Autism Blood Biomarker Discovered

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Interesting article here:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 085405.htm

Of course, the article starts out with this assertion: "Early intervention is the key to the best treatment for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which affects about 1 in 70 children."

Thank goodness only children are affected...

There's really no need to treat children at all, as autism disappears on its own on one's 18th birthday.

Edited to add: I also see that girls were once again an afterthought in this study. What's more invisible than an autistic adult? A female autistic adult.

So very true... We actually don't exist.

And I'm not a female, but it does seem girls and women get short shrift when it comes to research, which is truly unfortunate. I've known girls that I suspect were on the spectrum, but it may be that the behavioral aspects of ASD are markedly different and / or less obvious with females. I do know one woman, a few years older than myself, who I'm pretty sure is on the spectrum although she isn't diagnosed.

More propaganda! Yes!

I don't think it's as much propaganda in most instances as it is ignorance. The general public is only dimly aware of what autism is, generally speaking. And news media just keep recycling the same emphasis on percentages of children impacted - as though the rest of us should have outgrown it by now.

The article could just as easily have referred to is as affecting 1 in 70 children instead of 1 in 70 people because the researchers are trying to diagnose children, and they are diagnosing children because that's when it is best to get the diagnosis.

Nice! Full article here. http://www.nature.com/articles/srep19164

I like it when journals put their publications up on the internet for free for all to read.

sry for multi-post, but it's clear that the person who published the 'for public' information from the study took the offending phrase from "Approximately 1 in 70 children are diagnosed with ASD at an average age of 4 years," in the first line of the paper itself.

I think you might be missing the point. It's not just this one study that singles out children for consideration. It's the vast majority of studies that repeat the same line. While factually true, it's somewhat misleading.

Imagine if you were doing research on blindness, and 99% of the articles you found on the subject referenced children. Wouldn't you begin to wonder whether children "outgrew" blindness, or maybe even didn't make it to adulthood? The repeated citation of children in the majority of these studies only skews public perception of the issue. Autism is no more a childhood diagnosis than is blindness.

It's probably true that children have the most to benefit from research, but it's not like the rest of the adult autistic population deserves to be ignored.

...
the study didn't repeat the same line, the press didn't represent what the study itself said properly.