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Spectrum: Autism Research News

WEEK OF
May 22nd

Budget backlash

Government agencies that support science, health and education in the United States are among the hardest hit by the budget proposal President Donald Trump released on Tuesday. The National Institutes of Health, the nation’s top funder of biomedical research, stands to lose 18 percent of its budget. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention faces a similar budget cut. And the Department of Education would lose nearly 14 percent of its funds.

Trump has also proposed an $800 billion cut to Medicaid, which helps to cover healthcare costs for children with disabilities.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Kathleen O’Brien, who has a son with autism, says the proposed cuts would disproportionately affect families like hers. “Republicans and Democrats in Congress should reject this attack on Medicaid, a vital, often overlooked part of the safety net,” writes O’Brien, who is an editor at the newspaper. “They should take a stand for the people in our communities who are least able to stand up for themselves.”

Sources
Sources
The New York Times / 24 May 2017
Fake news

A sharply written commentary in Autism Research urges researchers to take action against fake autism news, particularly statements involving vaccines.

The commentary comes amid a revitalization of anti-vaccine activism, bolstered by Trump’s perpetuation of the vaccine-autism myth.

“A lie is a lie, evidence is evidence, and we must help members of the public know when they are being hoodwinked and conned,” write Isabel Smith, professor of developmental pediatrics, and Noni MacDonald, professor of infectious diseases, both of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.

Smith and MacDonald discuss ways to address “evidence deniers” and “pseudoscience promoters,” such as refuting inaccurate information and planting real evidence in its place.

Politicians in the U.S. are also urging Trump and his team to stop spreading fake news about science, STAT reports. Last week, seven members of Congress sent Trump a letter pleading for him to hire a science advisor. Until the post is filled “by a qualified, objective scientist who understands the difference between alternative news peddled on alt-right websites and legitimate well-vetted scientific facts, we fear that you will continue to be vulnerable to misinformation and fake news,” they wrote.

Legend lost

The autism research community has lost a legend: Isabelle Rapin.

Rapin was professor emerita of neurology and pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She authored more than 250 papers about autism and related conditions. Spectrum covered her work, and she was also a contributor, describing in a 2011 Viewpoint how far the field had come over the course of her career.

“We have done away with the theory of refrigerator mothers. We know that autism spectrum disorders are disorders of the developing brain and have learned that genetics plays a major — but by no means exclusive — role in their cause,” she wrote.

“Families deserve the credit for major steps forward, because they banded together to insist that the results of such tests be collected and stored in large data banks accessible to researchers,” she added. “I salute them and anticipate that we can make much more progress if we can find the means to sustain the momentum of the past decade.”

Sources
The New York Times / 25 May 2017
Brain bungle

A story in Bloomberg Businessweek raises new questions about neurofeedback, the controversial idea that people can change their brain activity and behavior based on a readout of their brainwaves.

The idea is the basis of Neurocore, a company partly owned by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. The company’s website claims neurofeedback can ease attention problems, depression and autism.

In the story, journalist Peter Andrey Smith describes his personal experience with Neurocore. Staff at the clinic in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, showed him an image of his brain with swaths of blue and orange indicating the “excesses” and “deficiencies” they said underlie his drowsiness and trouble focusing. But it turns out they showed him an image of someone else’s brain by mistake.

“The mixup left me wondering if the data could be interpreted to mean anything,” Smith writes.

Sources
Migratory minds

Scientists like to move around, according to an analysis in Science last week.

The magazine used ORCID, an anonymized database of roughly 3 million scientists, to track how researchers migrate throughout their careers.

The analysis revealed some interesting trends. For instance, about one-third of researchers who received their Ph.D. in the United Kingdom no longer live there. The proportion of researchers who left the U.S. after obtaining a Ph.D. there is smaller — about one-fifth. The largest proportion of researchers who left both countries ended up in Asia.

The piece includes some neat figures and a very cool interactive.

Pot promise

A compound derived from marijuana can reduce the frequency of seizures in children with a rare form of epilepsy, according to the first-ever trial comparing the experimental treatment to a placebo.

The findings appeared Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers compared the compound, called cannabidiol, with a placebo in 120 children with a rare seizure disorder known as Dravet syndrome. Up to 20 percent of children with the syndrome die before age 20.

Children took a liquid dose of cannabidiol or a placebo solution daily for 14 weeks. During that time, the median number of convulsive seizures per month among children who received cannabidiol decreased from 12.4 to 5.9. The median rate of seizures among children in the placebo group went from 14.9 to 14.1.

About 5 percent of children who took cannabidiol stopped having seizures altogether, STAT reports.

In a feature last September, Spectrum’s Jessica Wright explored the promise and pitfalls of pursuing marijuana as a treatment for epilepsy and autism.

Sources
New England Journal of Medicine / 25 May 2017
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