US Government officials are finally getting serious about studying all potential environmental factors in autism, and I for one applaud them heartily for leaving no etiological stone unturned.
Kirby is writing about the Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation or EARLI study. See their website.
As someone trained to be a scientist it has always been infuriating to me how little is understood about the current increase in the number of children with ASD. It looks like there is finally some momentum in the right direction. I increasingly feel there is some bad combination of genetic tendencies with environmental triggers.
Category: ASD Research |
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An interesting project would be a series of modified USB flash drives like this one made into a Steampunk artifact but there are lots of other things you could make.
A nice, quick project would be a dedicated streaming video PC designed to be a living room internet-connected DVR hooked up to your TV capable of playing DVD and Blu-Ray disks, other digital formats off of removable disks or hard drives, and streaming internet sources like Hulu, Netflix, and YouTube.
United States Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) writes in the Huffington Post about her plans to create programs supporting affordable treatment for children diagnosed with ASD.
Autism affects more American children than pediatric cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined. It’s a heartbreaking disease that approximately 29,400 children in every corner of New York suffer from.
In the June 22 issue of Forbes is an article by Elisabeth Eaves about Simon Baron-Cohen (academic brother of comedian Sasha Baron-Cohen) which discusses his research and his idea that the Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) brain is an extreme version of the male brain.
Baron-Cohen and his researchers feel the currrent incidence of ASD is 156 per 10,000 (or 1.56 %).
Today the strongest evidence [of a cause for ASD] supports a genetic theory, most likely with an additional environmental factor that interacts with the risk genes.
This is one of those articles that makes me wonder what the heck researchers think they’re going to find when they start their projects? Kind of like doing a study to discover the sky is blue, or that water is wet!
I don’t know whether vaccines are related to any increase in cases of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) seen in recent years. I agree there are very probably genetic factors but I feel there must also be some sort of environmental trigger at play as well.
Is there really an increase in ASD? There is definitely an increase in ASD diagnoses (see Epidemiology of autism at Wikipedia). What I have seen in my lifetime in the SF Bay Area is that when I was a kid you saw mainly Down Syndrome and children with birth defects in Special Education classrooms — no autistics.
Autism was rare.
Here in Marin today we easily fill classrooms with autistic kids and I do not mean edge cases but full blown autistic kids.
Many believe that the way vaccines are administered, and how that has changed over the years, could be one of the environmental factors affecting the rate.
We added lots more content to the website and there are now links to past projects at the bottom of each Workshop page. We will add more as we go along and soon the site will be seriously ‘content rich’!
We took some great photos of Dan’s Friday and Sunday Build Stuff Workshops but we were all so busy on Saturday that we forgot to pick up the camera during Nate’s Filmmaking Workshop! This week we will make up for that and take a bunch of photos.
Nate will be going on vacation starting June 13th so this is the last June Saturday that he will be here. We are going to continue the Filmmaking Workshop for an additional 3 weeks (June 13, 20, and 27) with Dan and Janet leading the group. Nate will rejoin us in July for the twice a week classes.
We are in the process of forming a non-profit organization. We will be applying for grants soon – in fact, the first application is due June 15th. This is for a grant from Marin Charitable Association – a small grant from a local foundation. If you would like to write letters of support those would be truly appreciated.
