6 ms·

This seems to bolster the theory that autism is modulated by the gut-brain axis. Being given antibiotics at such an early age will probably severely dysregulat

by drooby 2y ago

This seems to bolster the theory that autism is modulated by the gut-brain axis. Being given antibiotics at such an early age will probably severely dysregulation gut microbiota. And GABA actually does cross the BBB but in small amounts. Perhaps at such an early age, dysregulation in GABA produced in the gut has significant effects on brain health - over stimulation, learning memory issues, etc.

sidewndr46 2y ago
Reading the article, it turns out the one twin who is "more autistic" had a hole in his heart that surgery had to correct. So I suspect the actual issue here is something simpler like a difference in brain development because of the difference in the amount of blood flow.
- eutropia 2y ago
  Isn’t it common to be given a lot of antibiotics when you get a surgery?
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    It is.
    - boringg 2y ago
      I think blood flow to the brain >> impacts of antibiotics is the likely order of magnitude of impact - though tough to tell.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    A friend underwent operation of his aorta. Post-surgery inflammation is an absolutely common complication and they dumped a lot of antibiotics into him precisely to reduce the risk. (If I understand correctly, it wouldn't be probably fatal, but very, very unpleasant.)
  - idontknowifican 2y ago
    a lot and a heart artery drip for 30 days are orders of magnitude different in quantity
  - jejeyyy77 2y ago
    correlation causation
  - Retric 2y ago
    I had a fairly significant surgery at a premiere US hospital including several days of recovery in the hospital and didn’t get any antibiotics after the fact. They could have injected me with something during the actual surgery, but it didn’t show up on the bill. I think this may be specific to Heart surgery.
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      I was given prophylactic antibiotics for prostate surgery. It might depend on the surgeon.
  - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
    Whenever I had (minor) surgery in France, I was given antibiotics "as a shield". I obviously do not know if this helped or not. Now, French doctors were always very quick to prescribe antibiotics (as a kid I had plenty of them) and it took quite a lot of effort to change their(and parent's) mind. My children got much less, though they were almost never checked for virus vs bacterial infection.
- twobitshifter 2y ago
  That’s possible but he did get crazy antibiotics as well. FTA: “The infection was from drug-resistant staph bacteria. So John went back to the hospital and spent a month on powerful antibiotics pumped directly into a vein near his heart.”
  - scottlamb 2y ago
    ...or just being in the hospital environment for a month. The older theory they mentioned here: > "The earliest twin studies really helped to debunk this theory that autism was caused by parenting," Morris says. Under this theory, moms took the brunt of the blame, supposedly for being "cold and distant and detached from their child." ...might not be entirely wrong. They've since shown genetics is a factor, and I'll ignore the institutionalized misogyny part, but being in a hospital for a month probably did mean having much less parent/care-giver interaction/touch during a critical period, and who knows how much of an effect that could have.
    - lazyasciiart 2y ago
      This has been studied a lot in child welfare and is not currently believed, afaik. The diagnosis of reactive attachment disorder is acknowledged to have many overlapping symptoms with autism, but expressly differentiated as a condition.
    - jrsdav 2y ago
      > Under this theory, moms took the brunt of the blame, supposedly for being "cold and distant and detached from their child." Before the heredity nature of autism was accepted, this was the school of thought (“refrigerator mothers”). But in truth, it’s neurodivergent parents having neurodivergent children, and society punishing the parents (namely mothers) for their inability at providing the “expected” nurturing conditions.
      - cyanydeez 2y ago
        Tied back, atypical behavior.may create neurodivergent conditions, but one would expect children of aurististics to seek less overall care which doesnt support the hypitheses that antibiotics are causing aitism as this thrwad started
- crisply5706 2y ago
  My theory is that this causation is flipped. Something about whatever the precursor to autism is causes the body to experience more physical failures or malformed structures. Something like whatever mechanisms decode structure from the genome are faulty and produce slightly wrong structures throughout the brain and body. Anecdotally, I see a higher rate of general illness and physical birth defects in autistic people.
  - empressplay 2y ago
    There appears to be some correlation between Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and autism https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7711487/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7711487/ It makes a certain amount of sense that a collagen / connective tissue disorder is going to have wide-ranging effects, including the nervous system
    - ejstronge 2y ago
      Another way to think of this is that 'autism' is a broad series of disorders where individuals do not follow the social-relational cues we expect. There are many ways to violate unspoken social expectations, so there should be many ways to be autistic. In this setting, it's not unreasonable that any genetic syndrome would be more associated with autism; indeed, it's more interesting to find lesions that have a lower proportion of autistic carriers compared to the general population.
      - crisply5706 2y ago
        Yeah, I suspect it's quite likely that autism is correlated with/caused by genetic disorders in general, rather than being its own thing that just happens to be comorbid with a suspicious number of other disorders. There's too many correlations that aren't common enough, I really think we've got the causality backwards. But then again I don't know anything
    - b800h 2y ago
      Wow, I'm hypermobile and my sons have what appears to be mild autism (see my other comment above). Yet more to unpick!
- bitwize 2y ago
  This is Hackernews, where all major health issues are traceable to the gut.
  - adolph 2y ago
    Does that include mouth/teeth/saliva as part of the extended gut or are you talking stomach down?
    - verall 2y ago
      All of them and also seed oils. (I hope noone is taking this seriously..)
      - adolph 2y ago
        Would you also accept the nose-ear-throat-trachea-lung microbiome as well? Also nose biome interacts with the finger and fingernail biome quite often.
verisimi 2y ago
[flagged]
- ben_w 2y ago
  > What is never discussed, and isn't considered in this article, are certain types of other medical interventions - vaccination It's very frequently discussed. The downvotes you're expecting are because this meme can be traced to a fraudulent claim in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud I declined the MMR vaccine at school because I was at school when that story came out, and at that point he and his claim were taken somewhat seriously. (I did get the vaccine eventually). > For the very young, the brain does not 're-route' and developmental milestones are simply missed, whereas in adults it's possible to relearn skills That's the exact opposite of how it works. E.g. language acquisition in adulthood is much harder.
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    That’s actually a totally different story, this commenter is talking about a Canadian psychiatrist in the 2000s. https://doctors.cpso.on.ca/DoctorDetails/Drew-Jeffrey-Andrew-Moulden/0169352-75384 https://doctors.cpso.on.ca/DoctorDetails/Drew-Jeffrey-Andrew...
    - ben_w 2y ago
      I'm suggesting the second is a memetic descendant of the first. Unless there were other ancestors of both?
- suzzer99 2y ago
  Moulden was a snake-oil peddling quack with a degree in psychology who was never licensed to practice medicine. He peddled something called "BrainGuard" that purported to diagnose autism by looking at a picture or short video of a child or even a baby. https://web.archive.org/web/20100109213523/http://brainguardmd.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100109213523/http://brainguard... > YOU are Now the Expert: Now You can diagnose vaccine induced Alzheimer’s dementia (or autism) several years before the Medical Doctor’s do – amongst your family and friends. You can also diagnose Autism (as it is is happening) in newborns, babies, teens – common signs. LOOK here to learn and practice your skills – starting He also hooked up with something called therapies4kids to peddle a suit that could somehow cure or alleviate autism: https://web.archive.org/web/20090925065222/http://www.therapies4kids.com/home.php?pid=5 https://web.archive.org/web/20090925065222/http://www.therap... https://vaccineconspiracytheorist.blogspot.com/2011/01/quack-of-day-dr-andrew-moulden.html https://vaccineconspiracytheorist.blogspot.com/2011/01/quack... https://hatingautism.blogspot.com/2009/10/dr-andrew-moulden-and-other-scumbags.html https://hatingautism.blogspot.com/2009/10/dr-andrew-moulden-...
Aurornis 2y ago
> Being given antibiotics at such an early age will probably severely dysregulation gut microbiota. It’s extremely common for young kids to receive antibiotics. In some countries, antibiotics are over the counter and many parents will give their kids antibiotics for nearly any infection. Antibiotic misuse is rampant in some countries where they aren’t gated behind prescriptions. Any such link with autism would therefore be an extremely rare side effect. The rate of antibiotic use in children is far higher than the rate of autism. I don’t think this case supports the antibiotic theory by itself at all. I think it’s confirmation bias because antibiotics are one of the current trending theories among mainstream discussion.
- tomstoms 2y ago
  «So John went back to the hospital and spent a month on powerful antibiotics pumped directly into a vein near his heart.» This is not «extremely common».
  - spywaregorilla 2y ago
    Sure, but if you want to water the claim down to the idea that only extreme doses of antibiotics have noticeable effect sizes then its not a relevant claim to 99.99% of the population.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    No it is not, but ignoring the part about the severe infection require extended hospitalization and trying to reduce it all to “antibiotics” is extremely disingenuous. Given that antibiotics are common but extreme infections and extended hospitalizations are not, why would anyone focus on the antibiotics as the root cause? Not all antibiotics are created equal nor do they affect gut bacteria the same. There isn’t a singular scale for antibiotic power. Often, antibiotics are given via vein because they aren’t absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract, for example. This doesn’t tell us anything about the magnitude of impact on gut bacteria relative to an antibiotic that actually starts its journey in your gut. This is a complicated case. Reducing the entire complicated episode to “it was the antibiotics” is extremely reductionist.
- 2y ago
cma 2y ago
Wouldn't we see much lower rates in Christian Scientists?
- brightball 2y ago
  Why would that correlate?
  - cma 2y ago
    > Christian Scientists avoid almost all medical treatment, relying instead on Christian Science prayer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Healing_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Healing_prac...
    - adolph 2y ago
      Hmm, on the other hand, using religion for medicine might also be a confounding factor due to less diagnosis.
    - brightball 2y ago
      Have literally never heard of that. Is there any area where this is prominent?
      - astura 2y ago
        Have you ever heard of the The Christian Science Monitor? It's a mostly-respectable newspaper (now website) published by The Christian Science Publishing Society, the publishing arm of the church. Christian Science is very much a dying religion, and is not "prominent" anywhere so I'm not surprised that you never heard of them if you're young. The mother church is in Boston though.
        brightball 2y ago
        43 and grew up in the south, which is why I was surprised. Boston makes a little more sense though.
j45 2y ago
It’s possible but there was no explicit mention of this other than one receiving treatment they couldn’t avoid.
jjallen 2y ago
Isn't autism much older than antibiotics? I mean it couldn't be - I haven't actually researched it but I'm pretty sure autism is older than antibiotics.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  Severity can be modulated by the environment, it’s not that autism didn’t exist it but we can say for sure that antibiotics didn’t make anyone worse before it was invented.
- m0llusk 2y ago
  Pretty sure what is being asserted is that gut bacteria may influence brain function and antibiotics can have influence on gut bacteria. Those are both complex systems, so there could be many other factors as well as wide variations.
novia 2y ago
The gut microbiota shouldn't be affected by antibiotics delivered via IV.
- drooby 2y ago
  This source says otherwise: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9896080/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9896080/
fellowmartian 2y ago
Persistent neuroinflammation seems to be a more likely cause.
Nifty3929 2y ago
Not really. "The infection was from drug-resistant staph bacteria. So John went back to the hospital and spent a month on powerful antibiotics pumped directly into a vein near his heart." There are so many confounding factors here. Could be no connection to the episode whatever. Could be that the infection that required the antibiotics contributed to the autism. Could be the antibiotics contributed directly. Could be the overall trauma of the surgery, treatment and recovery. Seems like the gut thing is the least likely culprit and requires quite a lot of creativity to even consider it.

by drooby 2y ago

sidewndr46 2y ago

Reading the article, it turns out the one twin who is "more autistic" had a hole in his heart that surgery had to correct. So I suspect the actual issue here is something simpler like a difference in brain development because of the difference in the amount of blood flow.

eutropia 2y ago
Isn’t it common to be given a lot of antibiotics when you get a surgery?
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  It is.
  - boringg 2y ago
    I think blood flow to the brain >> impacts of antibiotics is the likely order of magnitude of impact - though tough to tell.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  A friend underwent operation of his aorta. Post-surgery inflammation is an absolutely common complication and they dumped a lot of antibiotics into him precisely to reduce the risk. (If I understand correctly, it wouldn't be probably fatal, but very, very unpleasant.)
- idontknowifican 2y ago
  a lot and a heart artery drip for 30 days are orders of magnitude different in quantity
- jejeyyy77 2y ago
  correlation causation
- Retric 2y ago
  I had a fairly significant surgery at a premiere US hospital including several days of recovery in the hospital and didn’t get any antibiotics after the fact. They could have injected me with something during the actual surgery, but it didn’t show up on the bill. I think this may be specific to Heart surgery.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    I was given prophylactic antibiotics for prostate surgery. It might depend on the surgeon.
- BrandoElFollito 2y ago
  Whenever I had (minor) surgery in France, I was given antibiotics "as a shield". I obviously do not know if this helped or not. Now, French doctors were always very quick to prescribe antibiotics (as a kid I had plenty of them) and it took quite a lot of effort to change their(and parent's) mind. My children got much less, though they were almost never checked for virus vs bacterial infection.
twobitshifter 2y ago
That’s possible but he did get crazy antibiotics as well. FTA: “The infection was from drug-resistant staph bacteria. So John went back to the hospital and spent a month on powerful antibiotics pumped directly into a vein near his heart.”
- scottlamb 2y ago
  ...or just being in the hospital environment for a month. The older theory they mentioned here: > "The earliest twin studies really helped to debunk this theory that autism was caused by parenting," Morris says. Under this theory, moms took the brunt of the blame, supposedly for being "cold and distant and detached from their child." ...might not be entirely wrong. They've since shown genetics is a factor, and I'll ignore the institutionalized misogyny part, but being in a hospital for a month probably did mean having much less parent/care-giver interaction/touch during a critical period, and who knows how much of an effect that could have.
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    This has been studied a lot in child welfare and is not currently believed, afaik. The diagnosis of reactive attachment disorder is acknowledged to have many overlapping symptoms with autism, but expressly differentiated as a condition.
  - jrsdav 2y ago
    > Under this theory, moms took the brunt of the blame, supposedly for being "cold and distant and detached from their child." Before the heredity nature of autism was accepted, this was the school of thought (“refrigerator mothers”). But in truth, it’s neurodivergent parents having neurodivergent children, and society punishing the parents (namely mothers) for their inability at providing the “expected” nurturing conditions.
    - cyanydeez 2y ago
      Tied back, atypical behavior.may create neurodivergent conditions, but one would expect children of aurististics to seek less overall care which doesnt support the hypitheses that antibiotics are causing aitism as this thrwad started
crisply5706 2y ago
My theory is that this causation is flipped. Something about whatever the precursor to autism is causes the body to experience more physical failures or malformed structures. Something like whatever mechanisms decode structure from the genome are faulty and produce slightly wrong structures throughout the brain and body. Anecdotally, I see a higher rate of general illness and physical birth defects in autistic people.
- empressplay 2y ago
  There appears to be some correlation between Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and autism https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7711487/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7711487/ It makes a certain amount of sense that a collagen / connective tissue disorder is going to have wide-ranging effects, including the nervous system
  - ejstronge 2y ago
    Another way to think of this is that 'autism' is a broad series of disorders where individuals do not follow the social-relational cues we expect. There are many ways to violate unspoken social expectations, so there should be many ways to be autistic. In this setting, it's not unreasonable that any genetic syndrome would be more associated with autism; indeed, it's more interesting to find lesions that have a lower proportion of autistic carriers compared to the general population.
    - crisply5706 2y ago
      Yeah, I suspect it's quite likely that autism is correlated with/caused by genetic disorders in general, rather than being its own thing that just happens to be comorbid with a suspicious number of other disorders. There's too many correlations that aren't common enough, I really think we've got the causality backwards. But then again I don't know anything
  - b800h 2y ago
    Wow, I'm hypermobile and my sons have what appears to be mild autism (see my other comment above). Yet more to unpick!
bitwize 2y ago
This is Hackernews, where all major health issues are traceable to the gut.
- adolph 2y ago
  Does that include mouth/teeth/saliva as part of the extended gut or are you talking stomach down?
  - verall 2y ago
    All of them and also seed oils. (I hope noone is taking this seriously..)
    - adolph 2y ago
      Would you also accept the nose-ear-throat-trachea-lung microbiome as well? Also nose biome interacts with the finger and fingernail biome quite often.

verisimi 2y ago

[flagged]

ben_w 2y ago
> What is never discussed, and isn't considered in this article, are certain types of other medical interventions - vaccination It's very frequently discussed. The downvotes you're expecting are because this meme can be traced to a fraudulent claim in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud I declined the MMR vaccine at school because I was at school when that story came out, and at that point he and his claim were taken somewhat seriously. (I did get the vaccine eventually). > For the very young, the brain does not 're-route' and developmental milestones are simply missed, whereas in adults it's possible to relearn skills That's the exact opposite of how it works. E.g. language acquisition in adulthood is much harder.
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  That’s actually a totally different story, this commenter is talking about a Canadian psychiatrist in the 2000s. https://doctors.cpso.on.ca/DoctorDetails/Drew-Jeffrey-Andrew-Moulden/0169352-75384 https://doctors.cpso.on.ca/DoctorDetails/Drew-Jeffrey-Andrew...
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I'm suggesting the second is a memetic descendant of the first. Unless there were other ancestors of both?
suzzer99 2y ago
Moulden was a snake-oil peddling quack with a degree in psychology who was never licensed to practice medicine. He peddled something called "BrainGuard" that purported to diagnose autism by looking at a picture or short video of a child or even a baby. https://web.archive.org/web/20100109213523/http://brainguardmd.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100109213523/http://brainguard... > YOU are Now the Expert: Now You can diagnose vaccine induced Alzheimer’s dementia (or autism) several years before the Medical Doctor’s do – amongst your family and friends. You can also diagnose Autism (as it is is happening) in newborns, babies, teens – common signs. LOOK here to learn and practice your skills – starting He also hooked up with something called therapies4kids to peddle a suit that could somehow cure or alleviate autism: https://web.archive.org/web/20090925065222/http://www.therapies4kids.com/home.php?pid=5 https://web.archive.org/web/20090925065222/http://www.therap... https://vaccineconspiracytheorist.blogspot.com/2011/01/quack-of-day-dr-andrew-moulden.html https://vaccineconspiracytheorist.blogspot.com/2011/01/quack... https://hatingautism.blogspot.com/2009/10/dr-andrew-moulden-and-other-scumbags.html https://hatingautism.blogspot.com/2009/10/dr-andrew-moulden-...

Aurornis 2y ago

> Being given antibiotics at such an early age will probably severely dysregulation gut microbiota. It’s extremely common for young kids to receive antibiotics. In some countries, antibiotics are over the counter and many parents will give their kids antibiotics for nearly any infection. Antibiotic misuse is rampant in some countries where they aren’t gated behind prescriptions. Any such link with autism would therefore be an extremely rare side effect. The rate of antibiotic use in children is far higher than the rate of autism. I don’t think this case supports the antibiotic theory by itself at all. I think it’s confirmation bias because antibiotics are one of the current trending theories among mainstream discussion.

tomstoms 2y ago
«So John went back to the hospital and spent a month on powerful antibiotics pumped directly into a vein near his heart.» This is not «extremely common».
- spywaregorilla 2y ago
  Sure, but if you want to water the claim down to the idea that only extreme doses of antibiotics have noticeable effect sizes then its not a relevant claim to 99.99% of the population.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  No it is not, but ignoring the part about the severe infection require extended hospitalization and trying to reduce it all to “antibiotics” is extremely disingenuous. Given that antibiotics are common but extreme infections and extended hospitalizations are not, why would anyone focus on the antibiotics as the root cause? Not all antibiotics are created equal nor do they affect gut bacteria the same. There isn’t a singular scale for antibiotic power. Often, antibiotics are given via vein because they aren’t absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract, for example. This doesn’t tell us anything about the magnitude of impact on gut bacteria relative to an antibiotic that actually starts its journey in your gut. This is a complicated case. Reducing the entire complicated episode to “it was the antibiotics” is extremely reductionist.
2y ago

cma 2y ago

Wouldn't we see much lower rates in Christian Scientists?

brightball 2y ago
Why would that correlate?
- cma 2y ago
  > Christian Scientists avoid almost all medical treatment, relying instead on Christian Science prayer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Healing_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Healing_prac...
  - adolph 2y ago
    Hmm, on the other hand, using religion for medicine might also be a confounding factor due to less diagnosis.
  - brightball 2y ago
    Have literally never heard of that. Is there any area where this is prominent?
    - astura 2y ago
      Have you ever heard of the The Christian Science Monitor? It's a mostly-respectable newspaper (now website) published by The Christian Science Publishing Society, the publishing arm of the church. Christian Science is very much a dying religion, and is not "prominent" anywhere so I'm not surprised that you never heard of them if you're young. The mother church is in Boston though.
      - brightball 2y ago
        43 and grew up in the south, which is why I was surprised. Boston makes a little more sense though.

j45 2y ago

It’s possible but there was no explicit mention of this other than one receiving treatment they couldn’t avoid.

jjallen 2y ago

Isn't autism much older than antibiotics? I mean it couldn't be - I haven't actually researched it but I'm pretty sure autism is older than antibiotics.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
Severity can be modulated by the environment, it’s not that autism didn’t exist it but we can say for sure that antibiotics didn’t make anyone worse before it was invented.
m0llusk 2y ago
Pretty sure what is being asserted is that gut bacteria may influence brain function and antibiotics can have influence on gut bacteria. Those are both complex systems, so there could be many other factors as well as wide variations.

novia 2y ago

The gut microbiota shouldn't be affected by antibiotics delivered via IV.

drooby 2y ago
This source says otherwise: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9896080/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9896080/

fellowmartian 2y ago

Persistent neuroinflammation seems to be a more likely cause.

Nifty3929 2y ago

Not really. "The infection was from drug-resistant staph bacteria. So John went back to the hospital and spent a month on powerful antibiotics pumped directly into a vein near his heart." There are so many confounding factors here. Could be no connection to the episode whatever. Could be that the infection that required the antibiotics contributed to the autism. Could be the antibiotics contributed directly. Could be the overall trauma of the surgery, treatment and recovery. Seems like the gut thing is the least likely culprit and requires quite a lot of creativity to even consider it.