TV Really Might Cause Autism

Slate ^ | October 16, 2006 | Gregg Easterbrook

[I Hired Craig Livingstone]

Last month, I speculated in Slate that the mounting incidence of childhood autism may be related to increased television viewing among the very young. The autism rise began around 1980, about the same time cable television and VCRs became common, allowing children to watch television aimed at them any time. Since the brain is organizing during the first years of life and since human beings evolved responding to three-dimensional stimuli, I wondered if exposing toddlers to lots of colorful two-dimensional stimulation could be harmful to brain development. This was sheer speculation, since I knew of no researchers pursuing the question.

Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.

[I Hired Craig Livingstone]

Television: turning adults into idiots and children into autistics.

[beezdotcom]

Hey, it makes as much sense as vaccines...

[cripplecreek]

TV only turns adults into idiots if they have a pre existing propensity to become idiots anyway.

[GOPJ]

I thought the connection was fathers over the age of 35...

[Mamzelle]

It's not that far-fetched--when you see how the brain heals itself after a stroke (when it can) --it's a rewiring job and responds to outside stimuli--it's not that great a stretch to worry about the feedback a growing toddler's brain is using.

[Lijahsbubbe]

I don't know about causing actual autism, but I can see where steady viewing of TV by a very young child could condition him to be irritated by outside interruption or attempted interaction.

Too much of being 'inside their head'.

[B Knotts]

FWIW, 1980 also marked the founding of CNN.

[L98Fiero]

Ah, yes. Another "might" article. We are being over-run with alarmist "possible", "might", may be", "could be" and "studies indicate" articles. Ridiculous.

[smith288]

Whatever the cause, pointing your kid at a tv for hours wont result in a smarter kid, thats for darn sure.

[ZGuy]

FYI - Good timing, as even this article today highlighted the flaws in the studies that blamed vaccines:

Bad science

---

The silence over new MMR research

Ben Goldacre
Saturday October 14, 2006
The Guardian


Think back into the mists of MMR: in 2002, John O'Leary's group in Dublin reported finding measles virus in the intestine of children with autism and bowel problems. The anti-MMR movement were almost delirious with excitement, and so were the media. Andrew Wakefield, working with Kawashima et al in Japan, had already reported finding measles virus in blood cells in similar children.
What if they were mistaken? How would you know? Well, a major paper published in the leading academic journal Pediatrics this month strongly suggests that these earlier results were in error, false positives. This study has been ignored by the media: it has been covered, by my reckoning, in one Reuters piece, and in one post on the lead researcher's boyfriend's blog.

This new MMR study, by D'Souza et al, replicates the earlier experiments pretty closely - and in some respects more carefully - in 54 children with autism (80% also had gastrointestinal symptoms), and 34 controls. All but six had received the MMR vaccine.

All these studies, old and new, used PCR, the same process used in genetic fingerprinting. PCR works by using enzymes to replicate RNA, so you start with a small amount in your sample, but then it is "amplified up" - copied over and over again - until you have enough that you can measure and work with it.

Beginning with a single molecule of genetic material, PCR can generate 100bn similar molecules in an afternoon. Because of this, the PCR process is exquisitely sensitive to contamination so you have to be very careful and clean up as you go. One substance used to prevent this contamination is called "UNG". The new study used 50 times more UNG than the original O'Leary paper, to prevent contamination. The researchers were also careful to use the very same primer sequences for the measles virus genes as their predecessors.

The results were striking. Firstly, using the Kawashima primer pairs, they simply got negative results, where Kawashima et al reported positive results. The replication of the O'Leary work was more interesting. Looking only at the results of the PCR, at first it looked like the O'Leary primers did indeed produce RNA strands that matched measles virus. However, when they looked more carefully at the size of the strands, and the "melting curves", and then sequenced the genetic material, they discovered that what had been amplified was not from measles virus at all: they were false positives. The original O'Leary paper did not pursue these extra "double checking" steps.

The authors are quite clear: there is good reason to suspect that the earlier studies produced false positive results, because of suboptimal contamination control, and because the O'Leary primers can accidentally amplify bits of normal human RNA. This is not about criticising individual researchers. Techniques move on, results are sometimes not replicated, not all double-checking is practical.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,,1922380,00.html

[I Hired Craig Livingstone]

I thought the connection was fathers over the age of 35...

Hey now, that was last months study. ;-)

[Phsstpok]

Ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo!

Can I be the one to tell the folks from Sesame Street?

Ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo!

Can I be the one to sue the folks from Sesame Street?

Just how much money has Children's Television Workshop made from that show via licensing?

I also wonder if you can correlate it with what the kids watched, not just how much?  What if the odds go up if they  watched the really lousy cartoons that were around at the time?  Or if parents parked their kids in front of CBS they were doomed, but ABC kids are now all at Juliard?  Could there be a negative correlation if the kids liked the Scholastic Rock stuff?

This is rock solid proof, however, that Buffalo Bob and Clarabell the Clown were not bad for our development as I was told in school.

[pollyannaish]

Imo it makes MORE sense than vaccines because of how children process information during early development.

However, that said, it does not explain how children who did not watch lots of television became autistic.

Correlation does not equal causation.

[Irish_Thatcherite]

TV only turns adults into idiots if they have a pre existing propensity to become idiots anyway.

That's worth repeating!

[dead]

This is just goofy speculation.

One thing that I think contradicts the premise is the fact that, statistically, autism is far more likely to strike the children of very intelligent people. Those tend to be the very people who would be less likely to park their infant in front of the television for a few hours.

Of course, my remark is not very scientific, but neither is this article.

[I Hired Craig Livingstone]

TV only turns adults into idiots if they have a pre existing propensity to become idiots anyway.

True, but I think it atrophies the mind of just about everyone who indulges in more than moderate amounts of it.

[mtbopfuyn]

Yeah, and the other day they claimed it was from a lack of Vitamin B-6.

As I glance over to my two AP students watching a Roseanne re-run working on second chocolate eskimo pies... oh, maybe that's why I get blank stares when I demand their rooms be cleaned...

[dead]

Ping for your ping list.

[cripplecreek]

I think it atrophies the mind of just about everyone who indulges in more than moderate amounts of it.

That depends on what you watch and how you watch it. I like TV that makes me think.

[Cicero]

I was always of the opinion that Sesame Street was bad for young children. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, the medium is the message. And the medium in the case of Sesame Street is violent visuals, loud music, frequent cuts, and short attention spans.

Mr. Rogers, by contrast, was serene, quiet, and not broken up into 5 second visual segments.

I actually like the characters on Sesame Street. But I think it was a destructive program nonetheless. Not suitable for children.