3 ms·

I feel compelled to add that aside from (or interact with) genetic risk factors for autism, exposure to excessive immune system antibodies during pregnancy appe

I feel compelled to add that aside from (or interact with) genetic risk factors for autism, exposure to excessive immune system antibodies during pregnancy appears to be involved in a significant number of autism cases. Moreover, in rodent models ASD like symptoms in pups have been created by exposing the dam to compounds that ramp up the immune response in the pregnant dam. I think there are real possibilities for preventive medicine here. Citation: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322316327391 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322316...

AstralStorm 10y ago
This is weak evidence, further weakened by not being shown in humans. I suppose some variants of autism could be caused by essentially autoimmune reactions. Good luck showing causation. You would need full immune library of thousands of mothers and their children. Further luck in fixing the problem, you cannot just immunosuppress the mother. What is worse, is that symptoms of autism tend to show up quite late in many cases. Few years of age which suggests some sort of an inherited problem though potentially also autoimmune.
- SubiculumCode 10y ago
  You think I covered all the evidence in my forum post? Yes there are many question left, but right now there is evidence in non-human primates and rodents with causal experimental models, and in humans differences in brain morphology and intellectual disability are associated with increased levels of maternal cytokines and chemokines during gestation in humans. Of course, it would be unethical to do random assignment in humans to a condition causing a large cytokine response in mothers. As far as treatment that is a difficult question. Active filtration might be a possibility. In any case, there is more of a possibility here for prevention than gene therapy, imo.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    Unless you accept eugenics of course or perhaps in vitro fertilization. Somewhat dirty words nowadays. Or if the problem turns out to be metabolic and thus possible to work around. Compared to drugs, it is no treatment at the moment. Damage done by autoimmune disorders early in life can rarely be fixed. Diagnostics are years off at the very least.
    - SubiculumCode 10y ago
      There are certainly ethical issues associated with detection of autism risk during pregnancy allowing the choice for termination. I'm not sure about your point though. Fixing things after it has happened is generally hard. I am no immunologist, but preventing excessive immune response is a possibility maybe for prevention of the injury (not completely removing the immune response, just retarding it).
      - AstralStorm 10y ago
        First you have to know what to look for. As many cases of autism are unexplained, there appears to be no symptoms to look for. Big leukaemia would be detected while taking a routine sample during pregnancy as done already for testing of blood immunoreactivity alongside known viral and bacterial infections. (Full blood group test preferably.) However to find less obvious immune reactions first we need to know what are we looking for and when. (during pregnancy or after) To find out requires a comparable effort to human genome project. That is progressing as ImmGen project (currently mouse stages), Human Immunology Project (ImmuneSpace) and probably some others, but getting precise and numerous enough samples during pregnancy is problematic. Parallel research is going into toxins in utero, later immune reactions after exposure to toxins and so on. Yet more is going into studying infant microbiome esp. gut microbiome which would be related to method of delivery, feeding, exposure to chemicals and so on. Any of the above might prove crucial. Or all of them. It is a young and exciting field.

AstralStorm 10y ago

This is weak evidence, further weakened by not being shown in humans. I suppose some variants of autism could be caused by essentially autoimmune reactions. Good luck showing causation. You would need full immune library of thousands of mothers and their children. Further luck in fixing the problem, you cannot just immunosuppress the mother. What is worse, is that symptoms of autism tend to show up quite late in many cases. Few years of age which suggests some sort of an inherited problem though potentially also autoimmune.

SubiculumCode 10y ago
You think I covered all the evidence in my forum post? Yes there are many question left, but right now there is evidence in non-human primates and rodents with causal experimental models, and in humans differences in brain morphology and intellectual disability are associated with increased levels of maternal cytokines and chemokines during gestation in humans. Of course, it would be unethical to do random assignment in humans to a condition causing a large cytokine response in mothers. As far as treatment that is a difficult question. Active filtration might be a possibility. In any case, there is more of a possibility here for prevention than gene therapy, imo.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Unless you accept eugenics of course or perhaps in vitro fertilization. Somewhat dirty words nowadays. Or if the problem turns out to be metabolic and thus possible to work around. Compared to drugs, it is no treatment at the moment. Damage done by autoimmune disorders early in life can rarely be fixed. Diagnostics are years off at the very least.
  - SubiculumCode 10y ago
    There are certainly ethical issues associated with detection of autism risk during pregnancy allowing the choice for termination. I'm not sure about your point though. Fixing things after it has happened is generally hard. I am no immunologist, but preventing excessive immune response is a possibility maybe for prevention of the injury (not completely removing the immune response, just retarding it).
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      First you have to know what to look for. As many cases of autism are unexplained, there appears to be no symptoms to look for. Big leukaemia would be detected while taking a routine sample during pregnancy as done already for testing of blood immunoreactivity alongside known viral and bacterial infections. (Full blood group test preferably.) However to find less obvious immune reactions first we need to know what are we looking for and when. (during pregnancy or after) To find out requires a comparable effort to human genome project. That is progressing as ImmGen project (currently mouse stages), Human Immunology Project (ImmuneSpace) and probably some others, but getting precise and numerous enough samples during pregnancy is problematic. Parallel research is going into toxins in utero, later immune reactions after exposure to toxins and so on. Yet more is going into studying infant microbiome esp. gut microbiome which would be related to method of delivery, feeding, exposure to chemicals and so on. Any of the above might prove crucial. Or all of them. It is a young and exciting field.