Drinking while pregnant risks autism in babies

This report is OK as far as it goes. There is no doubt that heavy drinking during pregnancy is harmful to the fetal brain and that the damage could in part manifest as autistic symptoms is no surprise. Note however that autism sufferers are often high-functioning in some ways and that is not characteristic of fetal alcohol sufferers. These findings are not then relevant to autism research in general. All they do is add symptoms to fetal alcohol syndrome

Women who drink alcohol during pregnancy may be putting their babies at risk of developing autism, according to new research. The consultant psychiatrist who alerted the medical profession to the finding that drinking while pregnant can give babies a condition called foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) has now found that the consumption of alcohol by expecting mothers can also cause autism. The research is the first to suggest that autism may be triggered by the child's mother drinking alcohol during pregnancy. The findings will heighten concern about the increase in alcohol consumption among women of childbearing age.

More than half of all mothers drink alcohol while pregnant, according to the Department of Health. This week the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence will issue a new warning about the dangers. A recent survey showed 8% of women aged 18 to 24 had consumed at least 35 units of alcohol, the equivalent of about 15 glasses of wine, during the previous week. Binge drinking among young women has resulted in the number of alcohol-related deaths in women aged 35 to 54 doubling between 1991 and 2005. Earlier this year, the British Medical Association warned that the increase in alcohol consumption by young women will be reflected in a rise in drinking during pregnancy and, subsequently, will put more babies at risk of being damaged by alcohol while in the womb.

Raja Mukherjee, consultant psychiatrist at Surrey Borders Partnership NHS trust, has spent the past 18 months examining children who have been damaged by their mother's drinking during pregnancy and found that a high proportion of them have autism. The research has been presented at scientific meetings. Mukherjee, who has presented his findings to medical colleagues, declined to discuss them in detail before their publication in a medical journal but said: "Genetic conditions are by far the most common cause of autism but that is not to say that other things cannot cause it, and prenatal alcohol appears, possibly, to be [a cause]. "Unlike genetic conditions, this is 100% preventable."

Mukherjee has previously warned against any drinking during pregnancy and believes that even low levels of alcohol may endanger babies. Drinking during pregnancy can cause foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, the umbrella term for a range of disorders - from minor anomalies such as low birth weight to severe FAS, the symptoms of which include mental retardation and facial abnormalities such as a short nose. The number of cases of FAS in Britain has increased in recent years. So far the government and medical bodies have given out conflicting messages about how much alcohol it is safe to drink during pregnancy.

Source





Hope for type 1 diabetes cure

RESEARCHERS are a step closer to a cure for type 1 diabetes after the successful transplantation of insulin-producing cells into eight patients. The breakthrough gives hope to the 140,000 Australians, who survive on daily insulin injections. Wayne Hawthorne, from the national pancreas and islet transplant unit at Westmead Hospital, said the experimental procedure might soon be a real option for everyone with type 1 diabetes, including children.

Scientists transplanted the insulin-producing islet cells from a donor pancreas into the patients' livers, where they began to produce insulin. In people who have type 1 diabetes, the body's immune system malfunctions, producing an auto-immune response that destroys these cells. After one treatment, the amount of insulin the patients needed to control blood glucose levels was dramatically reduced, in some cases to zero.

Mike Wilson, the chief executive of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in Australia, said the treatment effectively reversed diabetes. "This is an incredibly exciting step forward for both the type 1 diabetes community and for the world-class Australian researchers who are rapidly advancing in this area," he said.

Only patients with brittle (unstable) diabetes, where blood sugar drops dramatically without warning, have been treated so far, but Dr Hawthorne said the aim was to treat everyone with the disease. However, he said low organ donation rates meant islet transplants would remain out of reach unless another way to source the cells was found.

Fewer than 90 pancreases become available a year for this type of operation in Australia but more than 2000 people are newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Xenotransplantation, where animal cells are transplanted into humans, is an option being investigated. Last month scientists in the United States turned stem cells into insulin producers that responded to blood glucose levels. Islet cell transplants have been reliable and viable only in the past few years because there have been major scientific advances. About 200 patients worldwide have been treated, with 80 per cent of them not needing insulin injections 12 months later.

However, patients need potentially toxic immuno-suppressant drugs so their bodies do not reject the new cells, and the drugs have serious side effects that for some people are worse than the disease.

Last week collaborating researchers at St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne announced the successful transplantation of insulin-producing islet cells into a Victorian woman. Elaine Robinson, 54, no longer sufferers from life-threatening hypoglycaemic attacks and needs to inject only a small fraction of the amount of insulin she was using previously. A planned second transplant could eliminate the need for insulin completely.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.

"What we should be doing is monitoring children from birth so we can detect any deviations from the norm at an early stage and action can be taken". Who said that? Joe Stalin? Adolf Hitler? Orwell's "Big Brother"? The Spanish Inquisition? Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde? None of those. It was Dr Colin Waine, chairman of Britain's National Obesity Forum. What a fine fellow!

*********************