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)
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shaw_(laboratory_own...
> 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?