> In 2016, they showed that mice born to mothers who experience a severe infection during pregnancy are much more likely to show behavioral symptoms such as deficits in sociability, repetitive behaviors, and abnormal communication.
If vaccination of the child could prevent some baseline level of IL-17a from developing (in offsprings who already suffered the brain degradation in the womb), it could be interesting.
They should look for children who had the risk factor (infected mother) but didn't turn autistic to see if they have the levels elevated. Long shot.
> The researchers began by studying mice that exhibited behavioral symptoms due to exposure to inflammation during gestation. They injected these mice with a bacterial component called LPS, which induces a fever response, and found that the animals’ social interactions were temporarily restored to normal.
So if you get your kid sick enough you can temporarily pretend they aren't autistic, and really put to the test the idea that anti-vaxxers think autism is worse than being deathly ill?
They are not preventing the infection itself, they are allowing your immune system to kill the infection before it develops into the full blown disease.
(No it is not funny, because people and children dying because of this bullshit)
I thought vaccines just contained antigens which are essentially just the receptors; i.e. it's impossible to actually get sick from a vaccine since the actual bacteria/virus is missing. IANAB though, I'm sure there are many kinds of vaccines prepared using many different methods.
Also, I thought the joke was funny; I highly doubt there are any genuine anti-vaxxers in HN comments.
It depends on the type, some (not quite a small number) of vaccines contain an attenuated version of the virus. Some are available in multiple forms, like Salk and Sabin polio vaccines.
However, the risk of getting sick from the vaccine is small compared to the risk of getting sick without the vaccine. When the risk levels get close to equal, the vaccine type is changed to the less-risky but less-effective type.
Attenuated virus vaccines are usually more effective than inactive virus ones.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Autistic children are children, the same full irritating, exhuberant, noisy and magnet for troubles in a small package than before, but with a plus of cleverness, strange ways to do things, uncommon hobbies and extravaganza.
The idea that an ill children tired and with less energy than usual would behave better is not a total surprise.
"I want bunny I want it bunny! I WANT IIIIIIT!" [gets bunny, immediately hurls it across room] "I don't like it I don't want it! I don't like bunny waaaah!" [3 seconds pass] "I want bunny!"
My daughter, every time she has a cold, which since daycare is almost always.
My bad, you make me remember. When children were smaller, indeed they were quite energetic up to until some quite high degree fever.
Now they are older, and fever starts to knock them out sooner. Fever suppressants make them bouncy again still (so no rush to give them until 38.7-ish, as long as they drink well etc).
The problem is how they define a better communication between mice. From an human point of view?
Normal male mice fight. You enter in my zone, I'll bite you and chase you off. Normal female mice are more tolerant with relatives and pups, but not with any other female. They can fight also with strange females.
This is the rule for the species and the definition of perfect and normal communication. "pacifist" or mesiah mice is anomalous and probably would send a really confusing message for the other mice.
"I'm too feverish and tired to fight right now, so let me alone" is common among animals and not necessarily related with autistic behaviour.
" but with a plus of cleverness, strange ways to do things, uncommon hobbies and extravaganza"
You present autistic children like they are all little Sheldons from the Big bang theory, when the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
Autism is a spectrum where a certain percentage of kids are as you say, but many can't do anything without the help of an adult and certainly aren't going to have 'uncommon hobbies' or 'cleverness'.
You're thinking of high functioning autistic people, which is understandable because
they're the only ones you are likely to meet - a severely autistic child might be non-verbal,
and constantly screaming because of sensory overload. You will not meet those because
they stay home or institutionalized.
Even high functioning autists tend to have issues. Sensory overload that can be hidden but is still stressful. Being very verbal without noticing that the other person isn't interested in what you've been talking about for the past hour.
NT people are so broken in your own ways: relationships with parents, relationships with spouses, relationships with children, relationships with the environment: you don't get any of them right. You are all so broken and unhealthy! Why are you all on anti-anxiety meds, why are you all on anti-depressants? Every NT person I know makes so many weird decisions, against their own interests, against their own emotional health. You are broken in this world.
But for some reason it becomes so important that ASD people just "act more normal". Whatever.
I don't know if there's a different meaning of "neurotypical" in the ASD community, but under the general definition, anyone who is on anti-anxiety or antidepressant medication (presumably prescribed) is, by definition, not "neurotypical." A neurotypical person is a person with a complete lack of issues recognized by the DSM-V.
But, putting that aside: these problems you're describing are all things that ASD people also have to deal with. People with ASD have strictly more problems than people without it, since they have all the "normal" problems, and then some other ones that only they suffer from (like the aforementioned sensory hypersensitivity.) The only differences that exist stem from people lowering their expectations of how people with ASD will perform on e.g. social tasks. Those tasks still need to get done; people on the spectrum just don't get the choice to be the one to do them, because other people make that choice for them. (Just like nobody asks a deaf person to transcribe audio for them, or asks a paraplegic to deliver a package for them.)
> But for some reason it becomes so important that ASD people just "act more normal".
I don't think anyone wants people with ASD to "act" any way that's hard for them. The point of the development of ASD treatments is to enable people to have the opportunity to choose how they want to be, rather than being locked into one part of behavior-space without having had such a choice.
To put it another way, by analogy to another community of sufferers: people with hearing can choose to put in earplugs. Deaf people cannot choose to put in hear-plugs. Because of this, being able to hear is a strict improvement over being deaf: you can choose to use it, or not, at any point.
But more importantly... nobody is asking ASD people to act “normally”. It’s just being noted that they tend to act in particular ways and suffer from particular stimuli and are generally more difficult for NT people to relate to.
> The reason for that, the researchers found, is that in these mice [with certain genes missing and whose mother didn't have inflammation while pregnant], inflammation did not stimulate IL-17a production.
What I wonder if baseline mice produce IL-17a in response to inflammation?
My guess would be no. I would also wonder if some low to moderate infection in mothers can spare the offspring from autism, but still prime IL production?
There is also at least one study showing (at least) flu infection compelling humans to be more sociable and outgoing, but it was (now that I think of it) conducted by comparing self reported social interaction counts before and after a flu vaccine containing (of course) flu virions.
See references in this article, because I have trouble copying them on mobile.
I mean, I guess my question is could this be apart of the virus or bacteria's attack vector? Isn't it in the best interest of viruses and bacteria that the host becomes more sociable and therefore improves infection rate.
Are mice considered an effective model for autism? My understanding is we still don't know the exact mechanism of action of autism. Heck, there could be many different mechanisms, and we're lumping people with different underlying conditions into a single category because the symptoms line up. So our model of autism is entirely based on behavior. But if the mechanism of action in these mice is different from humans, you can't make any real predictions about how to treat/manage it.
"Although findings in mice do not always translate into human treatments, the study may help to guide the development of strategies that could help..."
Pulled right from the article. Studies in mice are simply a way to point in the, hopefully, "right" direction without having to shoot in the dark with human test subjects needlessly.
A mouse model for human autism is contrived at best.
The cynic in me feels that some researchers are running out of ideas. The only experimental apparatus are poor knockout mice.
Arguably an analogy is trying to fix a compiled binary with a hex editor and replacing all your 0x11s with 0x0a. Then claiming the segfault is a good model of how another binary crashes (due to a null pointer exception or whatever really).
Oh my shit, they don't claim to have an answer. They have a direction. Not an answer. There's a very large difference. The entire language in this is extremely aware and careful that they don't have a cure. Quit acting like this is a CNN article saying "Scientists cured all disease because of a 2 person study". They have some survey based evidence that it happens in humans too. With a potential replication in mice, they feel confident it's an avenue worth pursuing. No one is holding their breath. It's an interesting study, with interesting line of evidence thought that they think is worth seeing if completely true. That's it, don't make it out to more than that. They share this information so other people can be enlightened to the idea and with professionals who are actually apart of the field help poke actual holes in the issues or offer other ideas to help guide it further. Not just "Ugh, you used mice, like, it's totally not gonna work man because it's like this one programming bug I once had."
IMO this isn't really relevant to the discussion; none of us here, nor the article itself imply that the mouse model is directly translatable, or that this is a cure instead of an interesting finding.
>Heck, there could be many different mechanisms, and we're lumping people with different underlying conditions into a single category because the symptoms line up. So our model of autism is entirely based on behavior.
Autism is characterized by autistic behavior. You cannot separate autistic behavior from an autistic person, it is simply their nature. These "mouse models" are inaccurate, as they're based on behavioral observations in the mice and likening them to human behavior. We don't really know how autism works and why, and we haven't discovered actual autistic mice. In other words, it's mostly extrapolation.
Anything can "reduce autism symptoms" that can make a neurotypical person unable to behave normally. Autistic behavior IS the normal for autistic people. Heavy sedatives, just like being very sick, can "reduce autism symptoms" since the person would be too tired to exhibit any behaviors at all.
"Look, he's not flapping and pacing! His autism must be cured!" No, you dolt, he's exhausted and miserable from being sick.
Leave autistic people alone and let them be themselves.
Seriously, I can't believe some people would rather let their kid die of polio than believe they could be autistic. If you think having an autistic child is that terrible, you probably shouldn't have kids.
> Leave autistic people alone and let them be themselves. Seriously, I can't believe some people would rather let their kid die of polio than believe they could be autistic. If you think having an autistic child is that terrible, you probably shouldn't have kids.
That's very much not the case, unfortunately. Many autistic kids are very low function. Their deviations in behavior are way more serious than just some quirky flipping and pacing.
I consider low-functioning autism to be similarly debilitating; both mean that the afflicted individual will not have a "normal" life, the manifestation is of course completely different.
But this is a bizarre strawman because vaccines do not cause autism.
Would you please not post high-indignation, low-information comments to HN? I've sure you have good reason to feel strongly on this topic, but the rant you posted above has little to do with the article, and now you're taking the thread further into pure inflammation. That is what we're trying to avoid on this site.
I think many people are unaware of the difference between high functioning autism and low functioning autism. Severely autistic children often react violently to any deviation from their expected norm. Violent children turn into violent teenagers. A 160 pound human prone to violence is a huge issue for any teacher or care giver. Imagine if being bitten to the point of bleeding, being punched, and having broken bones was a common part of you job.
For the record, I agree with the "let them be themselves" answer in most cases. Sometime who they are is a real problem.
It's weird that it has to be repeated so often on HN, but:
Autism is not a superpower.
Yes, sometimes mildly autistic people can become genius mathematicians, or whatever, but most of autistic people simply cannot function by themselves, they struggle with everyday things. So no, we can't just "leave them alone", we should try and understand what causes autism, and maybe someday we can cure it.
It's not so black and white.
Most autistic people aren't distinctly "low" or "high" functioning like that. They are otherwise fairly average people with a few traits that make things difficult, and appear "high" or "low" functioning depending on the environment they are subjected to.
Why don't you ask an autistic person if they want to be cured? Go ahead. Jump on r/aspergers and ask them. They will tell you to go fly a kite.
It's possible that people so invested in the identity of having Aspergers that they hang out on /aspergers would tell you to fly a kite. That's hardly a representative sample of people with the condition. Most are probably living their lives and not hanging out on /aspergers.
Nice goalpost scoot. I'm telling you that if you ask any autistic person, they may express dissatisfaction with their autistic troubles, but they would tell you they would not want to be "cured" or "changed", because they would no longer be themselves.
GP's point isn't to move goalposts, it's that your example is not indicative of the autistic community at large - it's a biased sample and, in line with GP's reasoning, I suspect there is a substantial proportion of (especially high functioning) autists who would strongly consider a cure. Imagine having normal, innate desires for friendship and companionship, but being unable to form such relationships and being crushingly aware of this fact. It's a miserable, deeply lonely existence and some of us would consider giving up "ourselves" in order to have a chance at a more socially fulfilling life.
I'm not trying to move the goalposts. I'll try responding in a different way.
I don't know why you have stated everyone would provide identical answers if asked about a cure for austism. A simple reddit search which I just did confirms there is a thread where some have been asked this question and said they would in fact sign up for a cure. Other answered "maybe". Many said "no". Nobody said "go fly a kite".
I will concede the majority of people appear to have answered no, but, again, that isn't a representative sample of the general population. More data would be needed to make a more general conclusion.
I am sure most nonverbal low functioning autistic people would want to be “cured” if they could answer.
I agree there is no need to treat autistic people who get along in society mostly fine, but people who can’t work, talk, or live on their own is probably where I would draw the line of those people needing actual treatment if it ever exists
Curing ASD is a bad idea. Helping symptoms may be a good idea.
There's an assumption here that NT socialization is the "correct" socialization. That NT behaviors, world-view, all that thing, is what is "normal" and "correct". This is just straight up bias. You want ASD people to be "normal" for your definition of normal but there's actually no natural law that makes it so. Just the tyranny of the majority.
Having had a child this year, my greatest fear was that it might be profoundly autistic. I can't begin to imagine what it must be like to be stuck with a physiologically-broken child, for life, that is incapable of empathy or love for its parent.
I appreciate that's the sort of thing that happens at the extreme ends of the spectrum and not at all representative of many high-functioning autists, but I don't think it's terrible to have that as a fear.
Nope, and I'm not sure I even began to infer that.
And also nope, because we ran the gauntlet despite our slightly higher age and subsequent increase in probability of autism (amongst many, may other conditions).
As I say, I don't think it's wrong to fear the possibility, and as your post admirably points out, life is inherently full of risks.
Autistic people are not sociopaths, they are not incapable of empathy or love, they just struggle to understand when you're expressing it, or to express it in appropriate way.
Your fear of being unable to communicate with your child is valid, but autistic people are not "broken".
You seem to be, by choice or haste, missing the conditions in my post - profoundly autistic people at the ends of the spectrum are, by societal standards 'broken' and are indeed incapable of empathy or love.
It's not a nice thing to say or admit, but it is .. well, true.
I have an autistic uncle who is not profoundly so, but is hard to communicate with and has problems existing by himself, often getting into trouble that is hard for the rest of the family to understand the logic of.
Autistic kids are demonstrably not "incapable" of empathy as commonly understood. They may be impaired in their expression of it, but that's something quite different.
There's debate whether ODD even exists or is just PDA profile of ASD. I think it's PDA but not expert in this area by any means.
I should say-- I think it's often PDA misdiagnosed as ODD. Which is very sad for those ASD kids not getting the help they need (because the "treatments" for ODD are probably not going to work well on a PDA kid).
"Lack of empathy" in ASD people does not refer to love of other people. It simply means ASD people have a hard time predicting the behavior of others. That's it. They can love just fine. It's a pervasive myth, unfortunately.
Indeed ASD people often suffer from extreme empathy e.g. towards animals or something upsetting on the news (war/famine/etc.)
There's some ambiguity between cognitive and affective empathy. There are people who seem to be quite lacking in affective empathy and the pro-social emotions, that one might definitely call incapable of love. But autism is not like that, indeed it's very different; at worst, autistic folks might be said to have impairments in cognitive empathy, and AIUI even that's disputed to some extent.
Autists have empathy and all the other emotions that neurotypicals think they lack. They're simply deficient in learning the complicated ways that neurotypicals use to credibly signal their internal state.
I did think about clarifying that point of my post, and should have, I suppose. What I mean is that 'from the perspective of a parent' no signalling of empathy or love is essentially the exact-same outcome as there not being empathy or love.
I know I couldn't handle that lack of feedback.
Perhaps that's a severe failing, but there we are.
Exact, and is even worse. We are taking the behaviour of an adult animal, a short lived one, strongly wired to have sex, bite other males at sight, chase off everybody from their territory and chew and eat other smaller animals and plants while avoid inminent death in form of many predators...
And they are living in captivity, between plastic toys and hamster wheels. Males in a cage, and females in another cage. An environment that for its evolution probably would be seen as normal as for us being abducted by aliens and living in an alien zoo for our entire lifes.
And we are taking that and extrapolating it to explain the behaviour to a human children.
Would be ridiculous even for neurotypical children to expect them to behave like vicious sex driven mammals.
Inflammation and temperature rise effect increase energy needed to propagate an action potential down an axon. Many anxiolytics also downregulate inhibitory neuronal firing (ie, GABA agonists (alcohol), GABA allosteric agonists (benzodiazpines), etc).
68 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadSo in other words...
:P
> In 2016, they showed that mice born to mothers who experience a severe infection during pregnancy are much more likely to show behavioral symptoms such as deficits in sociability, repetitive behaviors, and abnormal communication.
They should look for children who had the risk factor (infected mother) but didn't turn autistic to see if they have the levels elevated. Long shot.
So if you get your kid sick enough you can temporarily pretend they aren't autistic, and really put to the test the idea that anti-vaxxers think autism is worse than being deathly ill?
(No it is not funny, because people and children dying because of this bullshit)
Also, I thought the joke was funny; I highly doubt there are any genuine anti-vaxxers in HN comments.
However, the risk of getting sick from the vaccine is small compared to the risk of getting sick without the vaccine. When the risk levels get close to equal, the vaccine type is changed to the less-risky but less-effective type.
Attenuated virus vaccines are usually more effective than inactive virus ones.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The idea that an ill children tired and with less energy than usual would behave better is not a total surprise.
My daughter, every time she has a cold, which since daycare is almost always.
Now they are older, and fever starts to knock them out sooner. Fever suppressants make them bouncy again still (so no rush to give them until 38.7-ish, as long as they drink well etc).
Normal male mice fight. You enter in my zone, I'll bite you and chase you off. Normal female mice are more tolerant with relatives and pups, but not with any other female. They can fight also with strange females.
This is the rule for the species and the definition of perfect and normal communication. "pacifist" or mesiah mice is anomalous and probably would send a really confusing message for the other mice.
"I'm too feverish and tired to fight right now, so let me alone" is common among animals and not necessarily related with autistic behaviour.
You present autistic children like they are all little Sheldons from the Big bang theory, when the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
Autism is a spectrum where a certain percentage of kids are as you say, but many can't do anything without the help of an adult and certainly aren't going to have 'uncommon hobbies' or 'cleverness'.
NT people are so broken in your own ways: relationships with parents, relationships with spouses, relationships with children, relationships with the environment: you don't get any of them right. You are all so broken and unhealthy! Why are you all on anti-anxiety meds, why are you all on anti-depressants? Every NT person I know makes so many weird decisions, against their own interests, against their own emotional health. You are broken in this world.
But for some reason it becomes so important that ASD people just "act more normal". Whatever.
But, putting that aside: these problems you're describing are all things that ASD people also have to deal with. People with ASD have strictly more problems than people without it, since they have all the "normal" problems, and then some other ones that only they suffer from (like the aforementioned sensory hypersensitivity.) The only differences that exist stem from people lowering their expectations of how people with ASD will perform on e.g. social tasks. Those tasks still need to get done; people on the spectrum just don't get the choice to be the one to do them, because other people make that choice for them. (Just like nobody asks a deaf person to transcribe audio for them, or asks a paraplegic to deliver a package for them.)
> But for some reason it becomes so important that ASD people just "act more normal".
I don't think anyone wants people with ASD to "act" any way that's hard for them. The point of the development of ASD treatments is to enable people to have the opportunity to choose how they want to be, rather than being locked into one part of behavior-space without having had such a choice.
To put it another way, by analogy to another community of sufferers: people with hearing can choose to put in earplugs. Deaf people cannot choose to put in hear-plugs. Because of this, being able to hear is a strict improvement over being deaf: you can choose to use it, or not, at any point.
But more importantly... nobody is asking ASD people to act “normally”. It’s just being noted that they tend to act in particular ways and suffer from particular stimuli and are generally more difficult for NT people to relate to.
What I wonder if baseline mice produce IL-17a in response to inflammation?
My guess would be no. I would also wonder if some low to moderate infection in mothers can spare the offspring from autism, but still prime IL production?
See references in this article, because I have trouble copying them on mobile.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/darwins-subterrane...
Pulled right from the article. Studies in mice are simply a way to point in the, hopefully, "right" direction without having to shoot in the dark with human test subjects needlessly.
The cynic in me feels that some researchers are running out of ideas. The only experimental apparatus are poor knockout mice.
Arguably an analogy is trying to fix a compiled binary with a hex editor and replacing all your 0x11s with 0x0a. Then claiming the segfault is a good model of how another binary crashes (due to a null pointer exception or whatever really).
Sure, the question is whether that direction significantly better than a randomly selected direction
I thought that was already clearly established.
Anything can "reduce autism symptoms" that can make a neurotypical person unable to behave normally. Autistic behavior IS the normal for autistic people. Heavy sedatives, just like being very sick, can "reduce autism symptoms" since the person would be too tired to exhibit any behaviors at all.
"Look, he's not flapping and pacing! His autism must be cured!" No, you dolt, he's exhausted and miserable from being sick.
Leave autistic people alone and let them be themselves. Seriously, I can't believe some people would rather let their kid die of polio than believe they could be autistic. If you think having an autistic child is that terrible, you probably shouldn't have kids.
That's very much not the case, unfortunately. Many autistic kids are very low function. Their deviations in behavior are way more serious than just some quirky flipping and pacing.
But this is a bizarre strawman because vaccines do not cause autism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Autism is not a superpower.
Yes, sometimes mildly autistic people can become genius mathematicians, or whatever, but most of autistic people simply cannot function by themselves, they struggle with everyday things. So no, we can't just "leave them alone", we should try and understand what causes autism, and maybe someday we can cure it.
Why don't you ask an autistic person if they want to be cured? Go ahead. Jump on r/aspergers and ask them. They will tell you to go fly a kite.
Please edit snarky swipes out of your comments here. The rest of this post would be just fine without that first bit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't know why you have stated everyone would provide identical answers if asked about a cure for austism. A simple reddit search which I just did confirms there is a thread where some have been asked this question and said they would in fact sign up for a cure. Other answered "maybe". Many said "no". Nobody said "go fly a kite".
I will concede the majority of people appear to have answered no, but, again, that isn't a representative sample of the general population. More data would be needed to make a more general conclusion.
I agree there is no need to treat autistic people who get along in society mostly fine, but people who can’t work, talk, or live on their own is probably where I would draw the line of those people needing actual treatment if it ever exists
There's an assumption here that NT socialization is the "correct" socialization. That NT behaviors, world-view, all that thing, is what is "normal" and "correct". This is just straight up bias. You want ASD people to be "normal" for your definition of normal but there's actually no natural law that makes it so. Just the tyranny of the majority.
I appreciate that's the sort of thing that happens at the extreme ends of the spectrum and not at all representative of many high-functioning autists, but I don't think it's terrible to have that as a fear.
While the fear is natural, there are tons of other childhood conditions that are, in fact, worse than autism.
Would you decline vaccines for yourself or your child because you fear they might "get autism" (which has been debunked).
Edit: clarity
And also nope, because we ran the gauntlet despite our slightly higher age and subsequent increase in probability of autism (amongst many, may other conditions).
As I say, I don't think it's wrong to fear the possibility, and as your post admirably points out, life is inherently full of risks.
Autistic people are not sociopaths, they are not incapable of empathy or love, they just struggle to understand when you're expressing it, or to express it in appropriate way.
Your fear of being unable to communicate with your child is valid, but autistic people are not "broken".
It's not a nice thing to say or admit, but it is .. well, true.
I have an autistic uncle who is not profoundly so, but is hard to communicate with and has problems existing by himself, often getting into trouble that is hard for the rest of the family to understand the logic of.
Autistic kids are demonstrably not "incapable" of empathy as commonly understood. They may be impaired in their expression of it, but that's something quite different.
I should say-- I think it's often PDA misdiagnosed as ODD. Which is very sad for those ASD kids not getting the help they need (because the "treatments" for ODD are probably not going to work well on a PDA kid).
Indeed ASD people often suffer from extreme empathy e.g. towards animals or something upsetting on the news (war/famine/etc.)
I know I couldn't handle that lack of feedback.
Perhaps that's a severe failing, but there we are.
And they are living in captivity, between plastic toys and hamster wheels. Males in a cage, and females in another cage. An environment that for its evolution probably would be seen as normal as for us being abducted by aliens and living in an alien zoo for our entire lifes.
And we are taking that and extrapolating it to explain the behaviour to a human children.
Would be ridiculous even for neurotypical children to expect them to behave like vicious sex driven mammals.