[Hong Wu]

http://health.howstuffworks.com/mental- ... autism.htm

But a group of researchers out of Cornell and Purdue has focused on a very different possible cause: television. And while headlines are announcing "TV Causes Autism," that's not an accurate representation of what the study found.

Here's what the researchers actually discovered:

Autism-diagnosis rates began to increase dramatically around the same time that cable TV was introduced in the United States, and counties with greater access to cable TV saw greater increases in autism diagnosis.
Autism-diagnosis rates have increased faster in rainier parts of the country.
The researchers related the second finding to television by referring to other studies that suggest that children in rainier climates tend to spend more time indoors than children in less rainy climates; and children who spend more time indoors tend to watch more TV.

What the study did not discover is that TV causes autism.

I believe that if something logically follows, and you can find a strong correlation between the two, waiting for mathematic proof of causation is a mistake. We simply lack the technology to prove if television is causing autism on the epigenetic level, but it has been shown many times that there is a correlation between areas that are exposed to a lot of television and autism rates. We can also observe, quite simply, that the vegetative state when watching television and the vegetative states that characterize many forms of autism are superficially similar. What I am suggesting here is that if a persistent vegetative state in an individual becomes expressed in their epigenetics, their children are more likely to be born with forms of autism. This is impossible to prove from a scientific perspective but the correlation is strong and the theory makes sense because we know that epigenetics effect mental and emotional predispositions. Just because it's beyond our ability to prove doesn't mean it isn't happening.

http://www.nber.org/bah/winter07/w12632.html

While the results indicate that "there is a trigger for autism where exposure to this trigger is positively related with the amount of precipitation in the child's community prior to the age of three," it does not prove that television watching is the trigger, since there could be other indoor activities that children are also more likely to engage in when it rains.

I believe these people missed the point of their own studies. If there is a high exposure to things like television prior to the age of three, that means there could be high exposure to things like television prior to the child being born. The key exposure here is not necessarily to the child in its formative years, it could also be that the exposure to the parents in the periods preceding conception.

Unfortunately, it's our nature these days (especially in the west) to assume that if we can't prove it mathematically, it must not be true, no matter how consistent or rational the correlation might be.

[quetzalcoatl]

Hmm...

The problem with epigenetics is that it can be used to explain anything. Literally anything in a mother's environment might conceivably affect gene expression - including television watching. You're going to need a lot more than hand waving here. Even statistical correlations require control of other factors that might precede TV viewing. Such as time spent indoors, physical inactivity, junk food diet, etc. And at the very least, you will require some model of biological causation that might explain the effect you postulate.

A more plausible explanation might be social interaction and its effect on brain development in young children. This explanation requires no stable heritable phenotype change.

[Hong Wu]

Hmm...

The problem with epigenetics is that it can be used to explain anything. Literally anything in a mother's environment might conceivably affect gene expression - including television watching. You're going to need a lot more than hand waving here. Even statistical correlations require control of other factors that might precede TV viewing. Such as time spent indoors, physical inactivity, junk food diet, etc. And at the very least, you will require some model of biological causation that might explain the effect you postulate.

I don't think a "model of biological causation" should be necessary. Just reason it out.

1. Physical inactivity in of itself doesn't necessarily impact mental states, the two are often distinct from each other.
2. Television does impact mental states and autism is basically a kind of mental state that resembles television watching.
3. Junk food is everywhere but there have been exhaustive studies that attempt to find a food or drug correlation and none of them have been conclusive, yet we know it's been on the rise since television was invented and more-so in television-heavy areas.

IMHO then, the cause must be fundamentally related to television, if we can't pinpoint the exact reason then it's possibly a television-related cause we can't directly analyze and epigenetics are a rational cause that we know we can't analyze.

[quetzalcoatl]

I don't think a "model of biological causation" should be necessary. Just reason it out.

1. Physical inactivity in of itself doesn't necessarily impact mental states, the two are often distinct from each other.
2. Television does impact mental states and autism is basically a kind of mental state that resembles television watching.
3. Junk food is everywhere but there have been exhaustive studies that attempt to find a food or drug correlation and none of them have been conclusive, yet we know it's been on the rise since television was invented and more-so in television-heavy areas.

IMHO then, the cause must be fundamentally related to television, if we can't pinpoint the exact reason then it's possibly a television-related cause we can't directly analyze and epigenetics are a rational cause that we know we can't analyze.

Not sure epigenetics are going to be your best bet, then. The study you cite provides no evidence of stable heritable changes in phenotype resulting from television viewing patterns.

[mikema63]

Physical innactivity certainly impacts mental states, especially depression and anxiety. It's also more likely than television to have epigenetics impact since physical activity levels have impacted human existence for our entire evolution unlike TV.

Autism is a lack of ability to interpret other people's mental states. Television and entertainment largely rely on your ability to interpret people feelings and thoughts so I don't see a clear connection.

There are multitudes of potential explanations as to why places with higher TV watching might corelate with autism. One is that parents are simply more likely to be exposed to information on autism and get their child diagnosed (rightly or wrongly) by being convinced by media portrayals that that's why little johnny doesn't get along well in school. Places with more TV's also tend to be wealthier and have more access to medical care to get those diagnosis. Further wealthier nation's tend to rely more on technical skill in their workforce which makes up for the inherent losses of mild autism leading to more proliferation of the genes associated with autism.

Further it's one thing to suspect correlation might have causation but it's another to speculate on the exact method of causation I.e. epigenetics. Epigenetics isn't nearly as powerful as the media has made out.

You say that showing causation shouldn't be necessary but this thread is a case study in leaping to conclusions.

[Hong Wu]

Not sure epigenetics are going to be your best bet, then. The study you cite provides no evidence of stable heritable changes in phenotype resulting from television viewing patterns.

Don't post things that aren't true just because I'm disagreeing with you. The study doesn't reject the possibility of a genetic cause and epigenetics are one of the areas we have a lot of trouble analyzing. Also, the term "phenotype" does not appear in the study at all.

[Hong Wu]

Physical innactivity certainly impacts mental states, especially depression and anxiety. It's also more likely than television to have epigenetics impact since physical activity levels have impacted human existence for our entire evolution unlike TV.

Autism is a lack of ability to interpret other people's mental states. Television and entertainment largely rely on your ability to interpret people feelings and thoughts so I don't see a clear connection.

There are multitudes of potential explanations as to why places with higher TV watching might corelate with autism. One is that parents are simply more likely to be exposed to information on autism and get their child diagnosed (rightly or wrongly) by being convinced by media portrayals that that's why little johnny doesn't get along well in school. Places with more TV's also tend to be wealthier and have more access to medical care to get those diagnosis. Further wealthier nation's tend to rely more on technical skill in their workforce which makes up for the inherent losses of mild autism leading to more proliferation of the genes associated with autism.

Further it's one thing to suspect correlation might have causation but it's another to speculate on the exact method of causation I.e. epigenetics. Epigenetics isn't nearly as powerful as the media has made out.

You say that showing causation shouldn't be necessary but this thread is a case study in leaping to conclusions.

If we know it's on the rise and we can't explain it, do you think we should do something about things that are proven correlations, or do you think it's better to ignore it?

[Thunderhawk]

I suspect economic development and prosperity that allows money and time to be spent on cable television also allows money and interest to be spent on autism.

Autism is a lack of ability to interpret other people's mental states.

For the purposes of diagnosis, that is one of the flags looked at. Autism is an umbrella term which groups people with similar abnormal behaviors. The DSM5 has made the term broad and inclusive, making the population of Autism rather large, and growing. A distinct biological cause might (I suspect does) exist for classical Autism, but that determination and all research might be harder to carry out as the population includes people whose similar problems might be caused by other reasons.

[Ter]

If we know it's on the rise and we can't explain it, do you think we should do something about things that are proven correlations, or do you think it's better to ignore it?

It would be imprudent to jump to conclusions as to what the factors are leading to increased incidence of autism.
I personally think that certain milder forms of autism, especially mild Aspergers, were earlier not diagnosed, thus skewing the numbers.
I think that television and increased diagnosis of autism are probably concomitant factors, i.e. not a causative relationship.
I think we should leave epigenetic out of the discussion altogether.
I will look at this thread again tomorrow when I am sober.

[Vlerchan]

Wang et al. control for per capita income in their study so I'm not sure we can attribute any bias in their estimators to that.

It's actually negatively effective, though only significant at the 0.1 percent level so I wouldn't consider that result to have much purchase.

Worth noting though that when it runs it's second set of regressions - it regs autism on cable subscription densities - it examines the one state that didn't return a statistically significant result when income per capita was explicitly entered*, California and another which didn't appear in the first set of regressions at all, Pennsylvania. I imagine it was due to data limitations - I dunno, I just quickly checked the tables - but that in itself should suggest more research is needed before we can reach any sort of even soft conclusion here**.

Edit: So, what I am actually trying to say is that you can fault them on the socioeconomic class argument IFF you're not happy to accept the attrition which occurs when the paper shifts to examining the supporting argument.

---

* It did return a statistically significant result when county-level fixed effects were introduced, but that specification doesn't really measure the same thing at all.

** Without that second set of regressions their argument falls apart. It's impossible to determine whether precipitation is instrumenting - proxying - for playing board games, or spending more time with your mother, or basically just being inside in general.

[ThirdTerm]

For religious reasons the Amish do not use electricity and so young children in that
population watch no or at most very little television. Thus, our hypothesis that early childhood
television watching is an important trigger for autism suggests that autism rates among the
Amish should be distinctly lower than in the rest of the population.
Interestingly, there has recently been an investigation of this issue. Dan Olmsted, a news
reporter for United Press International, recently conducted an informal investigation of this issue
(see Olmsted (2005a,b)). According to Olmsted, based on autism rates for the general
population, there should be several hundred autistic individuals among the Amish. After
extensive investigation, however, Olmsted was able to identify fewer than ten. Also, his
interviews with individuals who should be in positions to know the general prevalence rate, such
as doctors, health care workers, and an Amish mother of an adopted autistic child, indicate that
the prevalence of autism among the Amish is indeed very low.20

Although our findings are consistent with our hypothesis, we do not believe our findings
represent definitive evidence for our hypothesis. We believe the only way to establish
definitively whether or not early childhood television watching is a trigger for autism is to more
directly test the hypothesis. For example, one could monitor the viewing habits of a large
number of children from the ages of zero to three and see whether the children who are
eventually diagnosed with autism on average watched more television before the age of three.
The finding that those diagnosed with autism had indeed watched more television would be
subject to the criticism that maybe those prone to autism are more drawn to television viewing
(this is similar to the criticism of Christakis et al.’s (2004) study of television viewing and
ADHD). But if a condition of participation in the study was that parents were required to limit
television viewing, one could judge whether television viewing is important by looking at the
overall rate of autism in the sample.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w12632.pdf

This paper is not very scientific and the authors do admit their shortcomings. BOLA2, a gene Homo sapiens inherited from Neanderthals, predisposes humans to autism, according to Nuttle et al. (2016).


Figure 1: Comparative sequence analysis of chromosome 16p11.2 among apes and the evolution of BOLA2 duplications in humans.

Genetic differences that specify unique aspects of human evolution have typically been identified by comparative analyses between the genomes of humans and closely related primates1, including more recently the genomes of archaic hominins2, 3. Not all regions of the genome, however, are equally amenable to such study. Recurrent copy number variation (CNV) at chromosome 16p11.2 accounts for approximately 1% of cases of autism4, 5 and is mediated by a complex set of segmental duplications, many of which arose recently during human evolution. Here we reconstruct the evolutionary history of the locus and identify bolA family member 2 (BOLA2) as a gene duplicated exclusively in Homo sapiens. We estimate that a 95-kilobase-pair segment containing BOLA2 duplicated across the critical region approximately 282 thousand years ago (ka), one of the latest among a series of genomic changes that dramatically restructured the locus during hominid evolution. All humans examined carried one or more copies of the duplication, which nearly fixed early in the human lineage—a pattern unlikely to have arisen so rapidly in the absence of selection (P < 0.0097). We show that the duplication of BOLA2 led to a novel, human-specific in-frame fusion transcript and that BOLA2 copy number correlates with both RNA expression (r = 0.36) and protein level (r = 0.65), with the greatest expression difference between human and chimpanzee in experimentally derived stem cells. Analyses of 152 patients carrying a chromosome 16p11.2 rearrangement show that more than 96% of breakpoints occur within the H. sapiens-specific duplication. In summary, the duplicative transposition of BOLA2 at the root of the H. sapiens lineage about 282 ka simultaneously increased copy number of a gene associated with iron homeostasis and predisposed our species to recurrent rearrangements associated with disease.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5 ... 19075.html

[Hong Wu]

This paper is not very scientific and the authors do admit their shortcomings. BOLA2, a gene Homo sapiens inherited from Neanderthals, predisposes humans to autism, according to Nuttle et al. (2016).


Figure 1: Comparative sequence analysis of chromosome 16p11.2 among apes and the evolution of BOLA2 duplications in humans.

Lower rates of autism in the Amish is interesting and they don't use electronic devices.

If there's a strong correlation and we can't find the reason for causation, screaming "correlation is not causation" and refusing to do anything strikes me as very foolish.

I don't watch TV and my electronic usage is done under some simple but controlled scenarios. Am I crazy? I might be wrong but I think the "correlation is not causation" thing is killing western people off when they know that something is happening in certain contexts and refuse to respond just because they don't fully understand it.

[quetzalcoatl]

Don't post things that aren't true just because I'm disagreeing with you. The study doesn't reject the possibility of a genetic cause and epigenetics are one of the areas we have a lot of trouble analyzing. Also, the term "phenotype" does not appear in the study at all.

You are the one that is using the term epigenetics, not the authors of the paper.

From the wiki article on epigenetics:

Such effects on cellular and physiological phenotypic traits may result from external or environmental factors, or be part of normal developmental program. The standard definition of epigenetic requires these alterations to be heritable,[3][4] either in the progeny of cells or of organisms.

There is no evidence of such heritable stable changes in phenotype presented in the study. Indeed that is outside the scope of their findings. You are misrepresenting the authors in the very title of this thread.

The OP illustrates the real hazards of drawing correlations. TV watching is not an independent variable. It can be variously correlated with time spent indoors, rainy weather, lack of vitamin D, etc. Another study associates vitamin D depletion with autism. Other studies indicate mitochondrial DNA dysfunction.

If you had not tossed in the epigenetic angle, this thread would only be half as bad as it is now.

[anetode]

I don't think a "model of biological causation" should be necessary. Just reason it out.

Let's not overgeneralize reason, your approach relies entirely on inductive reasoning with specific disregard for current empirically derived scientific understanding (and no, the non-sequitur mention of epigenetics does you no favors in substantiating your argument). Now what you really want to say is simply that you think television causes autism, there's no need for pseudoscientific pretense. There are indeed studies which examine the effect of screen-time on children, recently the Academic Pediatric Asociation published one such study based on a robust dataset collected in the National Survey of Children's Health. The study concluded that "there was no evidence that children with ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorder] differ in their screen time habits from other children. Both groups have high screen time use."

Is that the end of the story? Not necessarily. It could be that screen time contributes to development of an ASD in a population of kids who are predisposed to such disorders either through genetic inheritance or because of specific abnormalities in their prenatal or neonatal development. Regardless, currently there is no good evidence to indicate that screen-time could be one of the primary environmental causes of ASDs. In fact the majority of research has focused on using electronic media to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of children with ASDs.

[Motti]

Not sure to what extent epigenetics and neuroplasticity contribute to genetic disorders. But the environment, peer groups and social programming do greatly shape individual thought processes. Biases are reinforced even when contrarian facts are established.

This is a particularly growing problem in the West where the mass media has failed miserably in producing next generation thinkers, scientists and technocrats.

This loaded article kind of explains the disturbing dearth of questioning and self-questioning brought about by mass-mediated neuroplastic rewiring:

Memo to James Clapper: Are Americans Genetically Prone to Regression?

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201705 ... s-clapper/

And from an academic point of view, here is where such rewiring leads to. You got to read this to believe it. Two professors punked a peer-review journal with sexist nonsense, and it elicited rave reviews from the reviewers.

Do penises cause climate change? Discuss

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/do- ... e-discuss/

[Suntzu]

Autistic is the new term for retarded. Nothing much has changed, still around 2%.

[MememyselfandIJK]

Link to original study? I am highly skeptical that an economist is qualified to solve this problem and I would like to take a look at their methods/data/discussion.