美国国立卫生研究院院长就寻找自闭症病因的新项目发布最新进展
NIH Director Gives Update On New Project To Find Causes Of Autism

原始链接: https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/nih-director-gives-update-new-project-find-causes-autism

美国国立卫生研究院(NIH)启动了一项项目,调查美国自闭症发病率上升的原因,该项目可能利用患者病历和外部研究人员。主任杰伊·巴塔查里亚博士强调需要大型数据集,包括来自医疗保险、医疗补助和军队等来源的去身份信息化的病历,以追踪环境暴露与自闭症之间的潜在联系。 卫生部长小罗伯特·F·肯尼迪认为,自闭症发病率激增的原因是环境因素,而不是基因或筛查技术的改进。研究可能会探究霉菌和空气污染等因素。虽然肯尼迪的目标是在9月份之前获得初步结果,但巴塔查里亚澄清说,该项目将需要更长的时间,提案征集将在9月份发布,预计在拨款批准后一年内得出结果。预算估计为数千万美元。尽管肯尼迪过去曾暗示疫苗与自闭症之间存在联系,但巴塔查里亚表示,根据科学文献,他找不到支持这一观点的证据。


原文

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on April 22 that the new project to identify the causes of autism will likely involve patient records and outside researchers.

“We'd like to ... get access to the medical records of a large portion of the American population,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH’s director, told reporters in Washington. 

“I think to answer a question like this—why is autism rising—you need very large samples of people.”

He also said, “Medical records, I believe, should be a very important part of this, because that’s maybe the best way to track the link between exposures and then what happens afterwards.”

The project could draw data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid as well as other parts of the government, such as the military, Bhattacharya said. Patient data would be deanonymized to protect privacy, according to the NIH director.

Bhattacharya had said during an NIH meeting on Monday that the NIH’s data platform would pull data from pharmacy chains, medical claims, federal partnerships, and health organizations.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told President Donald Trump earlier in April that health officials had launched a “massive testing and research effort” that would determine what caused the spike in autism. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released on April 15 showed the rate of autism is up to one in 31 children in America. Autism is a developmental disability that can cause an array of symptoms, including delays in learning skills and epilepsy.

Kennedy told a recent briefing that the rise in autism is attributable to environmental factors, as opposed to genetics or better screening. He said studies would examine possible culprits such as mold and air pollution.

Bhattacharya said that the budget for the project, which will be run out of his office, is not finalized yet but will be in the order of tens of millions of dollars.

The process for picking researchers to be involved will be the normal process, with researchers offering proposals, NIH centers evaluating the proposals, and peer reviewers deciding which projects will be approved.

“I don’t know the exact details [of] what that will look like, but the goal is to use the normal way we do science at the NIH to answer a question that the NIH normally has not sought to answer,” Bhattacharya said.

Bhattacharya said at an unrelated briefing earlier on Tuesday that the reason autism is rising is a question “that is at the front of the minds of so many parents across the country worried about their kids, and yet scientific progress on this has been slow because scientists are frankly scared to ask the question.” 

He said that the NIH “is going to make it so that those questions are no longer taboo among scientists.”

Kennedy has said that vaccines may be one of the causes of autism.

Bhattacharya said during his confirmation hearing that he did not think there was a link between autism and vaccines, based on his reading of the literature, although he said he would support investigating the spike in autism.

Some autism organizations said in a joint statement on April 17 that “vaccines do not cause autism.” 

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network, one of the groups, said in a statement that “it is simply impossible that actual research into a supposed environmental cause of autism could be completed by September–real science does not move that quickly.”

Kennedy had told the president that “by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic,” but Bhattacharya said the project will take longer than that.

Bhattacharya said that the plan is to issue a call for proposals by September. Scientists will then respond to the call, and grants will be approved.

“I would like to have a timeline within a year, where they would start to put out the preliminary results,” he said. 

He added later: “Secretary Kennedy is enthusiastic to get the scientific process going, and I am too, so ... he’s accurately communicating that we want to get moving on this as rapidly as we can.”

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