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Tero Toivanen

NeuroLogica Blog » Hyperbaric Oxygen for Autism - 0 views

www.theness.com/neurologicablog

neurologica hyberbaric oxygen oxygen therapy autism

shared by Tero Toivanen on 22 Mar 09 - Cached
  • This includes autism - there are no compelling studies showing any benefit from hyperbaric oxygen therapy in autism. The few studies that do exist are uncontrolled, which means they are mostly worthless.
  • Some have pointed out that the study leader, Daniel Rossignol, has a potential conflict of interest in that he offers hyperbaric oxygen therapy in his practice.
  • Everyone agrees, even Rossignol, that this study will not end the controversy over hyperbaric oxygen in autism. It needs to be replicated.
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  • Another weakness of the study is that it was short term, only four weeks. It therefore did not test if the effect of hyperbaric treatment survives much beyond the treatment itself. Even if the effect in this study is real, it may represent only a temporary symptomatic benefit - not altering the course of autism itself. Therefore longer followup studies are needed as well.
  • It is not impossible that hyperbaric oxygen may have some benefit in some children with autism.
  • The biggest risk of the treatment now is that it is expensive - costing 150-900 dollars per treatment or 14-17 thousand dollars for a chamber.
  • But one thing is clear - any future studies should be very tightly controlled, or they will be counterproductive.
  • Tero Toivanen on 22 Mar 09
     
    Critics about the new study about the effectiveness of hyperbaric oxygen therapy in autism.
Tero Toivanen

NeuroLogica Blog » Facilitated Communication Persists Despite Scientific Crit... - 0 views

theness.com/...s-despite-scientific-criticism

FC Facilitated Communication supported typing autism communication

shared by Tero Toivanen on 09 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Facilitated Communication (FC) is a technique for allegedly aiding those with communication impairment, such as some people with autism, to communicate through typing or pointing at a letter board. The idea is that some children have greater cognitive ability than is apparent through their verbal skills, but they lack the motor skills to type or write. The facilitator in FC is trained to hold and support their client’s hand, to help stabilize it, so that they can type out their thoughts.
  • FC was enthusiastically embraced by the special education community in the late 1980s and early 1990s but problems quickly emerged, namely the question of authorship – who is doing the communicating, the client or the facilitator?
  • The scientific evidence came down clearly on one side of that debate – it is the facilitator who is the author of the communication, not the client.
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  • A 2001 review by Mostert came to the same conclusion – that the evidence supports the conclusion that the facilitators are the authors of communication in FC.
  • The strategy here is obvious – studies that directly and objectively confront the key question, who is authoring the writing in FC, gave an answer proponents did not like. They therefore shifted to indirect inference which is more amenable to judgement and qualitative analysis so that the desired results can be manufactured.
  • FC continues to exist on the fringe of legitimate science, but continues to fool journalists, patient advocates, and even physicians.
  • It is sad that FC continues to survive despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that it is not a legitimate method of communication, but rather an elaborate exercise in self-deception.  It is a useful example of how powerful and subtle self-deception can be, and also of the ways in which scientific evidence can be manipulated to generate a desired outcome.
Tero Toivanen

NeuroLogica Blog » Dr. Laureys Admits Facilitated Communication Failure - 1 views

www.theness.com/neurologicablog

Facilitated Communication FC pseudoscience research autism

shared by Tero Toivanen on 15 Feb 10 - Cached
  • This is where the story gets interesting, and where it became an international controversy. Enter Linda Wouters – a speech therapist who uses facilitated communication (FC). She claimed that after months of training she could communicate with Houbens by sensing the subtle movements of his right hand, which he could use to direct her across a computer screen keyboard.
  • FC, unfortunately, is pure pseudoscience. It was introduced in the late 1980s as a wonderful new method for communicating with children with cognitive disorders, on the assumption that they were more verbally than mentally impaired. Many therapists were convinced, and many parents were overjoyed as their previously non-communicative children starting writing poetry expressing their love for their parents. (And there was also a dark side as some children, through FC, started reporting physical and sexual abuse by parents and caretakers.)
  • When people got around to actually testing FC scientifically it turned out, rather unequivocally, that all the communication was being done subconsciously by the facilitator – a phenomenon called the ideomotor effect. They were not just supporting the hand of their client, they were directing it. Well-designed studies showed that the facilitator was always doing all the communication. FC then shrank to a fringe phenomenon – but its adherents would not give up, and FC continues to this day (even sometimes in courtroom testimony), hoodwinking the unawares and having to be debunked all over again and again.
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  • Regarding Rom Houben video showing Wouters performing FC with Houben clearly showed that he could not be doing the communication. In one video Houben was not even looking at the keyboard, and may not have even been awake. But in every video Wouters was moving his hand across the keyboard at unbelievable speeds – not even a neurologically intact person could direct another to keystrokes with such speed an accuracy by just moving one finger.
  • Laureys has now carried out those tests, and his results hold that it wasn’t Houben doing the writing after all. The tests determined that he doesn’t have enough strength and muscle control in his right arm to operate the keyboard. In her effort to help the patient express himself, it would seem that the speech therapist had unwittingly assumed control… In the more recent test, Houben was shown or told a series of 15 objects and words, without a speech therapist being present. Afterward, he was supposed to type the correct word — but he didn’t succeed a single time.
  • It is truly a scandal that FC is still around. Like homeopathy, therapeutic touch, and many similar medical pseudosciences – their persistence is not a failure of science, which has adequately shown them to be nothing but illusions, but rather of collective rationality.
  • Tero Toivanen on 15 Feb 10
     
     It is truly a scandal that FC is still around. Like homeopathy, therapeutic touch, and many similar medical pseudosciences - their persistence is not a failure of science, which has adequately shown them to be nothing but illusions, but rather of collective rationality.
Tero Toivanen

NeuroLogica Blog » The Genetics of Autism - 0 views

www.theness.com/neurologicablog

autism genetics

shared by Tero Toivanen on 03 May 09 - Cached
  • What this means is that there is likely to be a complex set of many factors that contribute to ASD - not one single cause.
  • The same exact situation is true for other entities, like schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder (ADD).
  • One difference, however, is that schizophrenia and ADD likely represent changes to particular parts of the brain, while autism is likely due to changes in the global architecture of the brain.
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  • Getting back to the genetics of autism, current models are therefore consistent with what is being found when the genetics of autism is researched - researchers are finding many genes that predispose to autism in a subset of cases but no single or simple universal cause. At present, 133 different gene variants have been linked to autism.
  • This new research, conducted by Dr. Hakon Hakonarson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is a genome wide analysis involving about 10,000 individuals.
  • The results are especially significant because the variants lie between two genes, called CDH9 and CDH10, which are known to play an important role in forming nerve connections in the brain.
  • The gene variants that correlated with ASD are for proteins that are involved in the process of neurons forming connections with each other. There is already other lines of evidence that suggest what is different in ASD brains is a decrease in the amount of interconnectedness and communication among neurons. It is therefore likely no coincidence that this study found genetic correlations for proteins involved with neuronal connections.
  • This also is compatible with the finding that many separate genes are potentially involved with ASD - for there are many separate genes and processes involved with forming and maintaining neuronal connections.
  • Tero Toivanen on 03 May 09
     
    A new genome-wide analysis of families with autism has found significant gene associations, adding to the growing evidence for strong genetic contribution to autism.
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