Basic first lesson of statistics and epidemiology.  No one seems to have consider the possibility of reverse causality -- that perhaps some of the babies on the more severe end of the autistic spectrum might not feed as well and therefore become jaundiced.  

The research discussed on MSNBC (they don't really get into the details) sounds like it might have been what one calls a "fishing" expedition.  This is commonly employed by graduate students desperate to finish their thesis and their advisors or those who must publish or perish and can't come up with a really good hypothesis.

At least this is not as bad as one of the so-called researchers in autism who  a) did not follow proper human ethics protocols for many of his experiments, b) only kept data that confirmed his theories (and threw out anything that didn't fit his theories, c) took huge sums of money from the legal system to testify for litigants based on his theories, d) had all his coauthors remove their names from the research when they discovered what he had done and e) has the honor of being the only person I know of to have his research removed from the Lancet. 

Because of the severity of some forms of autism there are many who are scrambling to find THE cause and very little solid research that identifies THE cause.  Like obesity, THE cause is actually likely to turn out to be that very messy real life scenario of many contributing factors.  

We can find all kinds of associations when we talk about our own personal experiences, but in the end this does not prove causality.  We can also take a selection of variables and run a bunch of statistical correlations on them and lo and behold a certain percentage of them will come up with a correlation that is statistically significant -- and this is embedded in the nature of statistics.  

And recently, I've become very cynical about economists who seem to rely almost entirely on correlations -- with such great recent results for the worldwide economy.

Susan Burger

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