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Tero Toivanen

Autism and early oxygen deprivation 2 | On the Brain by Dr. Mike Merzenich,Ph.D. - 0 views

  • Fraternal twins typically have different placentas, whereas identical twins share a placenta but have different cords. The blood supply, and pre-clamping susceptibility to anoxia, would surely be different.
  • As for the idea that one could statistically detect whether cord clamping is the problem, we can! Amish people do not clamp the cord until placental delivery, and they have no autism rate. The same is true in Somalia, but Somalian immigrants to westernized medical countries have high rates. Try to systematically find out autism rates and immediate cord clamping rates, on a country by country, or region by region basis. It is a task someone should get on immediately, but it will take a lot of effort.
  • An interesting discussion of the “Amish anomaly” re autism incidence has been provided by Dan Olmsted, who went to Amish Country to find the 150 or so individuals there who could be expected to be severely autistic. They aren’t there. He seems pre-disposed to believe that the difference lies with their non-vaccination. Many studies now show that this is unlikely. As David Blake points out, there is another difference in this population: In Amish birthing, by tradition, the cord is not clamped prior to placenta delivery.
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  • The picture with autism in Somali children is a little murkier. It turns out that the incidence of autism is very high in children of Somali origin who were born in the US (several times higher than normal), while it appears to be very low in Somali children born in their native country. Again, vaccination has been identified as the likely cause by Somali parents and by many observers — but again, clamping follows placental delivery in Somalia, while the cord has been clamped without delay as a general practice in Minnesota, where a high incidence of autism in these children of Somali immigrants was first discovered.
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    Comment about the hypothesis that early umbilical cord clamping might contribute to the risk of origin of autism.
Tero Toivanen

An Outbreak of Autism, or a Statistical Fluke? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A former Minneapolis school official said Somalis made up 25 percent of children in preschool classes for those with severe autism.
  • Since the cause of autism is unknown, the authorities in Minnesota say it is hard to know even what to investigate.
  • A small recent study of refugees in schools in Stockholm found that Somalis were in classes for autistic children at three times the normal rate.
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  • Antivaccine activists are campaigning among them, which worries public health officials, especially because some families go back and forth to Somalia, where measles is still a significant cause of childhood death, according to Unicef.
  • Last year, she said, 25 percent of the children in preschool classes offering the most intensive treatment had Somali parents, while only about 6 percent of public school enrollment is Somali. Dr. Daniel S. McLellan, a pediatrician, said that when he began practicing at Children’s Hospital six years ago, he was struck by how many autistic Somali children he saw.
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