Posted by amichail 13 hours ago
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
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?
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
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...
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!