zlacker

Why just the males though? Is there a hypothesis for why it only affects them?

I wonder, are we simply underdianosing the women with autism as usual?

And I wonder if there's a correlation between drinking diet sodas (as opposed to naturally sweetened?) and getting your children evaluated for autism (like, say - diet soda drinkers are on average wealthier, and that correlates with better access to healthcare and more parental involvement, thus reducing underdiagnosis of autism?)

Given how sensitive obstetrics are to even small risks and how prevalent aspartame is, I'd be surprised if there is a genuine causal link here of such strong statistical effect. I mean, how many people use zofran? And yet obstetrics we're limiting its use in pregnant women just for a very very small alleged increase in the risk of heart problems in the baby.

>>atomic+(OP)
4 out of 5 people diagnosed with autism are male. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_differences_in_...

So, there’s a significant gender difference here, possibly with diagnosis but likely a deeper connection. Alternatively, it might impact both but this study didn’t have enough statistical power to notice the correlation.

>>atomic+(OP)
The paper doesn't say it only happens in males. The paper says they found it to happen in males, but they don't have a statistically relevant result for females and need more data.

Abstract:

> No statistically significant associations were found in females.

Discussion section:

> Several possible explanations exist for the lack of associations among girls in our study; these include insufficient statistical power, inherent sex dimorphism in response to DS/aspartame exposures, and possibly even the recruitment strategy itself, which, by including as controls neurotypically developing female siblings of male cases, increased the likelihood that any early-life exposures found to be risk-enhancing among their brothers with ASD might appear to be negatively associated with ASD in the analyses for females. Further research with larger sample sizes for both sexes and prospectively gathered data would be important for investigating this association further in females and in all participants combined.

This study didn't find an effect in females, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.

>>Retric+D1
GP is alluding to the fact that social pressure on girls to be “nice” is so intense that many develop coping and masking mechanisms at a young age, confounding the diagnostic process. Boys have a more bohemian lifestyle and are easier to catch.

Same happens with ADD. A lot of parents are diagnosed in hindsight when their child is diagnosed. “Wait my son had ADHD because he acts like this? I acted exactly like this.”

>>hinkle+U3
If I recall there is a marked difference in ADHD between genders. In boys it manifests the way we typically imagine ADHD: the physical hyperactivity, etc., while girls are much more likely to have “inattentive” ADHD which is much more easily missed. They simply can’t hold attention on things for long and frequently have emotional outbursts but they’re aren’t as physically obvious.

>>atomic+(OP)
The symptoms of autism are more obvious in males, socially

>>atomic+(OP)
Only like ~15 diet drink drinking mothers of females with autism were included in the study. They said they didn't show a link, not that they demonstrated a lack of a link. And I believe none of the links shown for males were claimed to be causal but were hypothesized to be.

To control for demographics they divided that ~15 into 6 different demographics (or 5 if male/female was already included, about 3 people per demographic if so).

>>afavou+G4
I know a 20 year old boy who was diagnosed not long ago with inattentive type. I wonder how different his academic career and life would be if it was caught earlier.

But I also have known women who will happily bounce from topic to topic and the hint of a tangent, and it’s obvious to me they should have been diagnosed by ten. Some have been as young adults, some older, one at least I don’t think ever was. It’s not just different presentations. We don’t want to see it.

>>afavou+G4
Both presentations can manifest in either gender, but girls are more likely to have the inattentive presentation than the hyperactive one.

Inattentive is a bit of a misnomer, too—it's not that they can't hold attention on something, it's that they have a hard time controlling where their attention goes. This is another reason why this presentation often flies under the radar: "my {daughter/son} can't have ADHD, {she/he} can stay focused on {favorite activity here} for hours!"

>>Retric+D1
This is anecdotal but I strongly disagree with "likely a deeper connection." I really do think girls are just severely under diagnosed. I have several adult women and AFAB friends who all display autistic traits and, to me (an autistic man), are very obviously autistic but it's been so hard for them to get a diagnosis even when they want to. The system is really set up to diagnose young boys with rich families only. Getting diagnosed as an adult is expensive and arduous and most people in the field appear to be biased against diagnosing women. Granted, autistic traits are presented slightly differently in women due to cultural norms but I do believe they're easy to spot with practice.

>>63+da
Wouldn’t being autistic yourself make it harder, not easier, for you to notice autism in others?

>>lolind+S8
That dysregulation of focus leads to shame spiraling. Both from parents and self inflicted.

>>WendyT+Eb
Can you explain your reasoning for this? I've found that neurotypical people are pretty bad at identifying autistic people who are masking (that is after all the point of masking) whereas it's relatively easy for me to recognize it because I'm so familiar with my own mask. I'd also like to believe that I have more knowledge about autism in general than your average allistic person. They might be able to recognize that something is "off" about a person but I don't think they could reliably point out when it is or isn't autism and I think they'd have a pretty hard time justifying it if they do guess correctly. Maybe the close family members of autistic people could do well at it though.

>>63+Em1
Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder often associated with an inability to speak, serious intellectual disability, and similar issues. The less extreme cases have dramatically more contact with the wider population introducing an odd form of social survival bias.

At the same time the term has been more widely applied over time to include people with minimal intellectual or linguistic impairment, but that doesn’t mean people with such profound issues no longer exist.

Thus, if you’re talking about the full autistic population overall they are going to on average be worse at basically any task.

>>63+Em1
My understanding of autism was that those who have it are often less able to accurately evaluate others’ emotional states, which I extrapolated to identifying autistic behaviors. I don’t doubt you have a ton of knowledge on the topic, I asked in order to better understand from you if this idea is accurate, but didn’t want to put in a whole explanation if you weren’t interested in engaging.

>>WendyT+Qu1
Yeah I can see how that makes sense. All I can say is the old cliche "autism is a spectrum" line. Some of us are better at evaluating emotional states than others and it definitely requires some degree of self awareness that not everyone has. I'm not totally sure that emotional state carries over to behaviors anyway. Also if we're sticking to the popular perception of autism, autistic people are also supposed to be good at pattern recognition and I think that applies here. In sum, I think because of specialized knowledge and personal experience, the average autistic person would be better at spotting other autistic people than the average allistic person, but certainly there's a lot of wiggle room there.