Researchers discover molecular difference in autistic brains

Posted by amichail 12/28/2025

Researchers discover molecular difference in autistic brains(medicine.yale.edu)

144 points | 77 commentspage 2

Uptrenda 12/29/2025||

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ijustwork 12/29/2025||

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mapontosevenths 12/29/2025||

This was studied because it sounds reasonable on paper and several small studies showed a small link.

However, they did a very large cohort study with hundreds of thousands of subjects. The link completely disappears when genetics are accounted for via sibling pairs.[0]

It took almost two whole minutes of Googling for me to disprove this nonsense. Which shows that RFK did less than 2 minutes worth of research before panicking the world.

[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2817406

SubiculumCode 12/29/2025|||

I will say that this study presented a major challenge to the tylenol hypothesis. To my mind, there is still a remote possibility that the tylenol hypotehsis might just be relevant to a smaller subset of autistic individuals...but I am coming from the general outlook of believing autism needs to be subtyped when looking at etiology.

mapontosevenths 12/29/2025||

Personally, I very much agree. I feel that while the idea of a spectrum wasn't a mistake, it was only a start.

api 12/29/2025|||

But did you check the vibes?

mapontosevenths 12/29/2025||

I did, but I'm on the spectrum so I failed the vibe check. ;)

tomerico 12/29/2025|||

Didn’t whole internet get angry for Trump’s administration publishing a warning that Tylenol during pregnancy may cause autosim?

MangoToupe 12/29/2025|||

Can you explain the logical leap you're making here? Unless this is RFK Jr we're talking to, you're comparing two wildly different contexts.

ijustwork 12/29/2025||

MangoToupe 12/29/2025||

The logical leap

ijustwork 12/29/2025|||

mapontosevenths 12/29/2025|||

Anything claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

perching_aix 12/29/2025|||

> propaganda mouthpieces

Bit rich coming from a sockpuppet account created 57 minutes ago...

- exclusively commenting on this thread

- uncritically addressing it from a very specific angle

- mentioning specific things that sound related while not actually connecting them to the overall story with the same rigor

...isn't it?

ijustwork 12/29/2025||

diydsp 12/29/2025||

The vaccine autism hoax is traced back to one specific discredired researcher:

https://time.com/5175704/andrew-wakefield-vaccine-autism/

ijustwork 12/29/2025||

muglug 12/29/2025|||

Please don’t use a bunch of traumatised parents as a medical reference either. The science is extremely clear that Wakefield was a bad scientist — see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_Lancet_MMR_vaccine-...

slater 12/29/2025|||

please don't use "many parents" as a medical reference

tryscience 12/29/2025||

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mapontosevenths 12/29/2025|

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2817406

truseek 12/29/2025||

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wizzwizz4 12/29/2025|

Re-posting a flagged and dead comment under a new account is not acceptable behaviour. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46416138

gerdesj 12/29/2025||

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try2stopme 12/29/2025||

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slater 12/29/2025|

stop already with the sockpuppet accounts

Hnrobert42 12/28/2025||

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gchamonlive 12/29/2025||

It would also be interesting if there's no link to be found.

lez 12/29/2025||

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ziofill 12/29/2025||

Someone needs to tell RFK Jr -_-

tiberriver256 12/29/2025|

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

SubiculumCode 12/29/2025|

I have not read the paper as I am traveling, but just in case your opinion is based on the news article, let's not confuse that reporting with the actual research.claims or the actual views held by the scientists involved. This was likely a paper demonstrating the technique in preparation of a more comprehensive study.

tiberriver256 12/29/2025|||

The full paper isn't open so I can only read the abstract, method and results.

The part I take issue with: "lower brain-wide mGlu5 availability may represent a molecular mechanism underlying altered excitatory neurotransmission that has the potential to stratify the heterogeneous autism phenotype."

Seems like the very premise is flawed, though. Searching for a single global identifier for autism would be like if we spent research time trying to find a single global identifier for cancer. Noble effort... Way harder than spending effort on subcategorization into "lung" and "heart" cancers and working on research for detection of those subtypes.

The only good categorization we have in autism now is severity.

The anecdote I always like to share is Temple Grandin.

She was hyper-sensitive to auditory and tactile senses. The cause for this hypersensitivity was cerebellar abnormalities in her brain. Right now, someone who is hypo-sensitive to sound and touch because of different cerebellar development will also be put in the same bucket diagnostically speaking. There's not gonna be any universal way to detect that though...

To quote her directly:

"It would be my number one research priority, but one of the problems we’ve got on studying this, is that one person may have visual sensitivity, another one touch sensitivities, another one, auditory sensitivities. And when you study these, you got to separate them out. You can’t just mix them all together." https://www.sensoryfriendly.net/podcast/understanding-my-aut...

SubiculumCode 12/29/2025|||

I would say that as an autism researcher whose focus is in finding autism subgroups that I doubt that any specific receptor differences will not apply to the whole spectrum, probably just to one or several subsets

tiberriver256 12/29/2025||

So glad to hear research is being done in that area.

I'm a dad of two autistic boys who I think would be very different categories. I have friends whose child isn't really autistic, they have a much more rare and specific diagnosis but it's so rare it's hard to get supports so they got him diagnosed as autistic because that criteria is so broad almost anyone can qualify.

Thank you for your work!