Whatever happened to…
December 26th, 2006A few months ago, a study was done that found an apparent connection between alcohol consumption during pregnancy and some cases of autism. The study seemed to be basically well done, and likely found a real connection.
This is in contrast to the vaccine connection. With vaccines, there is no respected study that shows any such thing with vaccines. Even the supporters have resorted to tactics such as claiming the number of “mercury poisoned” autistics is actually so low as to be unmeasurable.
So, why isn’t the research on alcohol and autism being publicized? Why aren’t the leading autism organizations talking about the need to prevent alcohol consumption by parents (and, also, the need for earlier detection of pregnancy, as many mothers drink between the time they become pregnant and the time they learn that they are pregnant). Could it be that this study shows a connection that people don’t like to see?
Or, could it be that there are no big law firms hoping to cash in on the lawsuits? After all, who would you sue? You can’t get the parents to sign up to sue themselves, and parent’s don’t have the money of a mega-corporation, so there’s not much money to go around among the lawyers for such a lawsuit. You can’t really sue the alcohol companies, either, since most of the world has very strongly indicated that they want alcohol to drink, whether it has harmful effects or not – besides, almost every bottle of liquor I’ve seen recently has a warning about drinking while pregnant. I’ve not seen any commercials on TV or in magazines trying to get pregnant women to drink alcohol, either. In addition, and most important, juries understand alcohol and the fact that drinking during pregnancy is bad. It would be hard to persuade them that the alcohol companies are trying to make people drink while pregnant (this is in contrast to the vaccine issue, where the average person doesn’t understand the very technical arguments made by both sides).
So, perhaps there are special interests manipulating parents right now. There are leading organizations who are searching for a cause of autism, while ignoring a very likely cause, at least for some cases of autism. Once again, I ask, “Why is that?”
(for clarity, I don’t know if alcohol causes more than a tiny amount of autism – I certainly wouldn’t accuse any parent of harming their child by drinking, nor do I think guilt over one beer consumed two days after becoming pregnant is in the interest of anyone)
It’s obviously the money, followed by the possibly instinctive need to blame something ‘evil’ out there.
But I also think the possibility of cure is what draws some parents to the ‘mercury poisoning’ hypothesis. They have been lead to believe you just take the mercury out, and the autism is gone, or that at least there will be cognitive gains.
I was planning a post on similar lines (before I read this post, really) about what most parents surveyed attribute regression to and whether research focus and hype reflect those beliefs.
I love that the first words about Lyn Redwood in the idiotic book “evidence of smarm” are, “She knew with her first sip of Zinfandel….” or something. Apparently, Lyndelle reacted to alcohol at some point in her pregnancy and used that as an indicator that she was pregnant. Not that that sip of Zinfandel or any others before that made her son autistic…. we don’t know, but she’d scream bloody murder if you told her that her child was genetically sensitive to microscopic amounts of alcholol they way she says he’s sensitive to microscopic amounts of mercury.
I think that many of the currently autism dx’d kids have fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol effects (not as obvious as FAS which has another name now, I forgot what it’s called). If you had a child, adopted or not, and needed to tote him around to doctors and he needed all kinds of support to get through school, wouldn’t you prefer to call him “autistic” rather than having “fetal alcohol syndrome” or for that matter a “crack baby” or a “meth baby”? What if your kid got more services as “autistic” and less as a “crack baby”? There is a big overlap between symptoms of FAS and autism, though they are different.
I think these are some of the people who are inflating the “autism” numbers in schools. In Dr. Grinker’s book he describes a case where an older girl has cerebral palsy and her mom wants the doctor to say she has “autism” now because the services are better for autistic kids where she lives.
As bad as drinking while pregnant is, smoking is pretty bad, too. I don’t know if it’s worse, but it’s pretty awful for the baby.
link to article? thx
I can’t remember or locate the article that I was thinking of. However, doing some quick searches in an academic search index, I find there are a lot of articles that “autism” and “alcohol” both match on. A lot of the articles are in journals that I wouldn’t probably consider worth a lot, but are some in respectable journals that would be worth a read. I found one that links between maternal alcoholism and “regressive” autism to be interesting – isn’t this exactly the kind of autism that vaccines supposedly cause? I don’t know if it’s worth a darn or not as far as research methods, so please don’t assume I’m supporting the study! (http://www.springerlink.com/content/g708p33173318423/). One academic search engine that is pretty accessible to the lay person is Google Scholar. It’s not as good as some other search indexes, but for people who aren’t used to this type of searching, it may be easy to use.
Certainly I’m not trying to make this a pet causation theory. I’m just saying that if the mercury hypothesis even had *this* level of evidence, it would be a tad more believable than it is. I’m a believer in the fact that autism is primarily genetic – clearly not completely (twin studies have shown this, along with personal accounts of other autistics in peoples’ families – in mine, I can’t name a male relative who doesn’t have significant autistic traits). I find picking and choosing the “cause” that is best for special interests to be a pretty big abuse of science.
Maybe you’re thinking of the breastfeeding study?
No, the study I’m thinking of had nothign to do with breastfeeding.
Your point on there being a more likely/probable link to alcohol vs. mercury is well taken. However, your assertions that “alcohol isn’t being investigated as a cause because of money, parents not wanting blame, etc.” conspiracy falls quite flat. First, there have been multiple studies that examine similarities between ASD and FAS. That’s really about all that can effectively be done in this vein at this time. So this to the heart of the issue; it is extremely difficult to set up studies that backtrack to a causal event (such as investigating the possibility that alcohol could cause autism). This problem is further compounded by the obvious ethical constraints to finding any sort of meaningful relationships in such investigations, that I don’t even think are worth pointing out….
I’ll note that a whole lot of money in the US was just set aside and will most likely be used to determine if thimerosal causes autism – despite it not even being used in vaccines anymore. I also note that this seems just as difficult to study as alcohol. Why is one getting press and a lot of money, and the other is being mostly ignored (certainly there are some studies on it – I don’t dispute that – in fact, there are more reputable autism-alcohol studies than thimerosal studies by a long shot).
Thimerosal studies are/were much, much easier to conduct than alcohol-autism studies. This is due to the relative size of the pool to study, the relative ease to tracing which persons had received thimeresol (ie, we know if a person did or did not receive a vaccine that contained thimerosal), and the astounding number of “controls” that could be evaluated. The same cannot be said for alcohol. It is often difficult for a researcher to determine all the “if” exposures with regards to alcohol (ie, it is hard to accurately determine even the ‘if,’ let alone the effects of the ‘if’).
That being said, I believe that the reason for the money being set aside to do the “does thimerosal causes autism” studies is due to the very outspoken crowd out there who seem to think that mercury is the root of all problems…and I think we both agree on how we feel about that crowd!
I just came across this blog while trying to search for research about a possible connection between alcohol abuse and autism. The reason for my curiosity is I have a son on the spectrum and so does an older sibling of mine. In talks with several other parents of children on the spectrum one key factor seems to be that somewhere in the family tree there was alcohol abuse. I don’t know if it is a cause of it? But I honestly think there may be a connection between alcohol abuse in a previous generation of a family tree that somehow contributes to it? I’m not a dr. and I don’t have an answer. What I do know is it seems to be a very common element, but a very sensitive question for many families to answer honestly.