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  roywiggins
  "many neurodivergent people aren’t hindered by autism"This is more or less not true. If it doesn't hinder a person in any aspect of their life, they don't fit the DSM-V criteria for a diagnosis.(Many neurodivergent people aren't hindered by autism because they have some other neurodivergence, but that's a different issue with this sentence)
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  ggm
  Homeostasis across the blood brain barrier makes me suspect trivial approaches to boosting glutamate won't work. But this even begs the question if boosting available glutamate would be the right thing.There are perverse consequences in brain chemistry and signalling: flooding a brain deficient in glutamate processing receptors with glutamate may not help, it may overload pathways and cause hindrance, not compensation.Signs like this may be consequential, or related but not causal, or may simply turn out to be wrong.IF a small sample effect turns out to be indicative of a larger property, and IF it's shown to be causal and IF remeditation involves boosting blood borne glutamate or precursors is 3 stacked IF.IF its detectable in a young brain it could be diagnostic.IF its detectable in a young brain and amenable to gene therapy and IF it's causative then treatment would be useful.IF excess glutamate is not a problem and dietary supplemented sources cross the blood brain barrier and don't trip over homeostasis then it's possibly worth exploring.(Not a scientist, not a biologist)
• zmmmmm
  It's an interesting finding but important to note they are making no claim about causality. In fact, an explicit future question is whether changes in these receptors is present at onset or if it's a result of living with Autism.Neurons specifically increase / decrease receptor density in response to environmental factors, eg: use of SSRI's. Any excess of neurotransmitter would likely lead to reduction in receptor density as part of the response. So the story can be as much about an excess of neurotransmitter as it is about depletion of the receptor.Perhaps the main story here is they can use EEGs as a proxy for measuring this effect so they don't need to put people through PET scans to do wider studies.
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  ear7h
  N=32 and> We want to start creating a developmental story and start understanding whether the things that we’re seeing are the root of autism or a neurological consequence of having had autism your whole life
• robwwilliams
  Classic academic public relations piece. Not bad but more fluff than insight. Authors often have to grin and bear this PR machine, praying peers will forgive them their trespasses.But here there’s a basic design flaw. This is a study of 16 ASD cases and 16 neurotypical controls. Small sample sizes like this require careful matching. The problem: the autistic subjects are 100% White but controls are 37.5% White. That imbalance can’t be waved away with statistics or Jedi mind tricks. Recruiting matched neurotypicals would have been straightforward.One other issue is high heterogeneity within the two groups. In their Figure 1 (sorry behind a paywall), 4 - 6 of the autistic individuals have low mGlu5 levels across all regions. Two or three neurotypicals have high levels. Are these distributions actually normal, or are subgroups driving effects? It would help to know whether the participants’ GRM5 genotypes were informative wrt these subgroups. They weren’t checked.
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  rapjr9
  “We have found this really important, never-before-understood difference in autism that is meaningful, has implications for intervention, and can help us understand autism in a more concrete way than we ever have before,”So we might be able to make all the non-autistic people autistic? What would the world be like if everyone was mildly autistic?
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  NewUser76312
  Interesting indeed. Does such a finding suggest any worthwhile easy-to-try 'treatments' that may help alleviate symptoms?I don't know much about the biochemistry here, I assume this is not something like GABA that can be directly supplemented. But maybe there are precursor nutritional and supplemental substances that can help these people upregulate how much of the glutamate molecule in question the body can produce.
• joshcsimmons
  Very interesting - wonder when this will be cost effective for testing!
• ziofill
  Someone needs to tell RFK Jr -_-
• anon
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• anon
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  ijustwork
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  tryscience
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  truseek
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• gerdesj
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  try2stopme
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  Hnrobert42
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• Uptrenda
  can we use this to detect all the tiktok normies who are now claiming they have autism to be spedcal? that is the question.Edit: HNs love to "steel man" every argument, just not my elegant shit posts. Hey, what gives? Here is the extended argument then. Modern psychiatric circles are complaining about a trend of patients that are basically using information online to fake psychiatric disorders. It's based on whatever is "fashionable" in the moment. In the past it was "multiple personality disorder" (contested -- most dont think it exists.) Today its autism and ADHD.Why is this bad? Because there's a limited number of resources available to help these disabled individuals. And it really doesn't help them out much when the the spokesmen for their illness don't even have the illness. You should look at the diagnostic increases for autism in Australia. "In 2022 there were 290,900 Autistic Australians, a 41.8% increase from the 205,200 in 2018" Now, does +41 percent reflect a capability increase in diagnosis ability? Or (more likely) does it reflect trends in people seeking out the diagnosis.Keep in mind getting diagnosed with autism in Australia comes with considerable benefits. You get bux from cennolink for life. Potentially people come to clean your house for you (yes really). There are organisations to improve your quality of life that will even make allowances for things like buying you a gaming PC if thats what it means for you or cooking meals for you. There are also allowances in scholastic capacities like additional test time, longer periods to do assignments, and on and on. You're basically set for life in Australia if you get an autism diagnosis which people share how to do on TikTok.So yeah, that's the context for my post. I'm seeing many people now faking this illness and I think its messed up.
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  tiberriver256
  16 "autistic brains" were scanned and they are thinking this applies generally to all people with autism?Shows how shockingly unaware even researchers are on how broad and nonspecific the diagnosis of autism is...Were these 16 people hypo or hyper sensitive? Which of their five senses were involved? All? Some? Were some senses hyper and others hypo?Need to start with categorization and specificity before we can make meaningful progress in research