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Bipolar or TDD? Asperger's or autism spectrum?

February 12, 2010 By

Proposed changes in psychiatrists’ diagnostic manual could introduce “new mental disorders,” reports the Washington Post.

Children who throw too many tantrums could be diagnosed with “temper dysregulation with dysphoria.” Teenagers who are particularly eccentric might be candidates for treatment for “psychosis risk syndrome.” Men who are just way too interested in sex face being labeled as suffering from “hypersexual disorder.”

Asperger’s Syndrome and autism could become “autism spectrum disorders,” a change opposed by many Asperger’s advocates.

Advocates say the new categories are more precise. Critics say people in normal distress will be misdiagnosed, put on medication and stigmatized by insurance companies.

Among the concerns are proposals to create “risk syndromes” in the hopes that early diagnosis and treatment will stave off the full-blown conditions. For example, the proposals would create a “psychosis risk syndrome” for people who have mild symptoms found in psychotic disorders, such as “excessive suspicion, delusions and disorganized speech or behavior.”

“There will be adolescents who are a little odd and have funny ideas, and this will label them as pre-psychotic,” said Robert Spitzer, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the DSM revision process.

“Temper Dysregulation with Dysphoria” is intended “to counter a huge increase in the number children being treated for bipolar disorder by creating a more specific diagnosis,” the Post reports. But some fear it will encourage unneeded treatment of moody kids.

In addition to classifying the symptoms of grief that many people experience after the death of a loved one as “depression,” the proposals include adding “binge eating” and “gambling addiction” as bona fide psychiatric conditions; they also raise the possibility of making “Internet addiction” a future diagnosis.

The American Psychiatric Association will listen to feedback before deciding on the proposed changes for the new diagnostic manual, due out in 2013.

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Lancet retracts vaccine-autism study

February 3, 2010 By

Britain’s leading medical journal has retracted the 1998 study linking autism to vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella, which appeared in The Lancet in 1998.

Frightened by Andrew Wakefield’s study, British parents “abandoned the vaccine in droves, leading to a resurgence of measles.”  A series of major research studies found  no link between the vaccine and autism. Wakefield was charged with “changing and misreporting” his data. But many parents continue to fear vaccines.

It took too long, responds BMJ, a competing medical journal that had called for The Lancet to renounce the Wakefield study as bogus.

I Speak of Dreams rounds up reaction to the The Lancet’s decision.

Saturday HBO will air a biopic of Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who became an animal science professor and best-selling author.

Update: Alexander Russo has a Grandin quote: “Sometimes we forget about common sense. Autism is used too much as an excuse for bad behavior.”

You could replace “autism” with a lot of other words and the sentence would continue to make sense.

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Autism cluster linked to parents' education

January 17, 2010 By

High rates of autism are linked to high levels of parent education, not neighborhood toxins, in Silicon Valley and nine other regions of California, conclude University of California-Davis researchers.

College-educated parents of autistic children are more likely to fight for a diagnosis — and seek the state-funded services that accompany it — than less-educated parents, according to the team. Parents of children in these autistic “clusters” are also more likely to be older and white.

Researchers did not see more autism in the Silicon Valley than in Sacramento or Southern California, suggesting there is no “geek gene” that predisposes techies’ children to autism.

The high-autism areas did not share the same toxins.

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Educating all the children

January 2, 2010 By

Utah has its first high school designed for autistic students, reports the Deseret News (via Education News). Spectrum Academy is extending its K-8 program.

Such specialization runs counter to a federal and state push over the last decade to give children with learning disabilities equal access to a mainstream public education.

To comply with federal law, schools “offer special education courses but place autistic children in traditional classrooms as frequently as possible.” But some parents think mainstreaming doesn’t benefit their children.

Education News interviews Miriam Freedman, author of Fixing Special Education. Among her 12 steps for improving the system is ending the reliance on a medical model for labeling students with learning problems.

A child may be labeled with a specific learning disability (SLD) in one school district, emotionally disturbed in another, or simply as an ‘at risk’ student in the third. In the first town he gets a panoply of individualized special services, in the second, a panoply of totally different services, and in the third–none. This, in spite of the fact that we know that diagnoses are not exact, and far too often, are based on attributes unrelated to the child, such as socio-economic realities, savvy parents, or zip codes.

Freedman also talks about reducing paperwork and litigation so teachers can focus on teaching.

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Can kids grow out of autism?

May 12, 2009 By

Ten to 20 percent of autistic children “recover” as they get older, often after intensive behavior therapy, says Deborah Fein, a University of Connecticut psychology professor. The children were diagnosed correctly as autistic before the age of five, Fein says, and later were diagnosed correctly as not autistic.  Her study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

. . . Leo, a boy in Washington, D.C., who once made no eye contact, who echoed words said to him and often spun around in circles — all classic autism symptoms. Now he is an articulate, social third-grader. His mother, Jayne Lytel, says his teachers call Leo a leader.

Interesting, if true.

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U.S. court: Vaccines don’t cause autism

February 13, 2009 By

Vaccines don’t cause autism, federal special masters have ruled. Families claiming a link have sought compensation. From the Washington Post:

Yesterday’s ruling involved three separate cases, each of which explored a different mechanism by which vaccines might cause autism. Working independently, three special masters acting as judges in the federal “vaccine court” issued separate but similar rulings that found no evidence that the vaccines had caused the children’s disorders.

The decisions are especially telling because the rules of the vaccine court did not require the plaintiffs to prove their cases with scientific certainty — all the families needed to show was a preponderance of the evidence, or “50 percent and a hair.”

The special masters found the scientific evidence overwhelmingly showed no link between vaccination and autism.

Plaintiffs plan to appeal the decision. It never ends.

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Researcher fudged data on vaccine danger

February 8, 2009 By

The British doctor who started the scare over a link between the MMR vaccine and autism “changed and misreported results in his research,” charges a Times of London investigation.

Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.

The research was published in February 1998 in an article in The Lancet medical journal. It claimed that the families of eight out of 12 children attending a routine clinic at the hospital had blamed MMR for their autism, and said that problems came on within days of the jab. The team also claimed to have discovered a new inflammatory bowel disease underlying the children’s conditions.

However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

After the paper was published in 1998, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%.

Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.

Here are details on the 12 children in the study.

Wakefield worked for a lawyer trying to build a case against vaccine manufacturers, emphasizes Mike Dunford on The Questionable Authority.  Some of the parents came to Wakefield’s clinic in hopes of proving the vaccine caused their children’s problems.

Will this change minds?

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Italian study: Thimerosal not linked to autism

January 28, 2009 By

Yet another study shows no link between vaccines and autism, reports NPR.  “In the early 1990s, thousands of healthy Italian babies in a study of whooping cough vaccines got two different amounts of the preservative thimerosal,” which some fear causes autism.

Only one case of autism was found, and that was in the group that got the lower level of thimerosal.

Alison Singer, executive vice president of communications and awareness at Autism Speaks, recently resigned over the vaccine issue.

“Dozens of credible scientific studies have exonerated vaccines as a cause of autism,” she wrote in a statement. “I believe we must devote limited funding to more promising avenues of autism research.”

Singer, who has an 11-year-old daughter with autism, told Newsweek the vaccine question has been resolved. “We need to be able to say, ‘Yes, we are now satisfied that the earth is round’.”

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