> [...] Future studies with stricter inclusion criteria are required to confirm the present findings.
This is a small study that doesn't earn such a big subject line.
> BPA is about 10 percent less than that of control children. For a significant proportion of children with ADHD, it’s about 17 percent less.
The percentages are confusing me, BPA intake can vary greatly - if there was a stronger link shouldn't this be much obvious just in folks with higher BPA exposure?
Also there are bunch of metabolic conditions/disorders linked with autism already.
I don't understand what you would learn from such research other than "more research needed", certainly not what the headline implies.
> The percentages are confusing me, BPA intake can vary greatly - if there was a stronger link shouldn't this be much obvious just in folks with higher BPA exposure?
Presumably it’s much easier to measure someone’s ability to eliminate BPA from the bloodstream than it is to calculate how much they consumed in uteri and throughout their life.
The linked metabolic conditions could be linked because of trouble clearing BPA, if it were shown causative and they were just linked without direct causation (not saying it has shown that).
> The incidence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has greatly increased over the last few decades. The reasons are largely unknown although environmental factors are believed to be important.
This is a very misleading first paragraph. It’s likely that ADHD and Autism prevalence has not changed at all and it’s just cultural awareness that leads to the increased incidence. 30 years ago, most doctors believed that women could not have ADHD or Autism.
So yeah, it is “environmental factors” but the environmental factor is awareness - not plastic.
Why is an increase in diagnosis an increase in awareness? All they have literally done is make diagnostic standards more lax and decided to up the amount of diagnosis. The diagnosis is extremely relativistic and you can draw the line between autistic and not autistic wherever you please. Diagnosis is done on an overwhelmingly subjective and culturally bias way (E.G. lack of eye contact being seen as socially incompetent rather than respectful)
We just decided to call more people autistic, we didn’t become more aware. I’m still awaiting any research, at all, to suggest that diagnosis with autism actually helps the people diagnosed at all. Never mind helping them enough to outweigh the various costs of medical treatment and various entitlements received post-diagnosis. I just hear if we call more people autistic that means we’re more aware and that’s fantastic!
The CONSTANT diagnostic drift also means the vast majority of research on autism is likely non-reproducible and worthless (because it might have been conducted when 5x less people were considered autistic). I’d very much argue diagnostic instability is actually SABOTAGING autism awareness not helping with it.
> Why is an increase in diagnosis an increase in awareness?
Other way around, I would argue increased awareness -> increased diagnoses. Why? Because a lot more people know what the words "autism" and "aspergers" mean today than 30 years ago.
A feedback loop where diagnosis -> incr. awareness -> diagnosis seems plausible and has a nice simple mechanism. So I guess increased diagnoses would lead to increased awareness too.
> you can draw the line between autistic and not autistic wherever you please.
Agree, this is what makes psych evaluations so tricky. It's hard to have rigour for human mental complexity. My prefered view on this is that autism is defined by a series of correlated traits which are all continous variables, we define autism as someone who has 1 or more of those traits in the tail of that trait's distribution. e.g. very low social ability or very high impact sensory disorders.
You can whinge all you like about where the line is drawn, but the fact is the line has to be drawn through six dimensions and none of those dimensions is easy to measure.
> various entitlements received post-diagnosis
Most people with an autism diagnosis (level 1) do not have access to any entitlements. This is a common argument against self-diagnosis which holds no water.
> diagnostic drift also means the vast majority of research on autism is likely non-reproducible and worthless
Clinical researchers routinely sub-divide groups with a diagnosis based on severity. You can do this with autism in much the same way we do it with cancer. So broadening the diagnostic criteria doesn't impact statistical effect size and thus your argument is incorrect.
Regardless the last point, while theoretically you’re correct, in practice trying to rank autistics by severity seems both difficult to do objectively and it’s politically controversial as ranking autistics in such ways has been used to justify taking away benefits OR autonomy.
In any case you raise a good point insofar that research on what is called “level 2 autism” and “level 3 autism” is more constant over time but it’s the research on “level 1 autism” I would take with a serious grain of salt especially the more pessimistic research. Because it was usually done on people who were on average more impaired than the people being diagnosed today, and that can result in people making bad conclusions about how life is for most people that we call Autistic.
I don’t know, this whole phenomenon is quite troublesome I reckon and bound to cause particularly unwarranted and inaccurate prejudices. I’ve already witnessed this happen many many times.
> It’s likely that ADHD and Autism prevalence has not changed
Any evidence? Autism risk increases with paternal age and maternal diabetes status, so I find it hard to believe that prevalence is unchanged from 30 years ago.
Do we even know if it is the risk of it or just a correlation? E.g. older parents could have more resources to get their kids to therapist where they get diagnosed?
And so older parents will have higher likelihood of having kids with autism?
Or maybe it is hereditary and fathers prone to autism are less likely to get children earlier in their life. It makes sense if you consider social awkwardness part of autism.
Everytime I see research on those subjects it seems like those correlations could be explained away by also 1000 different factors.
To me intuitively it feels like ADHD and Autism in many cases are largely just natural variance because of evolutionary process, seen as something wrong due to environment having been changed. And a lot of the research seems to make claims on just correlation.
I have ADHD diagnosis and I almost got Autism diagnosis and multiple doctors have noted I have autistic tendencies, but I think it is just trade offs. It is where you direct your limited mental resources to. Sometimes it is acceptable to current society, sometimes not.
To sum up both diagnosis for me seem to be because I have easier time to focus on other things that most other people can't while I have harder time focusing on what is easy for most.
I find the peculiar thing about ADHD and Autism is they can be imposed. As in, if you make less eye contact than others, have fewer deeper interests, and a few other traits you are treated as PERMANENTLY disordered from the date of your diagnosis. Such things are very unacceptable to society appearantly.
> To sum up both diagnosis for me seem to be because I have easier time to focus on other things that most other people can't while I have harder time focusing on what is easy for most.
If you read the criteria for both diagnosis’s, they both have nothing to do with you having positive traits, even if you do have positive traits which come hand in hand with positive ones, it’s simply not considered. I find it entirely ridiculous really and it’s comical how often Autism in particular is portrayed alongside savant traits. There is something deeply distorted about considering somebody disordered or not based on the sum of their weaknesses.
What I was pointing out is that "awareness" is a confounder here. The statistic we have is that diagnosis rates have increased substantially. We cannot say why because there is no way to untangle the factors that may influence this statistic.
So no, I don't have evidence, and neither do you.
As someone who spent many years in medical biology and studied biostatistics, I am inclined to treat any biochemistry arguments with deep skepticism. It is in the author's interest to say they have found the answer for something because money is always in short supply. The more boring answer that society is not about to collapse into flapping mutes because we have learnt some new facts and our culture has changed doesn't get you research funding.
I really wish people wouldn't lump Autism and ADHD together. This is like lumping "cancer" all together. "Autism" isn't even a single disease just by itself.
For autism, the correlation on age and diabetes status is real, but weak.
The counterfactual is that autism in minority populations is growing much faster than it is in the non-minority population. The only good correlation is health care coverage and the correlation is very strong. That tends to suggest that the "increase" is mostly increased diagnosis and treatment.
And, in my personal experience, "weak" ADHD is being HUGELY over diagnosed (for various reasons--some of which are non-medical) while "stronger" ADHD is being significantly underdiagnosed (because dealing with it is expensive on multiple fronts).
However, note that none of these things are absolutes. Weak correlations do exist. The human organism is highly variable--some things work for some of the people some of the time. The problem is figuring out which things work for which individuals most of the time.
The diagnostic overlap the two is quite striking and I’ve heard people seriously suggest that not only should the two be conflated, but that the two are the same thing. Realistically ADHD and Autism are arbitrary social constructs only loosely linked to biological reality popularized by the ICD and DSM and behaviourism, and I don’t find the unquestionable biological reality of ADHD -or- Autism all that convincing. One of the more interesting attempts at rethinking how we categorize people is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Domain_Criteria
>weak ADHD overdiagnosis
ADHD diagnosis is used to gatekeep methylphenidate and amphetamine access, and I think making those drugs more freely available would be helpful, so I have little issue with rising ADHD diagnosis. I do question the wisdom of forcing people to go to a doctor and convincing them to label them as “disordered” if they want access to drugs they find helpful, but that’s the system we have.
Autism overdiagnosis I take more issue with because there are limited effacious treatments or accommodations for it. Diagnosis to me seems driven to me quite bluntly more by entitlements being connected to Autism than anything else and I find the rising diagnosis more perverse. Generally my support for a diagnosis hinges on my perception that being diagnosed helps the person diagnosed and the collective good.
There was some research out of Texas after they passed a law forcing Sped enrollment to be capped at 8.5% with an allowed racial discrepancy of more than 1%. BOTH the GenEd and SpEd started graduating less, but the black students who were the most likely to be put in SpEd classes before the legal changes graduated more. To me this shows we have either already passed the point of overtreatment in the black population and are likely just above or below the line of an “optimal level of treatment” for the rest of the population.
People have written plenty of papers, theses, and books on this topic. You could start with the book Neurotribes which explores the history of autism in psychiatry comprehensively.
The illustration at the top of the article shows plastic drink bottles, which are unlikely to contain BPA. According to Wikipedia, the most likely BPA sources in the food supply would be from the linings of metal cans:
> As a result of the presence of BPA in plastics and other commonplace materials, most people are frequently exposed to trace levels of BPA. The primary source of human exposure is via food, as epoxy and PVC are used to line the inside of food cans to prevent corrosion of the metal by acidic foodstuffs. Polycarbonate drinks containers are also a source of exposure, although most disposable drinks bottles are actually made of PET, which contains no BPA.[1]
Polycarbonates are the rigid plastics like the ones used in reusable water bottles, but many such bottles are now BPA-free.
People used to bury stuff in their gardens, e.g. Plastic & Asbestos. Imagine you bury it on a hill and a bit further down, say, 20 meters, they have a little garden with radishes and onions and potatoes and stuff and in a little greenhouse in between there are tomatoes growing. Insects are crawling all over the place and micey beings are doing their thing. There's cats and birds and stuff is happening. And it gets warmer every year and the kids and grandkids are playing and building and burning things and they love the fruits and vegetables coming out of and around this garden. Multiply this by a neighborhood. And remember, 60, 70 years ago, lefties, hippies and scientists have put effort into warning people.
Hi autistic here. One thing to keep in mind is that autism prevalence appears to be increasing because testing has gotten better : was 0.04% when I was a kid 30 years ago, now 2.78%. Also Asperger's was merged into ASD in 2013. Keep this in mind when reading sources like this.
I'm going to take a wild stab at a causative effect and note that both Autism and ADHD are associated with compulsive chewing and unusual dietary habits.
I don't buy the BPA causes ADHD/Autism correlation direction AT ALL because where's the dose-response relationship? BPA exposure varies quite a bit in the population and this correlation is slight.
One common coping approach for compulsive chewing which is indeed associated with ADHD (and co-morbid anxiety that's pretty common with it) is "here, wear this plastic thingy on a necklace and chew on it instead of other stuff".
> The study showed that for a significant proportion of children with autism, the ability to add the glucose molecule to BPA is about 10 percent less than that of control children. For a significant proportion of children with ADHD, it’s about 17 percent less.
Considering the rather huge differences between someone with autism and someone without, and the presumably rather large variation in ingested dose of BPA, a 10% difference in the elimination speed of a toxin doesn't seem like the whole picture.
> The study showed that for a significant proportion of children with autism, the ability to add the glucose molecule to BPA is about 10 percent less than that of control children. For a significant proportion of children with ADHD, it’s about 17 percent less.
The study's veracity notwithstanding, DOs are trained and accredited with the exact same curriculum and standards as MDs plus an additional section in Osteopathy. I don't think it's valid to use the fact that someone is an Osteopath against them.
Science in general, including MD conducted research has a lot of room for improvement.
Go read about lies and fake data in science. Then, read about efforts and successes of self-taught, passionate people. I know some scientists, I know quite a few doctors, I know engineers and other officially recognized professionals. MOST of them are objectively the worst at their jobs. Most of them Germans in Germany ...
Fearmongering clickbait title. Should be "positive correlation found between ADHD/ASD diagnoses and inhibited metabolism of BPA". The trick is that ADHD and ASD are already known to be genetic. So it's way more likely that the genetic variation that contributes to ADHD/ASD coincidentally also contributes to a reduction in our ability to metabolize BPA. Not that BPA causes ADHD/ASD.
Adhd & autism is not a disease but likely phenotypes of genetic diversity. Want to get rid of it? Its equal to eugenics and racism, getting rid of diversity.
ADHD literally has “disorder” in the name. The prejudices people have against these diverse people are rooted in medical authorities referring to them with insulting and condescending language. We stopped calling being gay or transgender a disease or disorder because it fucks up the lives of those labelled as such.
Wanting to get rid of ADHD and Autism may be eugenics, but it’s also a popular notion. What do you think happens when you tell the whole of society since these people are different, they are disordered, and need to be treated with lower expectations and given more benefits? Plenty of the disabled were killed by the Nazi’s including Autistics.
it's not in any way implying that BPA exposure is causing neurodivergentnl disorders
so it's more like if you, through unrelated reasons have autism, you are also more likely to be worse at handling BPA
in general there is strong indication that autism is largely related to genes
also science is increasingly moving away from calling it a disorder, it seems to be more like a natural variation instead. A variation which happens to be not very compatible with modern society and therefore often comes hand in hand with disorders like e.g. anxiety disorders caused by the friction modern society exposes on them. I mean think about a societyb strictly build for people at most 1.60m in height but you are 2.20m, you likely would have all kinds of mental and physical issues from the fact that everything in the world isn't compatible with your body size.
This is a small study that doesn't earn such a big subject line.
> BPA is about 10 percent less than that of control children. For a significant proportion of children with ADHD, it’s about 17 percent less.
The percentages are confusing me, BPA intake can vary greatly - if there was a stronger link shouldn't this be much obvious just in folks with higher BPA exposure?
Also there are bunch of metabolic conditions/disorders linked with autism already.
I don't understand what you would learn from such research other than "more research needed", certainly not what the headline implies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_autism#Metabolic_dis...