Archive for November, 2006

Treating Root Cause of Autism Offers Hope

November 18, 2006 at 9:33 am · Filed under About Autism / Chelation Therapy

New theories on the causes of autism seem to sprout up on a monthly basis of late. Some are weeds; others resemble bulbs ready to bloom.

A significant study arrived this September when epidemiologist Avi Reichenberg of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine had sifted through the historical data on “more than 300,000 parent-child records, and found that men older than 40 were nearly six times more likely to have children with autism than fathers under 30 years old” (as reported on www.sciencentral.com, from a study published in Archives of General Psychiatry.)

I was 39 years old when my son Fridrik was conceived. In 2003, he was diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), a prevalent form of autism. Although I didn’t quite fit the bill, having been on the cusp of the vulnerable age, I see the logic behind the theory.

Male sperm deteriorate as they get older. Therefore, the weakening strands of DNA are more likely to produce some sort of congenital disease when men hit their forties. The same applies to women in the same age bracket.

For autism and its epidemic, the Old Dad Theory explains an older parent’s greater likelihood of having a child born with the disorder. But the study is silent on the root cause.

It does not explain how the bulk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children end up with heavy metal contamination in their systems, in particular lead and mercury. The theory explains how babies of older dads might be born with latent triggers to get some form of autism, but it doesn’t begin to tackle the much bigger and more elusive question: What sets off the autism trigger in the first place?

Wacky Theory

In strong contrast to the fine detective work in the Old Dad Theory is a new study that claims “TV Triggers Autism.” In this wacky article—which I would dismiss out of hand, if it didn’t come from Cornell University—an economics professor studied TV viewing habits in three northwest states. He found that the sharp rise in watching television, which spiked in the 1980s, had a direct correlation with more children getting autism.

I know for a fact that I watched far more TV in the 1960s than my boy watched four decades later. If this new theory had any validity, then my younger brother and I would have gotten autism, which was extremely rare in those days, and my son should have been normal.

Over the decades, television has been blamed for many societal ills, from the erosion of morals, to copycat violence, to ruining one’s eyesight.

TV doesn’t cause autism. Not a chance. For parents who are dealing with this devastating disorder, whose family relationships are often torn apart and family finances ruined, the last thing we need is an outlandish, unquantifiable, and impossible-to-prove theory.

There are many things that have increased since 1980. The population of the United States crossed the 300 million threshold in October 2006. The number of vaccines given to babies in the first two years of their lives has gone up four times. In many of those vaccines, the amount of thimerosal—the mercury-based preservative used to keep vaccines free of bacteria during production and add to their shelf life—increased tenfold.

Since the rate of autism has outstripped the growth of the population over the past quarter of a century, we know that genetics alone can’t cause an epidemic. So there has to be a biomedical element, something outside the child’s body that works in concert with the latent environmental triggers that set babies on a path that leads to autism.

Heavy Metals—and Hope

Many ASD children like my son lack a normal child’s ability to excrete the heavy metals that poison their bodies. The injecting of thimerosal into my baby began when he was only two to three hours old, when his brain and nervous system were still developing.

Heavy metals contamination also explains the recent behavior of Fridrik as he recovers from this disease. For a little more than a year, my wife and I put him through a rigorous chelation therapy that bound and excreted the toxins out of him. Fridrik re-experienced the first days when he fell prone at two years old—lost his appetite and ability to use his fingers, and became mute with PDD.

His many episodes of regression followed the chelation treatments that purged the mercury and other heavy metals from his body. Now two months after stopping chelation therapy, Fridrik’s regressions have all but vanished.

At six years old, he now reads at an eight-year-old level. His math has come a long way, too, since last spring, when he couldn’t grasp simple addition. He sees a speech therapist after school and she has identified his mute problem. The non-verbal autism is now nothing more than an oral muscle problem, one he will overcome on his way to being a normal child one day.

That is happening because we identified and tackled the environmental aspects of our son’s problem early, often, and head-on. Parents of ASD children who haven’t gone down this path should do some research on their own and then go after the root cause of autism. An educated parent is the best defense against the disorder stealing a child’s potential.

The father of an autistic child, James Ottar Grundvig lives and works in New York City.

By James Ottar Grundvig
Special to The Epoch Times

Comments

Industrial chemicals linked to ADHD, autism

November 8, 2006 at 9:31 pm · Filed under About Autism / Chelation Therapy

Updated Tue. Nov. 7 2006 7:53 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

Industrial chemicals have caused a “silent pandemic” of brain disorders, according to study published Tuesday in the British medical journal, the Lancet.

One in every six children has some kind of developmental disability, and most of these affect the nervous system.

Exposure to toxic chemicals during fetal development can be linked to autism, attention deficit disorder, cerebral palsy and developmental delays, say the study’s authors.

“The human brain is a precious and vulnerable organ. And because optimal brain function depends on the integrity of the organ, even limited damage may have serious consequences,” said Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor at Harvard School of Public Health and the study’s lead author.

Grandjean and his team described how industrial chemicals like lead, mercury, PCBs, arsenic and toluene are causing brain injury in developing babies.

The largest groups of chemicals that cause such problems are metals, solvents and pesticides. The team identifies 201 chemcials with toxic effects.

Developing babies are much more susceptible to brain injury caused by toxic agents than adults are. During the nine months of prenatal life, the human brain is developing from a strip of very sensitive cells.

The blood-brain barrier, which protects the adult brain from many toxic chemicals, is not fully formed until an infant is six months old.

Also, certain pesticides and industrial compounds accumulate in breast tissue. They are passed to an infant through its mother’s breast milk. The result is infant exposure to these chemicals is 100 times the mother’s exposure levels.

The study points out that damage caused by industrial chemicals is preventable; however the toxic effects of industrial chemicals are not regulated in a way that protects children.

Research showed preschool children living in agricultural communities and exposed to pesticides had more brain development problems than kids in urban communities.

Toxic exposure can also have delayed consequences as well, including Parkinson’s disease or other neurodegenerative diseases in adults.

Recognizing the sensitivity of the developing brain has led to successful prevention programs in the past, such as eliminating lead additives in gasoline.

The study identifies roadblocks to more of such prevention programs.

Grandjean and his team say regulators need to test commonly used chemicals for their effects on the developing brain. The study says of the thousands of chemicals on the market, “fewer than half have been subjected to even token laboratory testing for toxicity.”

The study also says new chemicals should be tested specifically for neural effects before they are allowed to be sold. Finally, the researchers say too much proof is required to demonstrate a chemical is risky.

Many scientists are speaking out in support of the research. One critic, however, says it does not take into account that many children affected by chemicals are exposed to much higher than average amounts of toxins, and that safe amounts do exist.

Warren Foster, director of the Centre of Reproductive Care at Ontario’s McMaster University, cautions that these findings do not mean a ban on chemicals is necessary or helpful.

“We still need coolants, we still need plasticizers, we still need flame retardants, we still need solvents,'’ Foster said. “So if we ban these, they’re going to be replaced with something else. And just because something else comes along that we know nothing about doesn’t mean it’s safer.'’

With files from Canadian Press

Comments

Science by Press Release

November 5, 2006 at 8:29 am · Filed under About Autism / Chelation Therapy

Public understanding of autism research suffers from two perennial complications: correlational studies and press releases. The report by Waldman, Nicholson and Adilov (“Profs: TV May Trigger Autism,” October 27) is, I fear, the latest example of both these foibles. The controversy surrounding Waldman et al.’s unpublished and incompletely substantiated study illustrates the danger that arises when the conduct of science by peer review is supplanted with science by press release.

Waldman et al.’s curious hypothesis that television viewing may trigger autism stems from four items of backgroun evidence: a reported correlation between television viewing and later diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), an abnormal slowness to disengage attention in children whose family histories put them at risk for later diagnosis of autism, large increases during the late twentieth century in both autism and television viewing and a low incidence of autism amongst the Amish, who do not use electricity and therefore do not watch television. These separate indications, Waldman et al. claim, add up to plausibility for the idea that television viewing may trigger autism in certain susceptible children.However, nascent ADHD seems more likely to spur television viewing than vice versa, abnormalities of attention might predispose to autism without any involvement of television and many factors other than television habits distinguish both the late twentieth century and the Amish.This argument from television is cast further into question when one recognizes that Waldman et al. haven’t actually studied any children with autism. Their claim rests not on individual data but on group data, measurements from demographic and geographic databases that sample the general population. Waldman et al. present a roundabout argument in which correlations between autism incidence and precipitation rates and, separately, between precipitation and television viewing, amount to a causal effect of television on autism. Such a correlational argument is as apt to establish, say, that ice cream sales cause homicides, since both peak at the same time of year. Many environmental variables in addition to television viewing likely correlate with precipitation — for instance, agricultural run-off, exposure to indoor toxins, or even the geographical factor of proximity to an autism diagnostic clinic (since coastal cities tend to contain more of these).

In addition, in a set of as many variables and comparisons as Waldman et al. apparently have examined, one is certain to find correlations that arise simply by chance. Verifying such correlations demands that the test replicate in separate samples. Waldman et al.’s report does suggest a correlation between autism and precipitation in data from Oregon and Washington. In California, though, the greatest incidence of autism arises in Los Angeles and other relatively dry counties in the south. In addition, Waldman et al.’s data on ethnicity effects seem so equivocal as to argue against any robust relation between autism and television: an effect is found in the case of the native American population, but not in the cases of black and Hispanic populations.

Paradoxically, Waldman et al. argue that their indirect finding that autism is related to television through precipitation is less assailable than a direct correlation between television and autism would be, since although autism might cause increased television viewing, autism cannot of course cause increased precipitation. Even assuming that the precipitation-autism connection is real, this argument ignores the strong possibility that precipitation could cause both autism and television viewing, separately. Further doubt is sown by the model’s lack of biological plausibility: indications from studies of early brain growth are that autism is determined by the end of the first year of life, before the time at which a great deal of television exposure would have occurred. Although it is true that autism’s social and communicative deficits aren’t reliably diagnosed until toddlerhood, other, more subtle abnormalities of neurophysiology and behaviour do exist early on.

Every few years, a press release touts a breakthrough in autism research or treatment. The list of these discredited causes or treatments of autism includes secretin infusion, the MMR vaccine, chelation therapy and facilitated communication. Each of them has given parents false hope, or worse, false guilt. The researchers behind these press releases suffer from the most ethical of motivations: they sincerely believe that their conclusions are sound, they perceive a prejudice of the scientific establishment against these conclusions, and they sense an urgency to communicate their findings to the broadest possible audience of scholars and, more significantly, parents, so as to prevent autism’s ongoing tragedy. This well-motivated urgency often results in circumvention of peer review, the careful process by which scientific findings are vetted and judged worthy of presentation to the broader community. Despite its many faults and delays, peer review remains essential to maintaining public trust in science.

Perhaps the worst consequence of circumventing peer review is that those elements of the study that might have withstood scrutiny end up written off along with all the rest. Waldman et al.’s correlation between autism and precipitation would, if verified, constitute an interesting result on the possible role of environmental toxins. But its association with the autism-and-television conclusion may render it less likely to be followed up. (A similar blanket dismissal occurred in the case of the very flawed technique of facilitated communication, certain elements of which are in fact compatible with what’s known about autistic attention and motor planning.)

Waldman et al. are sensitive to the urgent need for intervention in autism’s growing public health crisis, and for this sincere motivation they deserve our respect. They’re correct in asserting that their hypothesis about autism and television is easy enough to test prospectively. I encourage them to do so, and to report their findings in a peer-reviewed publication.

Matthew Belmonte is an assistant professor at the Department of Human Development at Cornell University. He can be contacted at mkb4@cornell.edu. Guest Room appears periodically.


By Matthew Belmonte at Nov 3 2006 - 1:00am

Comments