Never forget to check your references

Unlike the sober and responsible team at Riddled Research Institute, some people will stop at nothing to win an IgNobel prize:
The authors made it clear in their press statements that the story is not just about creating autistic fish through chemistry...

Prozac-Contaminated Drinking Water May Be Link to Autism

It has proved a boon to the scribes of the Daily Fail and HuffPost in their "ongoing project to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer autism"* (e.g. Poinsettias) It would also provide us with an opportunity for a joke about Social Morays, except we made it earlier.

Reading past the Abstract, we discover that the test minnows were immersed in water loaded with two antidepressants and an anti-convulsant, at concentrations 400 to 700 times higher than anything ever found in tap-water.** The authors sliced and diced the fish brains to measure the activity of genes that they believe are counterparts of genes associated with autism in humans. As controls they also measured the activity of the genetic correlates of "fragile X and Rett syndromes", "Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, major depression, bipolar disorder and ADHD".***

At the Research Institute we are naturally agog, not to mention Magog, and as you see we are already hard at work exposing fish to unrealistically high levels of convertibles and frogs.


The inspiration for the study seems to have been a paper by Croen et al. claiming that SSRIs caused a slightly higher risk of autism / Asperger's Syndrome / PDD when taken during pregnancy in your actual therapeutic dosage [10⁶ times higher]. Croen couldn't quantify the increased risk because she was measuring adjusted odds ratios, i.e. the likelihood of a certain precedent (given an observed antecedent):

mothers of children subsequently diagnosed with ASD were twice as likely to have at least 1 antidepressant prescription in the year prior to delivery of the study child

The risk is the chance of observing an antecedent (given a precedent) and the increase works out to be much smaller. In their press release -- where a massive overstatement is more sensational and more important than telling the truth -- Croen et al. did in fact misquote their own work and talk about a "doubled risk". That's why one reads the original paper.

----------------------------------------------------------

"Why would anyone bother giving antidepressants to fish?" Chapman wondered aloud.

"To assuage their anxieties and bestow upon them the peace of cod that passeth understanding," Keats suggested.

----------------------------------------------------------

* © Ben Goldacre

** Questioned about this unrealistic dose, the authors explained that the levels reported from drinking water are growing all the time, and therefore may some day reach a concentration comparable to their experiment -- whereupon it will retrospectively affect infants born before 2010 IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY.

*** Skeptics might argue that these genes may not serve the same purpose in the neurological development of fish and of humans. But they will be refuted when fish are encountered showing fragile X and Rett syndromes, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, major depression, bipolar disorder and ADHD!