An infamous chemical has been strongly linked to Autism

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Not the one I expected the article to be about when I clicked it (glyphosate), no, they’re saying a mother exposed to DDT has a way higher chance of having autistic kids. And possibly PCB’s, too.

Read: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-m ... to-autism/

Interesting, not all about the mercury and anti-vaccers huh.

My dad has some very mild traits of it, he does this stimming thing where he occasionally rubs his hands together excessively and smells his hands/fingers, and walks on the balls of his feet, dislikes bright lights and apparently has slight eye contact issues. Otherwise though he’s completely normal.

Is there an actual paper or a publication of the findings? I can't find anything, and the link on that article is broken.

The article can be found on the journal's website: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10 ... 8.17101129

The full text is behind a pay firewall, but you can at least see the abstract. Note that the abstract refers to "p,p′-DDE." It is a chemical compound that results when DDT breaks down.

Nope, apparently not. Kraftie’s onto something with his “Autisms,” hypothesis.

It may be that each of these causes is a cause of x% of cases on the ASD spectrum. If so, there may eventually be separate “subtypes,” of Autism as there are ADD/ADHD but with different causes, symptoms/traits, and possible treatments. Etc. Only time till tell for sure.

A rather poor source of information is iflscience, where reports are double distilled for dumbing-down purity.
Most relevant research can be found using Google scholar or various free databases.

iflscience is to real science as psychologytoday is to real psychology.

If this is Fake News, please explain how it's Fake News vs. just saying you don't particularly care for the network it's broadcast on.

Seriously. If this is illegitimate Alternative Facts, educate us.

The article links to the actual study...

Yes, except that it's a dead link.

Well, for one thing, the title of this story on iflscience is "An Infamous Chemical Has Been Strongly Linked To Autism" while the source article (link provided above by RandomFact) is titled "Association of Maternal Insecticide Levels With Autism in Offspring From a National Birth Cohort." The wording of the first is sensationalistic, using words like "infamous" and "strongly," while the actual source article is much more restrained, referring only to "association."

This is what I mean by dumbing down. Most of us can't read the source article unless we have a university or professional affiliation or a medical library nearby. Popularized versions of scientific papers are nearly always less accurate and less careful than the scientific papers themselves, often giving a suggestion of proven fact whereas source articles - if they are in peer-reviewed publications - are more nuanced.

I never called it fake news. That's a term I never use. I did call it dumbed-down, as I just explained in my reply to Alex.

Autism is normal.

I used the term.

It's a news outlet. What expectations do you have of a news article? IFLScience, or any other news source, is going to write summaries of whatever the study is and publish it as an article & then promote it on Facebook to generate some ad revenue etc. This is how people see the news at all. Almost No One goes to some scientific study database and searches to see if there's anything new on a specific topic. News articles get written on these things and that's how people learn of them. Your suggestion that people turn to searching scientific publication databases for new studies instead of seeing a news headline to learn about things isn't practical or realistic. That's why we have news publishers.. publishing news articles.

WOW!

Who knew that exposing a mother to DDT would result in a higher chance of her having PCBs...

<* Well, that's how the sentence parses, anyway... *>

I happen to be in the "Almost No One" group. The database that I use the most: Scifinder Scholar. It is an expensive database to buy personal access to, but my university gives me free access to it as a faculty/staff member.

It would be nice if people would actually attempt to read the scientific journals more. We need more scientific literacy in the world. But, that would require effort that many do not want to exert. Often, I hear complaints that scientists should "dumb everything down" for the common man/woman. I take personal offense to this, as there are certain topics that get lost in the translation when you do that.

Learning to read scientifically is not something that comes naturally to most people. (I never had that problem.) I have to introduce starting chemists to the literature in my classes because many of them would not start reading in that area if they had a choice. What I found is that if you introduce articles that have an interesting possibility for the future, the students will tend to want to read it and some even do further research on it.

I really wish that people cared more about what they can learn with what they were given. This leads to the curse of the smart phone, as many people use their minds at a lower level and let the phone do the thinking for them. It will be interesting to see what they do if that system ever crashes in their lifetime.

Haha! That’s funny. It took me a second to understand.

Whatever passed through the placental barrier - I don’t think most contaminants pass through the barrier. Unless sometimes the barrier does not do its work properly

Last edited by Pjscrab on 17 Aug 2018, 12:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Again, all two of you can keep searching scientific study databases to your hearts’ content.. but the rest of the entire world relies on news headlines to hear about new things. Is what it is.