By Jake Crosby

He may not receive the same level of attention as Paul Offit, but what Columbia sociologist professor Peter Bearman lacks in publicity, he more than makes up for in autism research money. Millions of your tax dollars are being given to him through the NIH under the guidance of the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, whose chair, Dr. Thomas Insel, is the brother of a vaccine developer, Dr. Richard Insel. (When Vaccine Development is a Family Business. The Conflicted Role On Vaccines and Autism)

Is Bearman’s research worth the money being invested in it? This question was addressed on Age of Autism once before by Katie Wright, whose answer was pretty conclusive – “nonsense.” Kevin Leitch of Leftbrain/Rightbrain - perhaps the only place I’ve seen Peter Bearman receive a large amount of attention outside his own academic circles - leapt into the fray addressing none of Wright’s points while making a stink about how she simply won’t accept Bearman’s “science.” Little did I know at the time that this very debate would jump off the Internet and onto the Brandeis campus.

 On March 24^th, I attended a lecture at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management held by the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy. The title of the event was “Understanding the Increased Prevalence of Autism.” The honorary speaker was none other than NIH-funded Columbia sociologist, Professor Peter Bearman.

Having read Age of Autism’s post about Bearman, Peter Bearman, Autism and the House of Nonsense, I knew what to expect, and none of what Bearman said really shocked me or was different from what I’d heard from him in the past. He went through his research - the increased risk of autism between same-sex twins and a corresponding decrease of autism between opposite-sex twins, his claims that autism is due at least in part to diagnostic substitution of the “mental retardation label,” the “social clustering,” the increased parental age, and the close spacing of births.

With the close spacing of births, Bearman did acknowledge that it was perhaps related to folate-depletion, suggesting a nutritional basis for autism spectrum disorders that might perhaps play a role. While nutrition may well be involved in the pathology of autism, historical epidemiology suggests these findings are hardly significant. Closely spaced births was a much bigger phenomenon 100 years ago when the average family size was considerably larger while autism prevalence was not even high enough to be detectable – if there was any autism back then at all – much less at epidemic levels like it is today.

After hearing Bearman talk for a good 45 minutes, the audience was allowed to ask questions. I brought up his paper in the International Journal of Epidemiology and its claims that diagnostic substitution could account for a 25% increase in the rate of autism. I told him it was based on a flawed extrapolation of a sub-group of about 9% of cases who switched from a diagnosis of mental retardation to a co-morbid or sole diagnosis of autism. I also mentioned that the conclusion was based on generalizing this group to the autism caseload as a whole.

He started to answer, then paused and said out loud, “How should I answer this?” He then gave a long-winded response about how difficult it was to quantify the increase and that he felt his methods were right, but never explained why. In his response, he made two amazing admissions:

1. The increased prevalence of autism is real. It was good to know that even Bearman admitted that the epidemic denial of anthropologist Roy Grinker – a frequent commenter on Bearman’s work – was bunk.

2. Four out of five of the reviewers of his paper had the problem I had about its incorrect extrapolation. “And now,” he said, referring to me, “five out of six,” in a half-joking manner.

Bearman still concluded, “But I think it’s a good paper.”

That is just not an acceptable answer. He might as well have admitted that the NIH was giving him millions for his opinions, because that in essence is what he just said. NIH funding is supposed to produce scientific papers, not editorials. I could just as easily get someone’s opinion by reading the comments on a HuffPo article.

Yet he still had the nerve to call studies of environmental factors “junk” in his response to another audience member’s question, after admitting that four out of five peer-reviewers have essentially said just that about his own work. Then he said that another paper of his that is up for peer-review at different journal will “probably get rejected,” which was followed by snickers from the audience – to which I thought “it’s funny to them that his research is garbage?”

Bearman also delved into the increased risk of parental age, saying this caused “de-novo mutations” in genes that was driving the increase in autism and making it more heritable. He showed us a graph of autism concordance between same-sex twins going up and between opposite-sex twins going down. Historically, twin studies have been used to claim autism is a genetic condition while spuriously omitting the fact that concordance between twin births is instead due to related environmental exposures and susceptibility. Bearman’s analysis was no exception here. He never mentioned that the older a parent is, the more exposure they’ve had to a particular substance, and the more exposure they’ve had to such a substance, the more likely it is to affect their unborn children.

With that in mind, I asked Professor Bearman if perhaps the trend in twin concordance by gender was due to the increase of something in the environment that puts a certain group of people at risk, noting that autism effects more boys than it does girls. He did not address my point about susceptibility factors – simply saying that the 4:1 ratio of boys to girls affected with autism has remained stable and offered no evidence for why “de novo” genetic mutations were more likely a culprit than environmental insults beyond the correlation to older parents.

What struck me as most incredible was his response to a student who brought up Wakefield’s case series and The Lancet’s retraction of the paper. The student, as repeated ad nauseum in the popular press, incorrectly called the paper a study linking vaccines to autism. I called out correcting her, stating that it never did.

Bearman responded that because autism exists in clusters as opposed to the “global usage of vaccines” that he does not think the vaccine-autism connection warrants further study. Of course, vaccination rates fluctuate just as autism rates do. It is absolutely bizarre that he would make such a statement, especially when his own research made almost no effort to see whether vaccination rates and autism rates were related.

Bearman also stated that vaccination exemptions were highest in places with high autism prevalence as a way of doubting the connection. Well, of course they would be; vaccination exemptions are a response to the soaring autism diagnoses. This should, if anything, intensify the urgency for vaccine-autism research.

“But what if that’s caused by fear of vaccines-induced autism?” – I asked.

He never answered my question, but did acknowledge, “I know you disagree with me.”

But Bearman’s disagreement also contradicts what he told a different audience in a video featured in Katie Wright’s article. To that audience, he said autism rates and vaccination exemptions are completely unrelated, and that autism organizations are scaring people away from vaccines – as if autism clusters form around autism organizations and not the other way around. I guess even Bearman figured that such an assertion was absurd and changed his story. Yet, the story he replaced it with was no less absurd. Evidently, he is also disagreeing with himself in the Columbia video lecture.