Autism and rain? New research

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Hi, I work in medicine and received this short abstract about some new research, does anyone have access to this journal that could post their opinion on it's value in terms of the number of subjects and the validity of the conclusions? Thanks in advance.

Autism and Rain[Summary and Comment | Subscription Required] Mean annual precipitation rates were positively and significantly associated with autism prevalence rates.By Howard Bauchner, MDNovember 26, 2008Covering: Waldman M et al. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2008 Nov 162:1026Weiss NS. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2008 Nov 162:1095

I don't know.

I'm really not an expert at this, but I do wonder if cause and effect/other unrelated factors are being mixed up here?

Just because there's a positive correlation in the data doesn't always mean that it's the right or relevant correlation.

Perhaps some hi-tech industry cities just happen to coincide with areas of high rainfall due to the rain rising over the mountains, rain shadow patterns etc. If that was in fact the case then it wouldn't surprise me.

There are already threads that discuss this issue, and they have links to reports about the study which might be useful to you (use the search function at the top of the WP page, type in rain, choose WP site search when the google search box appears).

In terms of the questions you've asked, the following might help (and is an exert from one of the threads you can find by searching WP as described above)
For the study, Waldman's team looked at the prevalence of autism among children in California, Oregon and Washington. They also used data from the National Climatic Data Center to calculate the average annual rainfall by county in these states.

The researchers found among school-aged children in these states that the prevalence of autism rose as the amount of precipitation increased. In fact, the prevalence in autism increased up to 30 percent in the rainiest counties.

In before "Rain Man" jokes!

An alternative theory:

a) some quiet NT children are mis-diagnised as autistic and some "outdourish" autistic children are mis-diagonesed as non-autistics

b) in rainy towns, childen tend to be more quit and less outdorish (then, the first error is more likely to occur and the second less likely)