lau wrote:
^ (I took the liberty of fixing the link)
The idea that "Autism affects boys four times more often than girls" is rather contentious - and in any case, you can't "catch" autism.
All the report seems to be saying is that, if you selectively restrict your sample to "1,046 members of families with at least two sons affected by autism", then it is hardly surprising that whatever you find, the weighting towards boys, versus girls, would be an obvious systematic error.
The paper itself is at:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/va ... e07999.pdf(but you would need to pay to see the content - the abstract is there, though)
Oddly, nothing in the abstract seems to connect with the various conflicting news reports of what it is all about.
This study would also presume that all cases of autism are the same (just varying in degree) and therefore caused by the same set of genes. This is inherently flawed.
Autism and its cousins are the medical community's way of giving loose categorizations to similar symptoms-- behavioral "abnormalies" that are only identified as such because they deviate from an established norm. While we share similar traits, one gene or 10 can't begin to unlock the complexity of each individual. They may have identified one common gene in some autistics, and this particular gene may be X-linked (hence the 4-1 ratio of boys to girls identified), but that does not mean that the ratio of all autistics is 4-1. In fact, as we've seen in previous articles and personal accounts, autistic girls are highly underdiagnosed because their behaviors grate less harsly against female sterotypical behavior as autistic behaviors do against the picture of male sterotypical behavior.
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"If there's one thing in my life that these years have taught it's that you can always see it coming, but you can never stop it." ~Cowboy Junkies
20 May 2009, 11:30 pm
