President Trump answers questions after an announcement on “important medical and scientific conclusions for American children” in the White House on September 22. Federal health officials have suggested a link between the use of acetaminophen during pregnancy as a risk of autism, although many health agencies have noted not conclusive results in research.
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Researchers from Cornell University received a subsidy of $ 5.1 million from Autism Data Science Initiative, as part of the increased failure of the Trump administration on disorder and controversial plans to follow direct sources for the complex and largely misunderstood condition.
The National Institutes of Health announced this summer for the subsidy project of $ 50 million to “identify how existing treatments / interventions are used and better understand their results to clarify the design of future clinical studies”.
The funding comes after the administration had previously announced controversial plans to study autism, including a database offered by autistic people composed of information from sources ranging from pharmacy chains and hospitals, to portable devices with health sensors, such as smart watches.
“Autism is a very, very complex disease, both of the cause and measurement, the diagnosis and the spectrum of autism,” said Judy Zhong, head of the biostatistic division of the health sciences of the population of the Weill Cornell Medical College. “This is why when we wrote the request (Grant), we have listed three stages to make a rigorous scientific replication for autism.”
It will direct the Center for the Replication, Validation and Reproducibility of Autism in Cornell, which will serve as an verification point for all other projects approved by the framework of the Autism Research Initiative.
With colleagues from Cornell, Zhong says they will use what they call for the square – a replication system created in 1982 which worked on more than 1,000 projects and hundreds of models.
“What we are doing is that we take a model, for example, using genetic variances to predict a result of the disease,” she said. “We take this model, we adapt it to our pipeline, and we generate the results on a new set of data, and we compare with the original claim of the model performance such as precision, etc.”
The causes and the impact of autism were at the center of the research decades, but the Trump administration made the study of the disease a key board of its public health program even though the NIH ended other federal research grants.
President Trump and the Secretary of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have made a certain number of unsuccessful claims on the causes of autism, in particular by praising long-debt theory that infant vaccinations were responsible, and more recently, advising pregnant women to take over the sale in common.
“What we see coming out of this administration is extremely complex and in many ways, quite contradictory,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, director of the Center for Autism Research Excellence at the University of Boston and founder of the Coalition of Autism Scientists.
“On the one hand, a week ago on Monday, we had … from President Trump, secretary Kennedy, false simplistic ideas that Tylenol and vaccines are responsible for the increase in autism rates and a very simplistic opinion,” she said.
“And in contrast to this, by reading each of the summaries of these newly funded subsidies, not a single investigator adopts such a simple approach,” said Tager-Flusberg. “They all take a very sophisticated, prospective and exciting perspective on the very complex and multifaceted potential nature of the factors that contribute to the risk of autism.”
Tager-Flusberg said that research from autism experts is ultimately extremely promising, despite its concerns that the administration can try to make the scale by promoting non-experts to prominence roles within the public health care system.
“We are quite relieved of what we see here and he comes out of NIH and we are grateful that the NIH staff who have been involved in the development and design of this research program to this point, the amount of work they put and the excellent results,” she said.
“It was a bit rocky along the way because of the chronology and some of the unknowns about how it was going to happen, but at this point, we are quite happy,” said Tager-Flusberg.
As long as researchers can avoid being influenced by external sources, she said that this funding for autism is ultimately a good thing.
