Masculinized features help define children with autism, online autism-parent forums spread pseudoscience, and the United States has more older fathers than ever.
Both boys and girls with autism have more masculinized facial features than sex-matched controls, the researchers found. In addition, social communication difficulties increase with increasing masculinity of facial features. The results were published 24 August in Scientific Reports.
Among the 10 most-shared stories that supposedly present autism-related science, BuzzFeed rated the top two as “unevidenced,” noting that they’d each been shared hundreds of thousands of times. Of the five top 10 most-shared articles that BuzzFeed ranked as “evidenced,” two of them confirm no link between vaccines and autism.
Among the strategies is the use of an ‘ARMED’ approach: Ask (about which therapies parents may be using), Respect (cultural or religious differences), Monitor (how children respond to any therapies), Educate and Distribute (evidence-based information).
But the upshot is that about 9 percent of U.S. children are born to fathers over age 40, the commonly accepted cutoff for ‘older dad.’ The researchers noted that these findings have “implications for public health factors,” including increased risk for autism, psychiatric illness and even childhood cancer in children born to older fathers. They also note that the frequencies of sperm mutations that accumulate with age are increasing in the population.
“In writing the story of my formative years in the words I had back in 2005 (I was 26), with feeling but without confidence or high finish, I found my voice,” Tammet wrote. He noted that English-language critics seemed most likely to view his first book as a one-time “account of a ‘numbers wiz’,” whereas “German and Spanish and Brazilian and Japanese readers saw something else, and sent letters urging me to continue writing.”
