Maternal obesity linked to Autism

I'm not interested in connecting vaccinations and autism. I just want someone (who has yet to do so) look up the vaccine schedule for young kids today vs young kids earlier than the 80's and compare overall health. It is not intuitive to me that an unbiased scientist can believe that injecting a baby with 6 rounds of various vaccines every 6 mos can be a healthy thing.

Now I think we can all agree that childhood health has degraded over the past couple of decades. Whether that is due to vaccines, sugar, HFC, hydrogenated oils, C-sections, lousy food supply, all of the above or some of the above - one thing is abundantly clear to me - it's one of the above if not all.

One other point is that we need to let intuition lead our analysis because my gut feeling is that for some reason the science is lagging far behind our current reality.

I'm all for vaccinating my daughter against the bad stuff. MMR, I'm cool with that. Polio (which they do not vaccinate for any more if you can believe that), and any of the crippling or deadly diseases that can be prevented.

Can someone please tell me why we need to vaccinate against the chicken pox? Is that really a problem? I have never heard of someone dying from it. It is not a huge problem for society like Measles, or Polio was. Why should I care about it? Yet for my daughter to go to school she had to have it like it was life or death. It's just chicken pox. To me, that's just retarded to make that mandatory.

Autism is very complicated, and will never be linked to just one factor. I will tell you, having had two children, the latter having autism, we recognized something different about the second child within the first few months and long before the big round of vaccinations. After the diagnosis, everything started making sense.

If this had been our first child, we many not have noticed. But with our first child having developed normally, it was easy to spot with the second that there was a problem.

For the person who asked, yes there have been studies regarding c-sections and autism, just google. Do c-sections cause autism exclusively? No. But children may be born with some biological mechanism (or whatever you want to call it), and c-sections can be one of the factors that triggers the autism.

Always remember, criteria for diagnosing autism has changed over the last 10-20 years, which can partially account for the increased number of kids with autism. Think in your own life, and I bet you can find one or two people who you would suspect of having autism that were never diagnosed with it as a child. I know a few.

We all know cross country running causes autism. How many Aspies do you know on the CC team versus the football team?

Dear Jefe,

I'm guessing that despite appearing to have unbounded knowledge on statistical analysis, you missed the first day of your Statistics 101 class so I'll recap for you: Correlation =/= Causation.

I'm also guessing that despite the fact that you appear to be a clinical psychologist, you must also have missed the first day of your Abnormal Psych class, so I'll fill you in there too: Autism is a spectrum disorder, the scope of which has widened significantly over the last several decades.

If these two little tidbits haven't fully worked their magic yet, let me tie this into a pretty bow for you:

Much knowledge on Autism has been accrued by the medical community over the last several decades, thus more doctors are more likely to be able to make a diagnosis at all. Also, the criteria for making the diagnosis for Autism has grown to include a broader population than several decades ago. Simultaneously, the medical community has added more vaccines to the schedule. So what we have is the number of vaccines going up over the last several decades as well as diagnoses of Autism going up in the last several decades. However, this doesn't warrant any statistical or medical merit because correlation =/= causation.

I'll now kindly ask out of curiosity: what other medical and/or life advice you take from the co-host of MTV's 'Singled Out'.

Actually, the more I think about it: movie ticket prices have gone up since the 60's, just like autism rates have. So has participation in youth soccer leagues.

I'm going to start a campaign against high ticket prices and youth soccer for the good of our children. Who's with me? I wonder if I can get Dan Cortese to help me spearhead this thing.

careful with that notion about elective c sections. doctors pretty much force most of the c sections on patients for insurance/malpractice reasons, raising rates above 30 percent and making them standard in many city hospitals. they went ahead with a planned c section even after my partner went into labor and the placenta previa corrected itself.

In the story does it say maternal weight gain during pregnancy or obesity in advance of pregnancy? I didn't see anything specific to that question. But a couple days earlier I saw a story linking autism to PATERNAL age (higher the worse).

Let's face it. Autism can be LINKED to almost anything at this point with statistics (or the misuse of). As already mentioned numerous times in this thread correlation =/= causation. C sections, weight, age, vaccines, movie ticket prices, national deficit, number of cars on the road, barefoot running, the wolf population etc... have all increased in the last few decades along with autism rates. No one knows if any of these factors are causes of autism.