December 14th, 2010 → 8:07 pm @ Seth Mnookin
I’m not sure how I missed this, but this is an excellent interview by Left Brain/Right Brain‘s Kevin Leitch with UC-Davis prof Cecilia Giulivi, the lead author of the aforementioned JAMA piece on mitochondria and autism. It offers a fairly convincing rebuttal to anti-vaccers arguing that the JAMA study provides more ammunition to the charge that somehow, someway, vaccines are to blame:
KL: Do you think, based on available science (including your paper) that vaccines cause autism?
CG: We do not have any evidence for this in our study. Our study was cross-sectional not longitudinal so it cannot point to any cause (not just vaccines), meaning we do not have any data supporting one way or another.
Post Categories: JAMA & LB/RB & mitochondrial autism & vaccines
December 14th, 2010 → 12:19 pm @ Seth Mnookin
On Saturday, The Huffington Post published a story titled Autism Research: Breakthrough Discovery on the Causes of Autism. The piece was about a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled “Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Autism,” which, according to the HuffPo‘s Mark Hyman, “discovered a profound and serious biological underpinning of autism.”
This is a big deal because if scientists can identify a biological mechanism that causes autism, they’re that much closer to determining a cure. (Indeed, the study received plenty of attention from all sorts of blogs.) It’s also notable because the vaccines-cause-autism crowd has as of late claimed that vaccines damage mitochondria–and therefore cause autism. But Hyman’s claim is not supported by the actual data presented in the paper he wrote about. (more…)
Post Categories: alternative medicine & Andrew Wakefield & Huffington Post & JAMA & mitochondrial autism & vaccines
