

Autism Clusters Tied to College-Educated Parents - cwan
http://news.discovery.com/human/autism-clusters-college-education-parents.html

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mikebo
'He notes that the results could reveal something as simple as a higher level
of autism awareness among highly educated people. "At least in part, the more
you are educated, the more you might readily recognize the symptoms of autism
and push for a proper diagnosis," Gerhardt told Discovery News.'

This seems like a key point of this article, yet it was mentioned in an
offhand way at the bottom. Must be hard to make a good 'story' out of it
otherwise.

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tibbon
Seems to be an issue of identification more than causation.

People with more education are aware of things like autism more in their
children, have higher salaries, better jobs, health insurance, etc...

All of this would lead to them actually identifying something as being wrong
with their children and them taking them to a doctor for diagnosis.

Poorer parents without the education background or money would potentially
just think, "that's the way kids are" or even if they recognized it, they
might not have the money to take them to the doctor for diagnosis.

And finally, wealthier people seem to have trends for what they blame the
problems of childhood on. Some level of this outbreak of autism is likely
parents going to their doctor and saying, "my child is autistic- right?" just
as they were doing with ADD years ago. Moreso, the doctors are able to provide
prescriptions ($$) and additional visits ($$) to people that have some
illness.

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cpr
Why would they correlate it with level of education?

Why not the obvious fact that highly-educated functioning autistic people
often have even more autistic children?

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stan_rogers
Probably because it would be statistically overwritten to an NSA-approved
level by the obvious fact that the vast majority of autistic people do not
develop relationships resulting in progeny.

More probable related factors would include increased parental age,
particularly maternal age at first-child delivery, increased rates of
delegated childrearing during critical developmental phases, parents being
physically present but intellectually and/or emotionally absent during the
same period, and so forth.

The causes of autism are not well understood. Although there is an interesting
apparent correlation between visual processing loci (particularly as it
applies to facial recognition) and autism, no-one knows whether the anomaly is
causal or merely indicative. Even if autism is strictly a product of genetics,
"genetic" is not congruent with "inherited" -- else we'd still be a layer of
ooze in a tide pond somewhere.

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jancona
This clustering is not really news--it's been noticed for years. One possible
explanation is "assortative mating".

The theory is that geeks marrying other geeks raises the likelihood of having
hyper-geeks as offspring, and today it's much easier/more likely for geeks to
meet and breed with one another than it was in the past.

