House of Eratosthenes

The obesity epidemic may be contributing to the rising number of children diagnosed with autism, according to a study published Monday.

Researchers said mothers who are obese are significantly more likely to have a child with autism or another developmental abnormality. The finding adds to the increasingly complex picture of possible factors that contribute to the disorders.

The obesity epidemic may be contributing to the rising number of children diagnosed with autism.

About half the risk of autism, a condition characterized by poor social skills and repetitive behaviors, is genetic, researchers believe, while the rest stems from factors including older parental age, premature birth or failure to take prenatal vitamins.

The new findings come in the wake of the announcement last month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that autism-spectrum disorders, as the range of abnormalities is now called, affect one in 88 U.S. children, up from one in 110 in a 2009 report.

It’s always been interesting to me that the learning disabilities are on the upswing — against even trace amounts of reasonable skepticism, you have these “cheerleaders” who push hard for a positive diagnosis in whichever test subject is under discussion, usually their own children, and they completely foam up at the mouth against the inquiring skepticism. They act like it’s a religion. And they’re so concerned about it…but…the statistics increase dramatically over a relatively narrow period of time, and you’d think they’d be concerned about that, too. I mean, what if it’s tainted drinking water causing it? What if it’s power lines over the house causing it? If you’re so sure Sugarplum has the LD and all these other kids have similar LDs, and just ten years ago there wouldn’t have been that many…shouldn’t there be this surge of adrenaline to try to find the cause, so the yet-to-be-born kids can have a normal life? And yet they don’t even sweat it. Nor will they tolerate any challenges at all to the idea that Precious has a LD.

Well. Mom’s obesity is Factor A, Autism is Factor B. The article doesn’t explore this, but much of Factor B is in the diagnosis process, and the decision to incorporate that reprehensible “spectrum.” But that has nothing to do with Mom being fat. Why the statistically-detectable tie-in?

I vote for a spurious relationship, meaning, there’s a Factor C that causes A and B, creating the correlation.

Some people are extraordinarily cautious about accepting demands on their time, I’ve noticed, even when they’re not doing a lot with said time. You suggest they do something to make something happen — they’ll spin this elaborate yarn about what’s going to go wrong with it when they do it, and finish off with, “and then I will have wasted all that time!” So what’s the point of even trying. So…they don’t. And, if you follow them around, you’ll see they don’t do much of anything. If they find they need to get somewhere five hundred feet away, on a perfectly nice day they’ll reach for the car keys.

And mothers need to work at it in order to relate to their sons. It doesn’t come naturally. I think every man who ever had a mother, will be able to confirm this for you. The mom needs to work at it. Sadly, in far too many cases, this is exactly what a spectrum disorder is; it’s a shortcut for moms that don’t want to work at relating to their sons. We like to think of science as crisp, hard and firm; we like to think of it as an objective, measurable thing, especially when it endeavors to tell us what’s wrong with our brains, and our kids’ brains. Well, the sad fact of it is, people who see empowerment in weaknesses tend to be pushy and loud people. And the science is not that hard. It’s been giving in.

The researchers are very careful to couch this in terms of a more direct, A-causes-B thing, so it can be an unavoidable body-chemistry tragedy in which all players are blameless. Of course they are. It can’t be sold any other way.

The results suggest that obesity and other metabolic conditions are a general risk factor for autism and other developmental disorders, said the researchers from the University of California, Davis and Vanderbilt University.

“The brain is quintessentially susceptible to everything’s that happening in the mother’s body,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, senior author of the study and chief of the division of environmental and occupational health in public health sciences at UC Davis.

But she added that “no one factor is going to be responsible for any one child’s case. This is not a ‘blame the mom’ thing.”

Well, maybe it needs to be. Not in all cases. But definitely in some.

I’ve often observed that we’re looking at a “no lifeguards worth a damn under forty years old” generation. What I mean by this is, today’s kids are sadly lacking in the skill of watching something for an indeterminate period of time, waiting for a state change, at which point they are to complete some task that is time-sensitive. This generation just can’t bring it. Lately, this particular skill hasn’t been getting developed. That’s because it’s not a birth skill. It’s developed, through life-experience and through necessity, and by no other means.

This rule seems to have been put in place, lately, I’m not sure exactly when, that Snowflake can’t ever be bored. It’s become the parents’ job to anticipate that he won’t have anything to do, and so some toy is going to have to be made available so Junior can fiddle with it…and this sacrosanct goal of constant, minute-to-minute entertainment, will be met. Thank goodness! Well okay, we can make a priority out of that, but I hope that in so doing, we can admit that a skyrocketing learning-disability diagnosis statistic will come as no surprise, as something we’ve been asking to have happen, when the time comes. That much is just common sense, isn’t it?

Now, if the parent wants to be the diversion, that would keep it from happening. But that takes physical energy. So there’s your correlation. Kid wants to ride his bike somewhere, if momma is immediately protesting “Oh no, mommy doesn’t do that, bad knees blah blah blah”…that will, over time, shape the kid’s brain. And it will shape the momma’s midsection as well.

But go ahead and look at amino acids and metabolism. I understand you have to, and my theory comes off as harsh, I get it. Science is more than a little bit political lately, and sometimes it has to look for the lost watch where the light is, far away from where it was dropped. Science is pretty expensive lately; wherever the money goes, there are politics. Call it the death of science, call it the terminal illness of science, call it whatever you like. It is what it is.

OR,

Because fat cells can retain more chemicals for longer periods of time, and because mothers’ milk is produced from fat, let’s say that breast-feeding causes it, no matter the weight of the mother. And to go further back, let’s say that those chemicals in the system of the mother are mostly from years of contraceptives.

Wouldn’t that cause a row down at the Junior League? Heh.

:o)
- JoanOfArgghh | 04/11/2012 @ 10:06
And we wonder why there’s a generation of “Flukers,” eh?

I have extended family in the ed biz, and she tells me that the rot is well-advanced. Used to be, for instance, that the lie you told when you hadn’t done your homework was “the dog ate it / my grandma died / I left it on the bus.” You know, something that might persuade the teacher to give you one more day to frantically crank it out. These days, though, there’s NO excuse; it’s a simple, blatant “I didn’t do it; can I have an extension?” She also often gets: “why are you correcting my spelling / grammar / punctuation? This isn’t English class…”

Kids of parents like these soon learn that their convenience is all that matters. Once you get a critical mass of those kids, administrators would rather cave in than fight all of them…. and from there, even the well-brought-up kids take the lesson that they can basically get anything they want if they pitch a loud enough, long enough hissy fit. And then they get to college, and all of a sudden it’s a federal case if they don’t feel like walking three blocks and shelling out $9 a month for birth control.
- Severian | 04/11/2012 @ 10:10
Maybe it’s a rational mechanism to cope with the fact that Mom is a fat, obnoxious beast. (…oops, did I say that out loud?)
- Rich Fader | 04/11/2012 @ 18:07
[…] wait for a goddamn thing, anywhere, anytime. Out come the cell phones. I’ve said it before once, and again, and I’ll say it again, it’s the “not a single lifeguard worth a […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 06/30/2012 @ 09:25

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Autism Linked to Obesity in MothersWednesday, April 11th, 2012

Autism Linked to Obesity in Mothers
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012