Edited by author 02-12-2009 10:38 AM
"Court says measles vaccine not to blame for autism" very short AP story here http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...L7-z8ct7JAD96A3OCO0 The upshot:

"A special court has ruled against parents with autistic children, saying that vaccines are not to blame for their children's neurological disorder. The judges in the cases said the evidence was overwhelmingly contrary to the parent's claims — and backed years of science that found no risk."

As AP notes, there's another decision to come.

"Gernsbacher Named to NSF Advisory Panel" APS Observer story http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observ...Article.cfm?id=2449

"APS Past President Morton Ann Gernsbacher has been appointed to the Advisory Committee for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) at the National Science Foundation. As the only federal science agency dedicated solely to supporting basic research, NSF occupies an irreplaceable niche in the world of science funding."

And:

"As a member of the advisory committee, Gernsbacher will provide guidance on research directions in the disciplines and fields encompassed by the SBE Directorate, provide oversight of overall program management and performance, and advise as to the impact of overall NSF-wide policies on the SBE scientific community. Leading scientists from a variety of fields, ranging from geology to sociology to economics, make up the SBE Advisory Committee."

Saw that movie. Loved it. I should really read the book. Goes very much to the quality-of-life issue.

Edited by author 02-11-2009 12:35 PM
Speaking of Mind Hacks..... read an interesting post earlier this month about Locked In Syndrome (http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/02/peering_into_the_dar.html)where it mentioned "In one famous example, the editor of Elle magazine, Jean Dominique Bauby, wrote the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly after suffering locked-in syndrome by painstakingly selecting letters with an eye-blink. It's both stunningly beautiful and eloquent, demonstrating a keen and focused mind."

I thought at the time - Hmmm I've never heard of this guy, this incident or this book.

Well, yesterday the movie was on TV on one of the Movie channels. It was French with English sub titles. It had my undivided attention for 2 hours.
(Partly because I had to read the movie and partly because it was very good)

The IMFAR 2009 (it's in Chicago this year) preliminary program is up, see http://www.autism-insar.org/index.php?opti...ew&id=92&Itemid=127

The keynotes are Mark Bear (known for recent work with mouse models of Fragile X), Catherine Lord, and Stephen Scherer. I've never seen Dr Bear present, but have seen both the others (Dr Lord at IMFAR, Dr Scherer at a CIHR conference).

This year's lifetime achievement award goes to Marian Sigman. I've read a lot of Dr Sigman's work but have never seen her present at a conference.

Edited by author 02-11-2009 08:55 AM
There were a couple of very interesting and fascinating hour long science related programmes on BBC television earlier this week. They are still available to view online.

In "Why Reading Matters" - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hk7w3 - science writer Rita Carter describes the neuroscience of reading, and how reading enables us to step inside other minds and see the world from different points of view. The programme mentions the above average sized hippocampi of London taxi drivers.

"Why Do We Dream?" - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hnc9n - investigates the science behind dreaming in human beings, with a mention towards non-human animals. It is thought that cats dream about catching mice. People who have had strokes lose their ability to dream if a particular part of the brain is damaged. Anthony Zadra of the Dream Lab at Montreal University talked about his work.

Dreams have a significant impact on our ability to learn, our memory and mental health.

Prometheus' blog - http://photoninthedarkness.com - is back online.

Followed the Ben Goldacre link (/m8890) and read a bit of that Jeni person's insane show. What I find amazing is that people try to equate Michelle's work with this kind of rubbish (I guess because it goes against the mainstream), when Michelle's work is the OPPOSITE of this. That Jeni gives breastfeeding a bad name!

An extensive update (including a trip to parliament) on the recent life and times of Ben Goldacre (him again!), see http://www.badscience.net/2009/02/lbc-mmr-...bit-of-stephen-fry/

Also, an interview here http://www.journalism.co.uk/5/articles/533461.php including the costs of neglecting nerds and an explanation of Goldacre's Law.

Almost forgot /m8880 . Here the response depends on which aspect(s) of vaccines is/are being objected to. Is it the MMR? Is is thimerosal? Both...? There are a lot of papers showing (in various ways) a lack of association between the MMR and autism, and there are a lot of papers showing (in various ways) a lack of association between thimerosal and autism.

E.g., for the MMR, Honda et al. (2005) involved the withdrawal of the MMR in Japan (for reasons totally unrelated to autism), which did not result in any decrease in rates of autism.

If you root around in Prometheus' blog http://photoninthedarkness.com/ , which is currently down [sigh], you should (when it revives) be able to find some writing about what it would take to compare rates of autism in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

Edited by author 02-10-2009 01:54 PM
Re mandatory ABA for autistics ( /m8884, /m8885, /m8886 ), this comes from two different directions. One is the "medically necessary" direction (we've discussed this before on TMoB), and this problem was featured both in my Auton application for leave to intervene http://www.sentex.net/~nexus23/naa_sup.html (see paragraph 5) and in my written argument (see the part about section 7 http://www.sentex.net/~nexus23/naa_fac.html#66 ).

In most or probably all Canadian provinces (no time to go look up the actual laws, sorry), depriving a child of any treatment deemed to be "medically necessary" has serious consequences. This situation creates a legal requirement for many individuals (professionals of various kinds, educators, etc) to report the deprivation of "medically necessary" treatment to the relevant child protection authorities, who in turn have an obligation to act.

So this goes beyond conflicts that arise in custody disputes and so on. When I asked FEAT about this problem, back in 2003 (I feel old...), the person I spoke with, Sabrina Freeman, clearly had not thought of this obvious consequence of demanding ABA as "medically necessary" autism treatment. Her response was that goverments would simply not enforce the law in the case of autistic children. Why? Because ABA is expensive and governments don't want to pay for it. This was not a serious response, and seems to contradict FEAT's claims that ABA-based autism interventions save money.

The other way of mandating ABA-based interventions is through schools. In this case, ABA isn't "medically necessary" treatment, but if you send your autistic child to a public school, no matter what you actually want for your child, throughout his entire school career he will be interacting with teachers, assistants, administrators, etc., who have all been trained in ABA-based autism interventions and also trained that this is the only effective approach to autism. This is the current situation in Ontario.

I suspect that in many schools, functional behaviour analyses or asssessments are mandatory for atypical students in many situations, and this too is mandatory ABA.

Then there's the push to get PBS (positive behaviour supports, a form of ABA) in all schools, which has been promoted by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. You can see their recommendations here http://autisticselfadvocacynetwork-virgini...-asan-comments.html and here http://asannorthernva.blogspot.com/2008/12...-asan-comments.html :

"Strategies like Positive Behavioral Supports should be developed and implemented throughout all school districts. Pilot programs can be developed in several districts and then disseminated throughout the entire state."

PBS is ABA, so this is mandatory ABA. I disagree with ASAN in this area, for many reasons.

Edited by author 02-10-2009 01:06 PM
Catching up (in several parts probably)... In response to /m8879 and the three enumerated questions...

1. Re information and materials, not sure how I can make this clearer than what I wrote before (see the original that Kimberly is referring to here http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2006/12/n...c116535053252298595 ; there's also this http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2006/12/n...4693014531309680325 ), except via examples.

An autistic child who has a strong interest for music is unlikely to develop strong abilities in this area if never given free access to (or given very limited or arbitrary access to) music, musical instruments, etc. An autistic who has a strong interest in printed words is unlikely to develop strong abilities in decoding written text if deprived of access to written language in whatever kinds, quantities and arrangements s/he needs in order to learn well. And so on. We've elaborated on this a bit in a new paper (Mottron et al., in press).

You might take a wild guess that autistics who don't have access to information and materials from which we learn well, or that we just basically need in order to function, might get into all kinds of difficulty and might seem to have various "inappropriate" behaviours and so on.

One of the major features of ABA programs (of whatever kind) in autism is their deliberate and extreme rationing of information and materials. Both the materials used in training tasks and materials used as reinforcers are rationed (and autistics are discouraged from showing any interest in task materials). If an autistic child is attracted to some information or materials (meaning, this might be something s/he learns well from), this may be identified as a reinforcer, and will then be heavily rationed at all times. Or autistics' focused interests and abilities may simply be identified as inappropriate in some ABA programs, and extinguished (Epstein et al., 1985).

2. I don't know of any on-line parent-training programs, though there are online autism courses at some universities (sorry, I know practically nothing about this). I don't know of any books either re the specific kind of intervention I was referring to, which is reported in a published pilot RCT in Aldred et al. (2004) and has now expanded into a large, multi-site 152-child RCT which is ongoing.

You can see some data from Aldred et al. (2004) in this paper (which you've already seen) http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/gernsbacher_reciprocity.pdf It is a manualized intervention, but I haven't seen the manual, and the researchers involved have gone against the overwhelming trend and been very cautious in not making claims for this approach until they have good quality data from a large multi-site RCT.

3. Miller (1989) is an excellent book; you can find a reference for it and see a bit about it in the learning chapter http://psych.wisc.edu/lang/pdf/Dawson_AutisticLearning.pdf . The difference having access to a piano made in the life of a young boy is briefly described (there's much more in the book, about what huge difference the piano made--and this is *not* music therapy or anything of the sort...). Whether this book is relevant depends on what you're looking for... Miller's 1999 paper (also cited in the learning chapter) is also very good.

re /m8884 and /m8885
There was a case in Australia in which Wendy Lawson was a witness in which the father was accused of being neglectful because he didn't support the ABA (which iirr had meant his son was prevented from having music lessons, which he loved, and was made to go to football, which he hated). He got shared custody in the end, but it was a nasty no holds barred sort of battle. I believe ABA has been an 'entitlement' of children diagnosed with autism in Western Australia for some time.

re m/8883 I don't know and It's likely that my asking wouldn't get an answer.

re m/8884 in an ugly divorce scenario, where custody is being fought over, I can't see why it wouldn't mean exactly that. I have raised this point in the past.

A thought on mandatory ABA therapy, for anyone who cares to reposoond. Am I undersstanding this correctly? Is it going to come to the point where if a parent does not provide "medically necessary" ABA, they would be considered neglectful and risk losing custody?

Your quite right, jypsy, thanks. Whatever does that mean? Is it a typo, do you think?

I thought some might be interested in reading my most recent blog posts about ABA. It's probably not scientifically accurate.

Here's the first post: http://comautworld.blogspot.com/2009/02/we...-heated-on-aba.html

And here's the one I just made: http://comautworld.blogspot.com/2009/02/we...ed-on-aba-part.html

It's not scientifically accurate. It's incredibly emotional. Straight from the heart and all that.