“Flagging” 3 months old for potential autism

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NEW AUTISM RESEARCH COULD PREDICT WHETHER CHILDREN AS YOUNG AS 3 MONTHS OLD ARE AT RISK

Bolding is mine.
Me thinks “early intervention strategies” is a nice way of saying finding a way to intercept and deflect the autism before the brain gets as the doctor put it “derailed”.

It strikes me as repugnant. Many people here will not have had their own 12 week old infants, but those of us who have may feel especially strongly about this. They are helpless little creatures, needing lots of cuddles and gentleness, and the idea of diagnosing them is just sick IMO. Children naturally develop at different rates, there are ranges not definite ages for some things.

There are similar stories nearly every day in the US media. I highly suspect it is the ABA monopoly that is the driving force behind this, they want to mess with these babies brains at a point in their lives when brain “wiring” changes and forms most rapidly. Everytime you read yet another praise of “early intervention” think ABA.

@both of you.

What exactly is wrong with research doctors trying to determine what causes ASD brain wiring and when it begins?

There are MANY things that are diagnosed in infants - and it's critical for their survival that they are.. some things are diagnosed before birth even. Why oppose furthering medical knowledge of ASD development?

It is a matter of how the information is to be used and I am suspicious of how it will be used.

We are not talking about a deadly flu virus that needs to be diagnosed at any age. I agree with B19 that 3 months old is way too young to be diagnosing psychological/developmental conditions. This goes beyound autism to a fundemental disagreement I have with diagnosing these conditions at these very young ages. It often does not take into account that kids mature differently. Another words the baby who is not speaking, not making eye contact, melting down often etc may just be late developing and not autistic. We have largely lost the philosophy of letting kids be kids and have been doing so for a long time.

If one autism is a curse caused by environmental poisoning most of this research is not looking at those factors.

The whole you have to have symptoms before a certain age is a diagnostic construct anyway. I guess now some experts will be saying if you don't display signs by 3 months you can't be autistic.

Without the knowledge it's impossible to use it in any way. Who's to say it won't be used for good? And who are you to determine what "good," is for that patient (mother, unborn child) or doctor? Decisions with medical information are rather personal & you'd be just as free to make your own decisions about yourself and your unborn child as anyone else ought to be about themselves and theirs. Maybe a pregnant woman might opt to alter her diet/supplements in order to prevent ASD development, and maybe you'd opt to alter yours in the opposite fashion in order to encourage it - but why do you think the knowledge shouldn't exist for anyone to do anything with?

The purpose of diagnosing children at very young ages is early intervention/treatment/therapy, but also possibly figuring out how to prevent diseases in the first place, or limit their severity so they're not so life hindering for people. There are many applications of medicine & of the earliest possible diagnosis as well as of knowing the root cause of the development of said anomalies.

Re: Your last line. (Which isn't crystal clear to me due to grammar/sentence structure - I may be misinterpreting what you intended to say.) How will research doctors know if autism is caused by environmental poisoning if they're not allowed to investigated what is causing different brain/neural wiring at it's earliest stages?

Of course it's a diagnostic construct.. and sometimes those rigid rules are ridiculous when they don't seem to apply to an individual. But diagnostic criteria & constructs change with new knowledge. There may be entirely new ways to diagnose ASD in newborns, or even prior to birth, as these researchers work backwards up the human development timeline.

I have to go by what information is and has been researched and how it was and is being used. Based on that I do not expect it to be used well.

I have every right to make a moral judgment on what should be done with the information and where the limited research funding should go. I have no idea what it is like to parent a severely autistic child. Because of that should I accept "bleach enemas" as none of my B I business?

I apologize for the last line of my last post. What I was trying to say is that most of the research about diagnosing babies has nothing to do with environmental issues but is behavioral and brain structure related. If one is a believer of environmental poisoning as a major cause of autism I would think one would rather have the money go to preventing the poisoning in the first place and curing/treating the effects of the poisoning then where it is going now which is diagnosing as early as possible to get ABA started as early as possible.

"Don't expect it to be used well." is entirely subjective.. as it depends on what your definition of using the information "well," is. Your definition may differ from mine, and both may vary from the research doctors involved in this, which may in turn be different from the patients' in this study's thoughts on the matter.

You have every right to make a moral judgement on what YOU do with information as it pertains to YOUR morals. That's my point. I could take the same information and make a decision that's right for ME that you wouldn't think was right for YOU and IMO that's just fine. Same same for every other individual making medical decisions. Some people say "Save me no matter what I want to live!" others say "DNR!" neither is wrong, both are making highly personal decisions with the same medical information.

Doctors researching the cause of ASD is completely incomparable to The Holocaust, or even the biggest genocide ever committed against humans when 90-95% of Indigenous Americans were killed off in a span of 200 years -> that's 130 Million people. There are no Autistic death trains or gas chambers, and there isn't a cavalry paid a per head reward for murdering ASD people. Get real.

Your argument against early diagnosis is.. weird. You think the methods are behavioural, but in the very same sentence admit that they are looking at brain structure. IF ASD's are caused by environmental poisoning, then why would you oppose research doctors trying to find out the root cause of ASD's beginning as far back in development as they can trace it so that they can then look at possibilities like preventing the environmental poisoning that's (maybe) triggering the different brain wiring structure to occur? If doctors don't continue to research these things and learn new knowledge, how can any of that be made possible in the future? You can't have a poison control solution without first determining which (if any) poison(s) it is that's causing this and when it's occurring so that it can be managed.

In America, most treatments of autistics are ABA with a bunch of speech therapy. This happened because of Autism parental organizations lobbied for it and mandated insurance companies pay for it. It is considered the "gold standard" treatment here. Look at nearly every article about effective Autism treatments for kids and ABA is almost always the first thing mentioned and then praised. ABA by definition does not give a s**t about causation just changing behaviors. Brain structure research can find what brain structure changes are likely to result in an autistic child. By itself, causation of the changes is irrelevant to this research. It is only relevant if they are looking at the structural changes in that context. The money is in looking at things in a behavioral context. The Autism diagnosis is based on behaviors. Why should I assume this emphasis on behaviors is going to suddenly change?

I apologize for breaking my own rule with the Nazi comparison. I changed that section.

Um, because that's what the article you quoted says?



They say right here they're measuring EEG signals in the brain & patterns of brain activity.. not merely observing behaviours.

They are not looking at the causes of any EEG changes. They are comparing EEG changes with later Autism diagnosis which is based largely on behaviors. In theory, diagnosing by EEG changes is "better" than later behavioral diagnosis but they have no idea how their EEG diagnosis will be used and if earlier treatments will change the natural maturing of a baby and if it does if that is a good or moral thing to do.

And how will they know without furthering their research?

As for good or moral medical decisions, as I pointed out, these things depend on one’s own personal definition of good and one's own personal moral code.

Everything I do is perfectly moral by my moral code. You cannot judge what I do as immoral because it may go against your own personal moral code. People live their lives by their own definitions of what is moral and what is not, for them, and thus it is not up to you to decide what is or isn’t moral for others.

I have no kids but I have no problem seeing that 3 months is way too young to consider autism.

I'm even skeptical to diagnosing kids (and the younger, the more skeptical I am) with Asperger's because they develop at such different rates.

So, one person is making a judgement based on their experience with their own children, and another based on not being around developing children... which is fine - these are the frames of reference each of you have to form your opinions.

However, the people who are professionally diagnosing infants are Doctors and they are basing their assessments on diagnostic criteria... not guesses out of thin air. IMO, the earlier the diagnosis & as far back as research can reveal the root causes of the development of ASD the better. Of course, what I or any of us on this forum think of the matter is rather moot - these people are furthering their research and knowledge of all of these things regardless. It's just that you think it's bad and I think it's good.. but my point is, these people are Doctors, not laymen on a forum. They know exactly what they are doing and why.