tiberriver256

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!

Comment · 10 months ago

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...

Comment · 10 months ago

Maybe they meant neurodivergent as a broader category? Like "some people are neurodivergent but don't have autism"

That would be a bit weird though...

EDIT: Neurodivergent is very much a broader category. What I meant would be weird is to state the obvious... Very much sounded like they were trying to say some people with autism may not want to get "cured" but using the wrong words

Comment · 10 months ago

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

Comment · 11 months ago

YES PLEASE.

This actively harms diagnostics and encourages cure-all peddlers.

Definitely has been good for financial benefits and such but... Once someone gets the "autistic" diagnosis all further research stops.

Comment · 1 year ago

VSCode + the new "Auto" model probably worth a shot for this