:
One common feature of autism is a shift in the ratio of excitation (or activation) and Inhibition (or inactivation) of neurons in animal models of ASD. Mutations that cause too much excitation of neurons result in autistic-like behaviour, and paradoxically, so do mutations that cause too much inhibition. Precise control of the Excitation to Inhibition ratio is therefore viewed as a key to regulate social behaviour.

If one looks at Spectrum News, one can find lots and lots of articles about scientists researching lots and lots of other possible neurological mechanisms.

However, scientists recognize that no single one of these neurological mechanisms underlies all, or even most, of the many different kinds of autism. In my previous post I quoted Jay Gargus, professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine, as saying, in this Spectrum News article: “When one dives into a pool of kids with a complex phenotype, a home run is finding an explanatory defect in, say, 10 percent.”

carlos55 wrote:
The only reason why autism has not been researched until recently is because of numbers of cases, until the last decade it was considered a rare condition that didn’t affect that many people. Until the 90s the only reference to Asperger’s was in a history book.

Leaving aside the reasons for the increase in numbers to 1 in 59, this now makes it a fairly common condition giving the incentive to act upon it by NT`s because they are nearly always the decision makers and because of what is seen as its disabling symptoms, large economic & social cost.

You state only the most severe autistic kids should be studied

Not that they should be the only ones studied, but IMO they should have highest priority, and the focus should be primarily on their most severe specific disabilities (e.g. inability to communicate in any language-based way) rather than primarily on the defining characteristics of "autism" per se.

An inability to learn language is, after all, a much more severe disability than, say, my own inability to conform to culturally-specific eye contact rhythms. People like me don't need billions of dollars to be spent on figuring out ways to help us make more standard eye contact. We just need more social milieux, including workplaces, in which we won't be rejected for our non-standard eye contact (among other relatively mild autistic traits). Surely a much better use of billions of dollars of research money would be on figuring out ways to enable the most severely disabled autistic people to learn basic language skills?

carlos55 wrote:
but if one reads the reports for all these trials, only those on the more severe side of the spectrum were used such as those who were non verbal rather than aspie programmers from Silicon Valley.

Actually there have been plenty of complaints about the more severely disabled autistic people being under-represented in studies. Here's an article reviewing those complaints: Are Children Severely Affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder Underrepresented in Treatment Studies? An Analysis of the Literature by Amy Stedman, Briana Taylor, [...], and Matthew Siegel, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2019. According to the abstract:

Quote:
We found that the proportion of studies that included the severely affected population decreased significantly over time, as well as wide variability in measurement and reporting. Inadequate representation of the full autism spectrum in the literature could lead to an unbalanced picture of ASD and leave behind those with arguably the greatest need.


Regarding your reference to "poor Asian & African autistic kids": In traditional Asian & African cultures, there is much more reliance on one's extended family than there is in the modern West. There is much less need to sell oneself in a traditional tribal society than there is in the modern West; hence the more mildly disabling forms of autism are likely to be less disabling in the context of a traditional tribal society than in the context of the modern West.

For that matter, even here in the modern West, they were less disabling even 50 years ago, when I was a little kid, than they are now, in the context of today's world. Indeed, that's probably the main reason why, in the English-speaking world, "Asperger's syndrome" wasn't even noticed until 1981 and wasn't at all widely known until sometime in the 1990's.


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18 Aug 2019, 4:15 am

What the article is referring to is the constilation of hundreds, posible thousands of genes involved in autism. There are many multiple genes involved in many medical disorders but the disorder is largly the same, in autism its a spectrum of severity.

As our knowledge of genetics increases we will learn more about how they interact and with genetic editing advancing ways of altering these.

The next big thing in autism genetics is looking at the 98% "junk dna" previously ignored that has recently been found to influence autism.

They have already sucessfuly edited genee in mice to remove some autism triaits which was shown in the vice documenty.

I believe these smart individuals wouldnt waste resources on something if they thought it was a waste of time.

Looking at the reporting of the results of these trials from respected outlets quoting scientists unless they were all lying they were reported as a sucess that influenced autism so i take that as face value. Thank you


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18 Aug 2019, 12:42 pm

carlos55 wrote:
What the article is referring to is the constilation of hundreds, posible thousands of genes involved in autism. There are many multiple genes involved in many medical disorders but the disorder is largly the same, in autism its a spectrum of severity.

In the case of autism, it really isn't "largely the same." There is no single specific autistic trait that we all have in common, and it's an oversimplification to speak of a "spectrum of severity." For example, one autistic person might have severe sensory sensitivities but no more difficulty multi-tasking than the average NT, whereas another autistic person might not have any sensory issues at all, but might have extreme difficulty shifting one's attention from one thing to another. Autism is currently categorized as "one disorder" only because there isn't currently any better way of classifying us.

carlos55 wrote:
As our knowledge of genetics increases we will learn more about how they interact and with genetic editing advancing ways of altering these.

The next big thing in autism genetics is looking at the 98% "junk dna" previously ignored that has recently been found to influence autism.

There have been lots and lots of "next big things" in autism genetics; the above is only one of them.

carlos55 wrote:
They have already sucessfuly edited genee in mice to remove some autism triaits which was shown in the vice documenty.

The use of "gene editing" techniques on humans, for the purpose of altering innate neurological/psychological traits (rather than, say, halting a degenerative disease) raises a lot of thorny ethical questions, and not just for autistic people.

Anyhow, I wouldn't rely on documentaries as a source of info on scientific advances. I much prefer print sources, for which it's much easier to keep track of details and to Google for more info to put the news into context.

carlos55 wrote:
I believe these smart individuals wouldnt waste resources on something if they thought it was a waste of time.

These "smart individuals" are not the ones who decide research funding priorities. Scientists need to compete with each other for the available funding; and, alas, winning said competition often means hyping one's research to be a bit more groundbreaking than it actually is. (This is mostly just a matter of spin; I would expect outright lying to be uncommon, although that's certainly been known to happen too.) Hence, to get a balanced picture, one needs to do a lot of reading of well-informed sources like Spectrum News.

carlos55 wrote:
Looking at the reporting of the results of these trials from respected outlets quoting scientists unless they were all lying they were reported as a sucess that influenced autism so i take that as face value. Thank you

Of course they are not all lying. But, like I said, you need to do a lot of reading of well-informed sources to get a balanced picture.


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