Well. Now we have another cause of autism. Thanks, RFK jr!
There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It’s highly likely because they are given Tylenol,Kennedy stated during a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.
That man is just incredibly stupid. He doesn’t understand cause and effect, he doesn’t understand correlation, and he doesn’t understand that you shouldn’t make off-the-cuff remarks drawing unfounded conclusions.
One of the papers he claims support his conclusion is direct that it is a correlational study, and it doesn’t even look at tylenol use.
The 2013 study looked at circumcision rates in boys versus autism rates. The authors admitted that national and state averages may show correlation, not causation, and said their study may have mistakes, bias and confounding. “Circumcision practices are also tied to culture and religion, which also affect autism diagnoses and health care use,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, CBS News medical contributor and editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News.
Another expert brings up a rather salient point.
“There is absolutely no studies establishing any causality,” Dr. Steven Abelowitz, founder and medical director of Ocean Pediatrics, told CBS News. “While some observational studies suggest possibly an association, there’s no studies (showing causality) — and the conclusion by any credible medical resource is agreeing that there’s no causal relationship between Tylenol, circumcisions or vaccines to autism.”
…
“We almost never, ever use Tylenol after circumcision,” Abelowitz said, adding he’s performed about 10,000 circumcisions across his 30 years of practice.
Fire that guy.
By the way, circumcision is a pointless cosmetic procedure that you shouldn’t do anyway, but not because it causes autism.
The practice may have started because men exposed to sand storms get sand grains under their foreskin when urinating, leading to painful inflammation (as reported by allied troops in North Africa).
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If the idiot was right, we should have a solid statistical signal from millions of muslims and jews.
Circumcision is a really odd one, where the science pretty clearly says it’s stupid, but the vocal opposition comes from a flock of utter nutters inventing crazy reasons to oppose it.
The available evidence is that the genetic contribution to autism is high at 80%.
The environmental factors that contribute are not well understood right now.
Medical research also shows that autism is set in fetal development.
The tl;dr version.
A proposed model is that upstream highly interconnected regulatory ASD gene mutations disrupt transcriptional programs or signaling pathways resulting in dysregulation of downstream processes such as proliferation, neurogenesis, synaptogenesis and neural activity.
We have identified hundreds of autism associated genes, with small effects that act together, i.e. poygenic. These genes are expressed in the fetal brain. The details after that aren’t at all clear.
Needless to say, nobody is circumcising fetuses.
If this is true, then isn’t the best course of action not to circumcise infants?
I’ve always viewed circumcision as a barbaric custom without any practical benefits. I would never inflict such pain on an infant. It’s a terrible introduction to the world.
@John Watts #4, even almost forty years ago, when our two sons were born, there was zero medical reason to perform circumcision, and we decided not to do that procedure with our boys. Unfortunately, people are still making stuff up to support one side or another.
numerobis: WTF are you talking about? Who are these “utter nutters,” and what “crazy reasons” are they “inventing?”
If your momma took Tylenol while she was pregnant and you were circumcised, you have autism. And yet we are treating (preventable) communicable diseases as if they were our bosom buddy. As a medical professional for >40 years, this shit makes my brain hurt.
The disconnect between preventable disease management and the spread of unsubstantiated medical claims is troubling.
I guess I’m only half autistic, Tylenol didn’t come out until after I was born.
I guess it was his turn to make an absolutely bullshit claim to flood the public square with outrageous distractions.
By modern standards, Einstein would be diagnosed as autistic. No idea on his circumcision status, but he clearly wasn’t exposed to Tylenol or childhood vaccines.
I do hope that non-neurotypical people will someday be considered just that, atypical but completely normal. It’s not really a problem to be above average in intellect
but find most human social behaviors exhausting and pointless.
“That man is just incredibly stupid.” Yeah, but stupid sells. Stupid i’s really big in America, Must do reasonably well in other parts of the world.
A little surprising to me that so many of my boomer generation have this anti-science, anti-science-based-medicine sentiment. The first anti-vaxers I knew were boomer hippies living in the hills on “borrowed” land. Anti-vax was anti-government. Yet, all of us grew up on vaccines. I distinctly remember the Salk vaccine in 1954…first grade, my classroom window overlooking the annexes where they gave the shots. Much weeping and wailing, some screaming. Deeply unsettling, but I was imbued with how necessary it was. And it was.
I wonder—has anyone investigated whether the rampant stupidity among boomers might be related to getting polio vaccines?
Or, I could just suppose he is a cranky boomer being gratuitously antisemitic, he doesn’t really care what the study says, he never cared what the study said.