NO PREVENTION ONLY MONEY FOR RESEARCHERS HOW ABOUT A WARNING ABOUT THE DRAMATIC RISK FACTORS OF PATERNAL AGE OVER 32?

A WARNING FOR THE CHILDREN OF A MOTHER WHOSE FATHER WAS OLDER WHEN SHE WAS BORN, FOR A FAMILY HISTORY OF TYPE 1 DIABETES, HASHIMOTOS'S, AND OTHER AUTOIMMUNE DISORDERS, FOR A FAMILY HISTORY OF ASPERGER'S AND OTHER ASDs, FOR A FAMILY HISTORY OF AUTISM,or,SCHIZOPHRENIA. A FAMILY HISTORY OF ADHD, OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDERS.



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A profession is not just a way of making money; it’s a form of public trust. ...Medicine has for many decades now been betraying this public trust.”


Hooked
Ethics, the Medical Profession and the Pharmaceutical Industry.

By Howard Brody. 347 pages. Bowman & Littlefield, $27.95

Howard Brody, a medical ethicist, has brought his discipline’s tools to the relationship between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry. This problematic tangle of moral compromise (or triumphant health-promoting collaboration, depending on your point of view) has inspired several polemics by physicians in recent years, all of them straightforward indictments of the pharmaceutical industry and its for-profit webs.

Dr. Brody is also a physician, but he aims for the measured cadences of the ethicist instead, calmly laying out the relevant facts and then reasoning from basic principles to determine whether the medicine-pharmaceutical relationship, as it stands now, is an ethical one or not.

That Dr. Brody manages to deliver a hundred-odd pages of determinedly objective analysis before he, too, lets the righteous indignation roll should not really be called a failure of methodology: even as he carefully lays out the facts in this impressively comprehensive book, those facts begin to speak damningly for themselves.

NYT



One Month After Launch, Interactive Autism Network Reports 13,000 Registered Participants Eager to Accelerate Autism Research
The Interactive Autism Network (IAN)—the first national online autism registry, spearheaded by the Kennedy Krieger Institute, and funded by a grant from Autism Speaks—has registered an unprecedented number of individuals and families living with autism. Never before have researchers been offered access to such a large pool of family-provided data on this puzzling disorder. In only one month, IAN (www.IANproject.org) has achieved significant milestones:

* More than 13,000 registered participants
* Representation in all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Marshall Islands and Palau
* Diverse family registration, including: six sets of triplets, 37 sets of identical twins and 157 sets of fraternal twins

Researchers from institutions across the country have already begun to access IAN data to:

* Supplement and enhance current research studies
* Compare and validate existing research results obtained from smaller sample sizes
* Explore hypotheses for future research and search for parallels among individuals with autism and their families in a way that was not previously possible