Autistic children do not have more mercury in their blood, study finds

[depakid]

Source: The Oregonian

Tests on blood samples from 452 California children, some diagnosed with autism and some developing normally, found no difference in the amount of mercury present in the kids' blood.

The tests don't mean that there is no connection between mercury and the development of autism, since all the blood was drawn after children already had been diagnosed. But it suggests that autistic children don't carry much more mercury in their bodies - at least in their blood. In fact, researchers found that autistic children tended to have less mercury exposure than other kids, mostly because they ate less fish. (Fish consumption is a big source of mercury exposure in the United States.)

The mercury tests, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, are part of a larger effort to find genetic or environmental factors that influence autism. That condition, which causes developmental problems in children, seems to be increasing, but no one knows why. Some people have suggested that mercury, a metal that can cause brain damage in certain forms and doses, might help cause autism.

A number of people have claimed that a mercury-containing preservative once found in several vaccines might be connected to autism, despite very strong scientific evidence showing no link between the preservative and the disease. That preservative, thimerosal, has largely been removed from U.S. vaccines, though many (but not all) doses of flu vaccine still contain the preservative.

Full study online here: http://www.ehponline.org/members/2009/0900736/0900736.pdf

Read more: http://www.oregonlive.com/health/index.ssf/2009/10/autistic_children_do_not_have.html

[WriteDown]

1. Of course, its used up in the autism creation process. nt

[rd_kent]

3. Hahaha!

[Cronus Protagonist]

10. +1

I snarfed milk when I read that subject line!

[Canuckistanian]

21. LOL

You're evil

:rofl:

[KamaAina]

32. Think of it as modern-day alchemy

base metals into (in some cases) intellectual gold. :-)

[woo me with science]

34. I like you. :) nt

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

2. Fuck RFK Jr.!

Alternate headline.

:eyes:

[Spider Jerusalem]

24. RFK Jr is a crank who needs to STFU.

There's absolutely zero medical evidence of any link between vaccinations and autistic spectrum disorders. The ONE study that everyone points to as evidence for a link turns out to have been fabricated and the author, Andrew Wakefield, has been reprimanded for professional misconduct. Not to mention that the vaccine most often posited as linked to autistic disorders, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, has never contained thimerosal or any mercury.

[lapfog_1]

4. That doesn't say much.

They need to biopsy the brains, in fact, a full autopsy of brains of normal v autistic kids (who have died in accidents or from other causes).

There is a blood / brain barrier and the question would be "has mercury or other metals (like aluminum from deodorants and cooking pots, etc) lodged in the brains of autistic children to a greater degree than non-autistic children".

Or the more basic question "what is different in the brain chemistry of autistic v non-autistic children?".

Both are legitimate questions, without jumping to conclusions about WHERE such substances, if any, originated.

[WriteDown]

5. Live brain vivisection would be much more effective. nt

[maddezmom]

6. ya know, I'm not a believer in the merc/vac autism link

but as a mom with a diagnosed severely autistic son, your comments seem crass.

[WriteDown]

7. Why is that? nt

[lumberjack_jeff]

8. Either A) you were making a joke about vivisection of children with Autism.

B) you were not.

AGF = assume good faith. I'm going to assume you are simply really bad at humor.

[WriteDown]

9. Wrong inference...

I was making an anti-vaxer joke. Some people are going to always look for proof even when none exists. If dead brain dissection did not produce the desired outcome, next they'd be calling for live brain dissection.

[maddezmom]

13. FWIW, I think the joke fell flat

[WriteDown]

14. It happens. nt

[MichaelHarris]

19. hey

I dug the joke.

[MichaelHarris]

18. plus

about a million.

[skoalyman]

20. don't forget it should be done in a hot room

you know so all the mercury rises to the head :rofl:

[WriteDown]

28. I am a mere amature compared to you.

:rofl: at you comment.

[trotsky]

27. Your joke may not have been appropriate, but your point sure was.

If dead brain dissection did not produce the desired outcome, next they'd be calling for live brain dissection.

100% absolutely true. They've made up their minds that (pick one: MMR, mercury, vaccines, aluminum) are to blame, and simply reject any and all facts to the contrary.

[mzmolly]

12. There are monkey studies that have raised questions in this regard, also published in EHP.

http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/7712/7712.html

Though, no live monkeys were dissected, thankfully. ;)

[msanthrope]

16. Could we eat the remains, Mr. Swift, or will they be too tough? n/t

[WriteDown]

29. Call me Jonathan.

:)

[KamaAina]

33. That was so funny I forgot to laugh.

:eyes:

[Demeter]

15. This Work Has Been Done for Decades, and the Findings Are:

there are large departures from the expected brain structures of the "neurotypical".

Autism is a genetic disease, caused, it is suspected, by too many repetitions of some powerful genes which resulted from parents with already large numbers of copies of those genes mixing their genes and hitting a threshold of genetic overload.

These genes are the ones that make engineers, lawyers, and other right-brained brains. When women got into college to learn something other than typing, and met their intellectual match, then the disease rate exploded.

Mercury poisoning is the vain wish of some to find an external cause for a condition due to "natural selection".

The rest of the world just wishes it and the kids would "go away".

It's funny about the mention of not eating fish. My AI spectrum kid refuses to eat fish, whereas I notice if my mercury levels are getting low. I just can't think as well! It's more likely the phosphorus, though.

[happyslug]

23. I hate to disagree, there is evidence of Mercury causation, but it is from Coal NOT vaccines

Under Reagan (We keep going back to him for some reason) the issue of using "Scrubbers" to remove excess mercury came up. It quickly became a debate between Eastern high mercury content coal vs Western low mercury content coal, but in a way that was strange. If Reagan put the restrictions on mercury being released as low as was recommended, utilities that burned coal for electrical generation would have to use Scrubbers no matter which coal was used, and preferred Eastern Coal for its greater energy content.

On the other hand, if the mercury guidelines went NOT set as low, Western Coal was preferred for it meet the higher Mercury release levels without scrubbers. Thus Western (which tend to be non-unionized coal) fought it out with Eastern UMW coal. As you can guess Western, non-unionized coal won and the scrubbers were NOT installed.

Recently it was found that Eastern Bituminous coal ash tended to absorb mercury, while Western Ligate coal ash did not. Combined with the above can explain the slow increase in autistic children over the last 30 years, tied in with greater release of Mercury by burning Ligate coal. In fact Legate Coal is even imported into Western Pennsylvania to use to generate Electricity, while Bituminous coal mined locally is shipped overseas for steel production.

Just pointing out that the switch in what coal we are burning to produce electricity has increased the mercury in the air. You have had a huge slow increase in electrical generation by coal, mostly ligate, since Reagan was President. This would affect children first in the form of Autism. The fact bituminous coal Absorbs mercury can help explain why we did not see as many in the 1950s and 1960s as we do now (With the big reason is the simple increase in mercury being released, even through the coal burned before 1980 had higher mercury content, its ash absorb more mercury then was released when it was burned).

That it is the mercury ABSORB by the body as a whole would also explain why it would NOT show up in the blood, the issue is NOT that the blood has mercury in it today, but that it was used in the pass to transfer mercury to the brain.

As I was writing the above I remember a "factoid" told to me many years ago, when your body needs something it will "crave" it, even if you are NOT hungary. Most scientists who have studied this come to the conclusion that the body will grave a food the body associates with whatever material the body needs. In reverse, the body will avoid foods that the body has come to associate with to high a concentration of material the body finds harmful. I bring this up for it was mentioned that most Autistic Children avoid Fish, while normal children eat fish AND that fish is the main source of Mercury in most people's bodies. Are the bodies of the autistics trying to avoid additional mercury by refusing to eat fish? I do not know the answer (it may just be the group used in the study just had a lot of anti-fish eaters for all I know) but its seems to indicate that the problem may be Mercury. Now I do NOT believe the Mercury in the vaccines caused the Autism but in some cases it may have provided the "last straw" of mercury needed to engage the tendency to autism (the main source of Mercury being Coal being burned to produce Electricity). Just something to think about and discuss and look into see if anyone is doing research it.

More on Mercury and coal see the following:
http://autisminnb.blogspot.com/2007/10/autistic-children-canaries-in-coal-mine.html
http://energy.er.usgs.gov/health_environment/mercury/mercury_coal.html
http://www.prleap.com/pr/105706/
http://www.utsystem.edu/news/clips/dailyclips/2005/0312-0318/UTHSCSA-HC-links-031705.pdf

Mercury and Autism:
http://www.usautism.org/USAAA_Newsletter/usaaa_newsletter_103007.htm
http://www.infowars.com/articles/science/mercury_air_pollution_autism.htm

Some cites that claim support for Mercury in Vaccine is causing Autism:
http://autismcoach.com/Autism%20Declines%20When%20Mercury%20Vaccines%20Banned.htm
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/mercury/analysis.html

[Demeter]

25. Autistic Children Do Not Eat Fish Because of Their Sensory Problems

they are highly sensitive to light, sound, taste, feel, and do not tolerate textures, tastes and aromas others find acceptable. In addition, my kid had a bone in her fish once, and forever after refuses to eat it.

Also, the mesentary (gut) is totally screwed up, and constant diarrhea is a real problem.

Children were mislabeled prior to the 80's, and called childhood schizophrenics instead of autistic.

Reagan did a lot of evil things, but causing autism cannot at present be laid at his door.

And correlation (or coincidence) is no proof of causation. Mercury is NOT a cause of autism. Sorry.

[liberal_at_heart]

41. I agree it is sensory

My autistic son is very picky about what he eats. It is because of his sensory issues. He told his daddy he doesn't like his stew because it is squishy. I think the reason some autistic kids won't eat fish is because of their sensory issues.

[WriteDown]

30. I thought Jenny McCarthy was from the west coast....

See Igel's post.

[happyslug]

31. Bu my post had to do with what COAL was being burned, not WHERE it was burned

And the growth of electrical production from Coal Plants have even increased on the West Coast (Through much of their electrical usage is Hydro-powered). My point was the INCREASE in coal usage AND where that coal came from more then WHERE the coal was burned.

[TrogL]

38. I love your sources

Especially autism coach. In their extensive section on Jenny McCarthy they're waaaaaaay more upset about her ties to industry and criticm of other organizations than her involvement in the vaccine controversy (which only tangentally mentioned).

They also speak favourably of every quack cure imaginable (except they seem to have skipped chelation and iron lungs for some reason).

That's OK, http://www.usautism.org/USAAA_Newsletter/usaaa_newsletter_103007.htm mentions chelation at the bottom of the page.

[Igel]

22. It's been done.

There are some significant differences between autistic brains and normal brains ("normal" used to mean within 1 standard deviation of the mean).

It's been done to death, so to speak.

There are a lot of brain chemistry differences. More importantly, there are some structural differences--structural differences that pretty much have to originate pre-birth, even though they continue to develop after birth (the entire humongous pre/post-birth transition is vastly overrated--some systems come on line, others shut down, but much of the body doesn't really care how the oxygen, glucose, amino acids, etc., etc., got into the bloodstream).

The Hg/autism connection has two main problems: First, eye-tracking shows whether or not kids are at the more dire end of the autism spectrum at 3-4 months of age in many cases, if not earlier. That's before nearly every vaccination--and usually when the soon-to-be-heartbroken parents would swear that their kid's developing perfectly normally. In fact, when they were told during the course of the study they adamantly denied it--even though the earlier the intervention starts the better. The limiting factor in eye-tracking is whether the kids can focus and have sufficient control over their eye muscles. Austistic and normal kids simply have different sets of interests even at 3 months: The normal kids seek out faces, both novel and familiar; the autistic kids simply don't care, human, doorknob, it's all equally interesting (or not). To solve part of the problem using a kind of brute-force method you'd need to find some enterprising fmri folks to image neonates' brains--or even brains in utero--so they could track the tykes later. The only problem would be sample size. Autism isn't all that common, and they'd probably need a few dozen autistic brains in the sample with no way of IDing them a priori. At an autism rate of what--0.2%?--they'd need to image 10,000 or more neonates. The funding would have to be out of this world. It would never pass the human research protocols committee.

Second, those holding the Hg/vaccination link to be true made a probably false assumption about organic Hg's behavior in the human body. Methyl mercury is retained and has a fairly long biological half-life. It takes a long-time for it to be removed from the bloodstream and tissues. Ethyl mercury pretty much washes right out at the levels induced by vaccinations, at a rate something like 1000 times faster than methyl mercury. (Yes, that was a bit of a shock to the researchers involved.) Thimerosal is a kind of ethyl mercury. In other words, the window of exposure to Hg from something like thimerosal is much, much smaller than assumed. The result would be that you'd expect to find a lot *more* autism than you do, with a different distribution, and a different frequency over time, since the methyl mercury background concentrations in the population would provide at least as much, if not more, exposure to Hg.

[TrogL]

35. Lovely job of moving the goalposts

AFAIK, no difference in brain chemistry overall has been found in autistic children - it's in the wiring.

Even then, you won't be satisfied.

I'm reminded of a story arc in 'Stand on Zanzibar'. The massive Artifical Intelligence computer Shalmanazar has ground to a halt and refuses to do meaningful work because of an inconsistency it has found in some data. It will not proceed until a "cause" is found to explain the discrepency. Eventually a philosopher known for his out-of-the-box thinking is hired to deal with the situation. He merely tells Shalmanazar that an "unknown but real factor" is causing the discrepency. The lights go on and Shalmanazar goes back to cranking out reports.

For God's sake stop obsessing on what causes autism - we may never know. Some Aspies feel that they're the next step in evolution and don't want to be fixed. Let's figure out what we can do for the kids, not to them.

When I grew up (1960's) mercury was everywhere. My father (a chemistry teacher) would bring some home from school for me to play with. It was in thermometers (alcohol is cheaper). It was used as a topical antibiotic (mercurichrome). It's since been taken off the market. (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2518/what-happened-to-mercurochrome.) Autism levels went up. Go figure.

You know what's the highest source of mercury exposure at the moment? Fish. You know what's the best delivery for nutrition required for brain development (eg. omega fatty acids)? Fish.

Go figure.

[Demeter]

36. The Brain's Chemistry Is Very Different as well as its structure

as cases like Temple Grandin and my own kid attest.

Serotonin and other neurotransmitter levels are widely diverging in the autisticly afflicted vs neurotypical brains. Which is why SSRI drugs are a great stabilizer for the afflicted. This is an atypical use of the drugs, but effective in enabling better brain function and therefore coping with life's chllenges.

And autism affects the entire nervous system, including especially the sensory, the vestibular and the mesentary nerve centers.

[lapfog_1]

39. I wasn't tying mercury to autism.

merely pointing out that measuring blood levels (of anything for that matter) does not rule in or out much of anything that relates to the brain. Your brain could be loaded with toxins of some type and your blood levels of that toxin might well be in the normal range.

That's all I was pointing out.

I'm not "obsessing" about anything. Just mentioned it because my niece is currently doing research on brain chemistry (not autism AFAIK) and has made this point over and over again.

[mzmolly]

11. I'll kick this but I will add that the issue according to some of the research is mercury

in the brain vs. blood.

http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/7712/7712.html

K and R.

[cpompilo]

17. Many autistic children find relief with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet

for children on the SCD: www.PecanBread.com

[TrogL]

37. Really!! Let's see some medical studies in a peer-reviewed journal

The abstract will do, but if you need the whole thing, post the item and I'll see if I can get it.

*listens to the crickets*

[eridani]

26. That says nothing about the possibility that they may be more susceptible

--to the harmful effects of low levels of mercury.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

40. Kick.