I'm using a bunch of quotes in there because I'm not well-versed enough in medicine terminology to know what the correct wording would be (and as such I also haven't had much luck in searching PubMed or NIH for that matter).
I would imagine that much like other complex systems, there are many similar outcomes that emerge from different chain reactions, and understanding one precursor is only a small part of the first link in a rather complicated chain.
What I find interesting if other cases are found is the incredible influence our intestines have on our personality and mental processes.
The above is just playing with an hypothesis, but there is evidence (unrelated to this case or autism) that gut microbiota is related to psychiatric/personality/mental disorders and stool transplants may help in those cases.
It’s just one datapoint, but it’s an _interesting_ datapoint nevertheless, because it seems so unrelated. A good starting point for an investigation, I’d say.
This however, seems more reasonable than the vaccines theory because the gut also has some gray matter and our digestive system I think plays some role in our consciousness system, along with neurons, and all the hormones and chemicals that our body uses to transmit signals and all the electricity running through our neural network, etc...
I'm pretty sure an uptick in ASD could very well correlate with environmental conditions considering we all have forever chemicals and micro plastics in our blood and those probably have some effect on hormones and internal body chemistry.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shaw_(laboratory_own...
Leave it to HN to fall for grifters, but then again I suppose this must just probably just a massive conspiracy by the big bad Illuminati or something to profit off mainstream understanding of autism and we should trust the “science” this time. (To be fair, I can’t find anything that points to the main author being nearly on the same level of quackery, but having this guy on there hardly instills faith)
And honestly, it's kind of disrespectful to bring up someone's history of grifting in this context. We should trust each other more, not less, and that starts with believing people who suggest suspiciously easy answers to questions that have hitherto resisted easy answers.
Don't trust anything at face value because it's written in an article, specially if it's published in a terrible journal.
Also, you’ll get to ponder how in the “List of abnormal clinical symptoms of the child with an autism spectrum disorder prior to antifungal therapy”, the first entry is “Silly”.
No standardized assessments of autism (e.g. the ADOS) are mentioned. While there are other genuine autism symptoms mentioned, it’s unclear if any other professional assessed the child, or if both the diagnosis and subsequent statement of cure were done by this guy with his pet theories.
1. Lawsuits are completely irrelevant to what is actually causative. E.g. there is essentially no evidence silicone breast implants are carcinogenic, but that didn't prevent implant manufacturers from going bankrupt due to legal judgments.
2. From your own link: "The studies in people are observational. Some conditions that might prompt acetaminophen use during pregnancy, such as fever and severe infection, are themselves associated with autism and ADHD in children." Observational studies may be a good point to start further investigation, but given how many observational studies have been thoroughly debunked from a causative point of view, they should be completely ignored as evidence IMO.
I think this tends to discount the emerging narratives about the link between gut microbiome and neurotransmitters.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9504309/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8234057/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcell.2021.6491...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/gut-bacte...
People are not used to this idea that what happens in your microfauna may play this super important role in what happens in your head, but there are already links to things like parkinsons and anxiety/depression.
To me it's not a stretch to associate fungal infections with a neurological disorder or symptom presentation at all, it's a pretty natural extension of the research that's happened over the last 10-15 years. And in several (human) case studies and research scenarios (mice), there is evidence for an actual causal link and not just "people with neurodivergence have fucked up microbiomes" too - treat the microbiome and you treat the parkinsons, or the ASD, and you can induce autism-like symptoms in mice by infecting their microbiome with B. fragilis.
Not a doctor but this does seem like probably the biggest thing people have tended to ignore (studiously, in some cases), that microbiome might play this huge role in things like weight or mental health. 100 years later, we are going to look back at this as an obvious case of science more or less ignoring what was right in front of our faces because it wasn't medicalized yet.
Authors are discussing this anecdotal paper here.
It's human nature to make ourselves feel superior by putting down others, but it skews discussion in a way that goes against what we're trying to optimize for here (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
Edit: it looks like you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in a lot of what you've been posting here. Can you please review them and stick to them? I don't want to ban you but we end up not having much choice if an account keeps posting in this low-quality way.
Paul Offit also has a great book on the other topic of what to look out for when it comes to quackery called "Do You Believe in Magic?" where he talks about Jenny McCarthy and various doctors who tried to support that movement.
Some others from that list:
- Curious/into things
- Likes fans
- Farting (stinky)
- Looks sick
Amazing criteria.
My brother has a few friends with similar deficits, just different ones. That makes me dubious of the idea of autism as a particular 'disease'. In fact I find the disease model insulting.
This kind of quackery has crossed into abusive territory, and heavy flogging as seen as in the Passion of the Christ would be appropiate for the physician and the parents.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shaw_(laboratory_own...
The guy is a menace, and is Facebook Karen Mom bait to the highest degree. He has done more to harm research into ASD than almost anyone, being second to only Andrew Wakefield (the only man ever to get a straight up middle finger from The Lancet for managing to slip one pass them, and getting a front page retraction for his trouble).
ASD exists, its real, it is a collection of symptoms that likely have multiple causes, and we know why that is likely true (immune system cross-reactivity in the parts of the immune system we don't understand well, and is also likely the root cause of a lot of poorly understood conditions; this is why there is also a high rate of ADHD comorbidity in ASD people).
The gut most likely is the "culprit" in the sense that the gut bacteria is no longer sending the correct chemical signals to engage the immune system, and the immune system gets confused and thinks we're stuck in some sort of Cold War with an Unseen Enemy, and just slowly fucks you up, but we simply don't understand this well enough for anyone to even consider something as a possible "cure". William Shaw is undermining the process and making it harder for actual researchers to research a possible cure.
> Some of this work indicates that autism is characterized by underconnectivity between distant brain regions and overconnectivity between neighboring ones; others show differences in connectivity within certain brain networks. In one study, connections within the default mode, or ‘daydreaming,’ network of autism brains looked especially weak.
> For example, mutations in the autism-linked genes MET and CNTNAP2 produce patterns that differ from those in people without these mutations.
https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/cntnap2-variants-alter-bra...
> Ashley Scott, a graduate student in Geschwind’s lab, scanned the brains of 16 high-functioning boys with autism and 16 age-, sex- and IQ-matched healthy controls during a difficult memory task that requires activity in that brain circuit. She also collected saliva samples from the children to see which ones carry the CNTNAP2 variants.
> Because the variants are common in the population, most participants — 11 of the children with autism and 12 of the controls — have at least one copy.
> Scott found that these children have increased connectivity among local areas of the prefrontal cortex. In contrast, long-range connections between the prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex — a region toward the back of the brain that’s part of the frontal-striatal loop — are significantly stronger in the children who do not carry the risk allele.
I don't remember if this is it or not, but there's something that stimulates the generation of long neural connections, and a deficiency in something can cause those connections to be shorter on average - you end up with the same amount, but they are distributed differently and more localized, which is what causes the "attention to detail" effect (as well as underutilization of potential connections, and connections between unwanted areas).
Still trying to find the original source where I heard that, though. Sucks that I do so many of my impulse searches in incognito mode.
There’s a lot of interesting observational research on this topic, and in particular I found this paper[1] interesting because it shows a similar link with Tylenol and autism in young infants, but did not find the same effect for ibuprofen, which to me almost rules out fever/infection as the root cause.
There was another paper I saw that even suggested the anti-vaxxer conspiracies may stem from the fact that doctors and parents give Tylenol to their kids to manage the side effect of some vaccines.
Interestingly, there is also a separate body of research[2] that has shown experimentally that acetaminophen causes emotional blunting and reduced empathy in adults - could be related?