Seth’s blog

• A skeptical look at Karl Popper by Martin Gardner
• Effects of food on the brain
• fat sensitivity correlates with BMI (less sensitive, greater BMI)
• Bill McKibben on Climategate: “If you managed to hack 3,000 emails from some scientist’s account, you might well find a few that showed them behaving badly, or at least talking about doing so.” This gives new meaning to the term denialist.
• if someone steals $2 million do you still trust their research?

Thanks to Vic Sarjoo, Anne Weiss, and Marian Lizzi.

Gut And Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) is a book by Natasha Campbell-McBride about how to treat allergies, autism, and similar conditions.  In this entry, Cheeseslave talks about her own son and then quotes another mother about the effects of the GAPS diet (plus other changes) on her autistic son.

Kevin lacked oxygen at birth, so in the first year of life, I already saw that he was not developing like my other kids (he is our 5th). His motor skills lagged and he cried a lot, didn’t sleep so well, etc.At two, his behavior was just not right. He never responded right to correction, would throw things in anger or frustration, cried all the time, especially when waking up, basically never happy. He didn’t walk until two and then he would fall down constantly.

He also began to always be starving. When he was really hungry, his face would get distorted and frozen in a strange way. I now think he was having seizures of sorts.

We did not vaccinate at all and we figured out that if we fed him lots of protein type foods like meats, he would relax his body and face and be able to go play for a bit until it happened all over again in a short time.

I do think that because we didn’t vaccinate and figured out to keep feeding him this way, we were able to “coast along” like this for years. He had learning disabilities, lacked social skills and continued to have autistic traits like sensory issues, hiding under blankets, reacting to sounds, not liking people around, rigid in routines, and spinning and going on his head along with head banging.

Long story shorter, we did get a diagnosis of Aspergers at one point. We took him to doctor after doctor, specialist after specialist to no avail. He also strangely was NEVER once sick (we later learned that his immune system was not working a bit).

At 9 years old, he got pneumonia, followed by asthma and allergies. His eating [problems] had escalated to the point of feeding him every 20-30 minutes or he would have gigantic meltdowns. We eventually could not even have people over.

He was given an inhaler for the asthma and suddenly, without us making the connection, he began to not respond when called, became extremely hyperactive and began to run away at all hours of the day and night requiring police to find him and being very dangerous. (we once lost him in the middle of downtown Chicago). He would also try to jump out of moving vehicles, out of windows and required constant restraining.

The seizures got bad, he would fall down the stairs and lose consciousness several times per day. They tried psych drugs and he almost died twice from his reaction to them (I am now grateful that we couldn’t go that route).

We became so desperate that we brought him home from hospital and got deadbolts to keep him from running, did all our own restraining and called alternative docs to help us.

We began kefir and diet from nutritionist (basically a BED [Body Ecology Diet]/GAPS version), took him off inhaler. His allergies were totally out of control, he could barely open his eyes from swelling, and his chin was deformed and swollen, his belly too, his whole body. He would only eat junk food and fast foods and it was incredibly difficult to transition him to the diet.

The DAN (Defeat Autism Now) protocols we followed, made him worse in lots of ways b/c the chelation made him extremely violent, the B12 shots kept him awake for nights on end without any sleep, the antifungals and all those other interventions were nightmarish for him.

Eventually, I resolved to use only foods and do this without any kind of doctors. So for this past year, I researched and researched and was determined to bring him back from this state. We have done a combo of GAPS (and BED) very successfully along with lots of fermented foods and drinks.

The allergies and asthma are 100% gone, the seizures we have had only one in 65 days and very mild (compared to 5-10 per day). He sings every morning and has cried once in the last 2.5 months (he used to cry for 1-3 hours at a time each day) and he can go outside again without running away. He is in martial arts, acting appropriately at church, having eye contact, no autistic traits of late and learning academics after two years of not being able to open a book. He reads before bed at an 8th grade level.

This story has many interesting elements. 1. Huge improvement. Very plausible that it’s due to the dietary change. 2. Autism and allergies go away at the same time, suggesting same cause. 3. Treatment with fermented foods. 4. A different “radical” solution failed, meaning there is no reason to think this is a placebo effect. 5. The mystery of why an inhaler made things worse. 6. Autism not due to vaccination.

Caroline Rodgers, a science writer, has noticed some very interesting correlations:

The new autism figures published in the CDC’s 12-18-09 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) http://bit.ly/57XRca reveal an apparent anomaly: While there was an overall average autism increase of 57 percent in children born between 2002 and 2006, Hispanics in Alabama showed a 67 percent decrease in autism.

The mothers of the first batch of children who were eight years old in 2002 would have been pregnant in 1993. Therefore, I looked at what changes might have occurred in Alabama’s public health policy in 1993 that would explain a 67 percent drop in the autism rate of Hispanic children born between 2002 and 2006.

According to the 2002 PRAMS Surveillance Report: Multistate Exhibits Medicaid Coverage for Prenatal Care http://bit.ly/8godkv .

During 1993-2002, the prevalence of Medicaid coverage for prenatal care . . . decreased in 3 states (Alabama, Florida and West Virginia).

This particular correlation is in addition to a broad correlation between wealth and autism (more wealth, more autism):

Also significant in last week’s MMWR report were the ethnic differences in autism prevalence found among non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Hispanics. The autism rate in the monitored areas throughout the United States of children of non-Hispanic white women was 102 per 10,000; among black children, 76 per 10,000; and among Hispanic children, 61 per 10,000 – roughly half of the non-Hispanic white rate. These results seem counter-intuitive, since the non-Hispanic white population could be expected to have more access to prenatal care than the black or Hispanic populations. Yet if autism risk is increased by exposure to prenatal ultrasound, these figures make perfect sense.

This isn’t cherry-picking. Rodgers believed that we should take seriously the idea of a prenatal-ultrasound/autism link based on entirely different data.

Tyler Cowen’s new book Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World has a lot to say about two topics in which I am especially interested: autism and human diversity. What can the rest of us learn from people with autism? What does the wide range of outcomes among autistic adults tell us about our world? I interviewed Tyler by email about his book.

ROBERTS If I remember correctly, you think a book should be new, true, and something else. What’s the something else?

COWEN The “something else” should cover at least two qualities.

First, if everyone read the book and was persuaded by it, would anything change for the better? An author should aim to write a book which matters.

Second, the book should reflect something the author really cares about. If the author doesn’t care, why should the reader?

ROBERTS What was the tipping point for this book — the event that made you say: I’m going to write a book about THIS?

COWEN To me it’s very important what an author is thinking about in his or her spare time, if the phrase “spare time” even applies to my life, which has an extreme blending of work and leisure time. Ideally that is what an author should be writing about. At some point you realize: “Hey, I am constantly thinking about xxxxx in my spare time!” And then you want to write it up.

I also hit up the idea of this book through pondering the lives of some particular individuals I know — and how much they *live* the thesis of my book — although I am not sure they would wish to be identified publicly.

ROBERTS Have you been to Autreat, the annual conference of Autism Network International, that you mention? If so, did it affect your thinking?

COWEN I haven’t been to Autreat, which for me is located somewhat inconveniently away from major cities (that is on purpose, I believe). I’m also not clear on exactly who is welcome, who needs an invitation, etc. Most conferences have a very high variance in quality across presentations and mostly one goes to meet one or two key people; often you don’t know in advance who they will be. I suspect the same logic applies to Autreat as well.

ROBERTS Do you think there are jobs that persons with autism do better than persons without autism?

COWEN Autistics often exhibit superior skills in attention to detail, pattern recognition, what I call “mental ordering,” and they have areas of strong preferred interests, in which they are very often superb self-educators. So yes, that will make many autistics very good at some jobs but also poorly suited for others. But I don’t want to generalize and say “autistics are better at job X,” that would be misleading. Across autistics there is a wide variety of cognitive skills and also problems. Engineering and computer science are the stereotypical areas where you expect to find higher than average rates of autism. While I suspect this is true in terms of the average, it can be misleading to focus on the stereotype precisely because of the high variance of skills and outcomes among autistics. One of the central issues in understanding autism is grasping the connection between the underlying unity of the phenomenon and the extreme variability of the results. In the short run, positive stereotypes can perform a useful educating function. But the more we present stereotypes, the more we are getting people away from coming to terms with that more fundamental issue, namely an understanding of the variance.

ROBERTS There is a basic biological phenomenon in which animals and plants under stress become more variable. Some say variability in the genotype has been released into the phenotype. Do you think the variance seen in autism has been “released” in some way?

COWEN I am not sure I understand the question…for one thing I am not sure what is the postulated increase in genetic stress…

ROBERTS Yes, it’s a confusing question. Let’s try this: What do you think the high variance of outcome seen in autism is telling us?

COWEN I’ll try to make that more concrete. One view of autism is that autistics have greater access to lower-level perception and such that access is essential for understanding autism. On one hand it gives autistics some special abilities, such as pattern recognition, certain kinds of information processing, and noticing small changes with great skill. (In some cases this also leads to savant-like abilities.) This also may be connected to some of the problems which autistics experience, such as hyper-sensitivities to some kinds of public environments.

It could be that non-autistics have a faculty, or faculties, which “cut off” or automatically organize a lot of this lower level perception. The implication would be that for autistics this faculty is somehow weaker, missing, or “broken.” The underlying unity in autism would be that this faculty is somehow different, relative to non-autistics. The resulting variance is that the difference in this faculty gives rise to abilities and disabilities which very much differ across autistics.

That’s one attempt to come to terms with both the unity of autism and the variance within it. It’s a tough question and we don’t know the right answer yet, in my view. What I outlined is just one hypothesis.

ROBERTS A clear parallel in the increased variance of autistic persons is the increased variance of left-handers. Left-handers have brain organizations that vary much more than the brain organization of right-handers. Right-handers are all one way; left-handers are all over the place. Do you see any similarities between left-handers and persons with autism?

COWEN I recall some claims that autistics are more likely to be left-handed but I’ve never looked into their veracity. There are so many false claims about autism that one must be very careful.

ADHD is another example of something which produces high variance outcomes. I don’t think it is correct to call it a disorder *per se*.

We’re just starting to wrap our heads around the “high variance” idea. Most people have the natural instinct to attach gross labels of good or bad even when a subtler approach is called for.

ROBERTS The term left-hander is confusing because left-handers aren’t the opposite of right-handers. The dichotomy is okay but the two sides are better labeled right-handers and non-right-handers. In other words, one group (right-handers) has something (a certain brain organization); the other group doesn’t have that brain organization. Then the vast difference in variance makes sense. How accurate would it be to say that non-autistics have something than autistics don’t have? (I’m left-handed, by the way.)

COWEN I would say we still don’t have a fully coherent definition of autism. And “have” is a tricky word. I think of autistic brains as different, rather than “normal” brains with “missing parts.” Some researchers postulate differences in the kind of connections autistic brains make. In thirty years I expect we will know much, much more than we do right now.

ROBERTS I hope this isn’t too self-indulgent: What do you make of the correlation between autism and digestive problems?

COWEN I don’t think there are convincing theories about either digestive problems causing autism or autism causing digestive problems. There is *maybe* a correlation through a common genetic cause, but even if that is true it is not very useful as a means of understanding autism. This is another area where there are many strong opinions, often stronger than are justified by the facts.

ROBERTS Another “assorted” question: I loved the study you mentioned where people with perfect pitch were more likely to be eccentric than those without perfect pitch. That’s quite a result. How did you learn about it?

COWEN There is a somewhat scattered literature on music, cognition, and society. It still awaits synthesis, it seems. Someone could write a very good popular book on the topic. (Maybe Gabriel Rossman is the guy to do it.) The more I browsed that literature, the more interesting results I found.

ROBERTS I don’t think I’ve done justice to your extremely original book but here is a last question. You talk about Thomas Schelling’s use of stories. Presumably in contrast to other econ professors. I think of story-telling being something that once upon a time everyone did — it was the usual way to teach. Why do you think Schelling told stories much more than those around him?

COWEN Thanks for the kind words. Schelling has a unique mind, as anyone who has known him will attest. I don’t know any other economist or social scientist who thinks like he does, but we’ve yet to figure out what exactly his unique element consists of. I would say that Schelling views story-telling as a path to social science wisdom. They’re not even anecdotes, they’re stories. Maybe that doesn’t sound convincing to an outsider, but it got him a Nobel Prize.

I am very interested in the topic of “styles of thought in economics.”

The latest issue of Pediatrics has a study that asks whether autism is associated with digestive problems. The authors compared the medical records of about 100 autistics with about 200 matched controls. The controls came from an area in Minnesota, near the Mayo Clinic, in which almost everyone has a health record on file that the researchers could look at. So the controls are a good sample of the non-autistic population.

The New York Times described the results like this:

The scientists found no differences [should be difference, singular] in the overall frequency of gastrointestinal problems reported by the two groups.

This isn’t quite right. The study found that the proportions of persons in each group to have had at least one digestive problem by age 20 weren’t reliably different. For the autistic kids, the proportion was 77%; for the controls, 72%.

The study design seems fine but the data analysis has a lot of room for improvement. You have an idea you want to test, good; try to test it with one test. The authors boiled down all their data into “at least one problem by age 20″ — that’s just what epidemiologists are told to do — but this was a poor choice. First, there is a ceiling problem. If both groups had percentages in the 90’s, this would be obvious. Better to avoid the ceiling problem. Second. to combine different symptoms with the “at least one” rule is likely to be less sensitive to differences than a combination rule that takes amount into account. The analysis in the article treats someone with 1 problem as equal to someone with 50 problems. No justification is given. Third, it isn’t obvious that it makes sense to combine symptoms this way. What if Symptom 1 and Symptom 2 are uncorrelated? In other words, what if whether you have Symptom 1 doesn’t affect your chances of having Symptom 2? Then to combine them (as the authors do) makes no sense. Factor analysis is how you condense several correlated measures into a few uncorrelated measures.

The study separated digestive problems into five categories (constipation, diarrhea, and three others). In each of the five categories, persons in the autistic group were more likely to report the problem than persons in the control group; in four of the five categories, the difference was significant (with one-tailed p values; the authors misleadingly use two-tailed p values — without making that clear).  In one of the five categories the difference isn’t anywhere close to significant — which supports the idea that that there are at least two dimensions here: one on which the two groups differ, and one on which they don’t.

In the discussion, the authors, not realizing that four out of five of their problem categories differed significantly in the predicted direction, try to explain away the two differences that were significant with two-tailed p values: in constipation and picky eating. They note that autistic children get more medication that normal children. “Many children with autism are treated with resperidone, and this may result in increased appetite and weight gain,” they write. Why a drug that causes weight gain would cause picky eating isn’t explained and, without explanation, doesn’t make sense. Weight gain — they mean too much weight gain — involves eating too much; picky eating involves eating too little. Nor do the authors explain why their results differed from many previous studies. My take on the paper is that their results confirm previous studies, so that would have been interesting to read.