About this “unresolved mystery” of autism, domestic and foreign experts are continuously conducting a large number of experiments and research to understand the causes of the disease and find a cure for autism. Looking back at the recent years of practical research, what important discoveries have been made about autism?
(Source: Internet)
01
Autism may not only be a brain disorder
For a long time, autism has been considered a brain disorder. However, a research result published in the American journal “Cell” proposes a different view, suggesting that some symptoms of autism are related to defects in the peripheral nervous system, such as limbs and skin.
Autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder, is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is common in infants and young children. The symptoms of patients include social interaction difficulties, communication barriers, restricted activities and interests, and stereotypical repetition. About 95% of patients experience sensory perception abnormalities, with the most common examples being hypersensitivity to auditory and tactile stimuli. They may cover their ears to avoid noise and dislike being touched.
In this research, researchers at Harvard Medical School in the United States first created experimental mice with mutations in autism-related genes using genetic engineering technology. However, these mutations only occurred in the peripheral sensory nerve cells of the experimental mice. The results showed that these experimental mice were unusually sensitive to external touch.
Subsequently, researchers studied the anxiety and social situations of these experimental mice by common analysis methods, showing that they were unwilling to interact with unfamiliar mice and their anxiety levels increased.
David Ginty, a professor at Harvard Medical School responsible for this research, said in a statement, “A potential hypothesis about autism is that it is merely a brain disorder, but we find that this is not always the case.”
The researchers proposed that mutations in autism-related genes cause significant defects in the “volume switch” of peripheral sensory nerve cells in mice, similar to the “volume” being turned up high, resulting in the magnification of touch sensation in mice and ultimately leading to abnormal behavior. This mechanism may also apply to humans. Therefore, their next step will be to study how to adjust the aforementioned “volume switch” back to normal levels through genetic or drug means.
(Source: Internet)
02
Fever during Pregnancy Increases the Risk of Autism in Children
Researchers in Europe and America have found that mothers who have fever during pregnancy may increase the risk of their children developing autism.
This research analyzed the health data of nearly 100,000 children born between 1999 and 2009 in Norway and their mothers. About 16% of the mothers reported having fever during pregnancy, and a total of 583 children were diagnosed with autism.
The research results showed that having a fever one to two times during pregnancy increased the risk of a child developing autism by 34%, with the risk increasing by about 40% when the fever occurred in the mid-pregnancy period. Women who reported having a fever three or more times after 12 weeks of pregnancy had more than a threefold increased risk of giving birth to a child with autism.
Maddy Honig, the first author of the paper and an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University in the United States, said in a statement, “Our research results suggest that infections during pregnancy and the congenital immune responses to infections play a role in the development of at least some autism cases.”
This research published in the latest issue of the journal “Molecular Psychiatry” in the United Kingdom also analyzed the effects of pregnant women with fever taking two types of antipyretic drugs, acetaminophen and ibuprofen, on the risk of their children developing autism. The results showed that taking acetaminophen had no significant effect on reducing the risk of autism in children. None of the children born to women who took ibuprofen for fever developed autism, but due to the small number of pregnant women who took ibuprofen, the study could not determine if ibuprofen is effective in preventing autism.
A previous study in Denmark also found that the risk of a child being diagnosed with autism increased if the mother had the flu or a fever during pregnancy.
(Source: Internet)
03
Autism May be Due to Inheriting Genetic Mutations from Fathers
A recent message on the official website of the journal “Science” reported a new study exploring non-coding DNA, which found that changes in regions that regulate gene activity could also lead to autism. Surprisingly, these changes tend to be inherited from non-autistic fathers.
Over the past decade, researchers have identified hundreds of gene variations that may affect brain development, thereby increasing the risk of autism, but these variations mainly come from DNA that directly encodes proteins.
Furthermore, scientists have been trying to find mutations that occur spontaneously in individual genomes of patients, rather than looking for inherited mutations from parents.
Jonathan Sebat, a geneticist at the University of California, said, “Only 2% of the genome consists of protein-coding genes. The non-coding part called ‘junk’ DNA has been ignored in autism research until now.”
The Sebat team was particularly interested in the non-coding DNA sections that can regulate gene expression and studied whole-genome sequences from 829 families, including autistic individuals, their non-autistic siblings, and their parents.
Evaluating the impact of changes in individual non-coding DNA regions is very challenging. Therefore, the research team selected so-called large sequence DNA structural variants as the focus. Each individual has only a few thousand structural variations in their genome, which narrows the analysis range and only requires examination of a small subset of gene structural variants.
They searched for regions where the general population had fewer variations than expected, including sites responsible for regulating gene activity and initiating gene transcription during brain development. Then, by examining the impact of parents on the pattern of autism and non-autism in children, they checked whether structural variants in these regions were associated with autism.
The researchers found that fathers transmitted more than 50% of the variants, indicating that children with autism may inherit risk variants from fathers rather than mothers. To verify this result, the Sebat team subsequently tested samples from an additional 1,771 families, confirming the above conclusion.
In response to this, neuroscientist and computational biologist Lucica Pesceo from Washington State University in Spokane said, “This is a very good article, challenging as it is, but it makes us think about the different causes of autism genetics, which is a huge contribution to this field.”
(Source: Internet)
04
Children’s Bad Temper Could be Due to Bread
A boy, from a young age, would cry and become agitated whenever he had a fever. His temper was always very big. As he grew older, when he had a fever, he would get out of bed and run around the house at night, claiming to have had terrible dreams.
The pediatrician prescribed him an antiallergy medication, “Loratadine”, and it just so happened that the child caught a cold and fever again. After taking the medicine that night, he surprisingly did not have any temper tantrums.
Why could an antiallergy medication gradually solve mental issues?
Research has found that a child’s hyperactivity, inattention, carelessness, irritable temper, and even childhood depression, autism, may be related to food allergies, particularly the gluten contained in bread and steamed buns, which make the allergic individual unhappy.
Gluten is a complex protein found in wheat. The soft and chewy bread we love to eat contains gluten, also known as “gluten.” It consists of two parts, gliadin and glutenin. Glutenin consists of 12 smaller units, and any one of them can cause an allergic reaction leading to inflammation.
For people allergic to gluten, after consuming wheat products containing gluten, the levels of antibodies in the body will rise. After the antibodies bind to the components in gluten that cause allergies, a specific gene in certain immune cells is activated. Once these genes are activated, inflammatory factors accumulate, attacking the brain, causing brain dysfunction. The change in personality is the result of brain dysfunction. In other words, many people’s abnormal personalities may be due to the presence of gluten in the food, such as eating these chewy breads.
(Source: Internet)
05
Boys at High Risk of Autism if Exposed to Electronic Screens at 1 Year Old
Recently, a research team from the Department of Social Medicine at the Graduate School of Yamanashi University in Japan reported in the “Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics” that the longer boys are exposed to screens such as television and digital video discs (DVDs) with digital images at 1 year old, the higher the probability of being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at 3 years old.
This study targeted 84,030 pairs of mothers and infants using a questionnaire survey. The results showed that the prevalence of ASD at the age of 3 was 392 in 100,000 people, and the probability of boys being diagnosed with ASD was three times higher than that of girls.
Among boys, compared to children with “no screen time” at 1 year old, the risk of ASD increased by 1.38 times for children with “less than 1 hour,” by 2.16 times for children with “1-2 hours,” by 3.48 times for children with “2-4 hours,” and by 3.02 times for children with “more than 4 hours.” The study did not find a clear relationship in girls.
(Source: Internet)
06
Short or Long Birth Intervals May be Related to Autism
The latest research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States found that having too short or too long birth intervals greatly increases the risk of having a child with autism compared to the general population.
The researchers published an article in the “Autism Research” journal, saying that they investigated data of 356 children with autism spectrum disorder, 600 children with other developmental disorders, and 524 normally developing children, and found an association between mothers having birth intervals that are too long or too short with autism, but not with other developmental disorders. The data showed that the risk of having a child with autism was 50% higher in mothers who became pregnant within two years of a previous birth than the general population, and the same risk existed for pregnancies occurring more than 4 years after the previous birth.
The article stated that due to limited and conflicting data from previous studies, this time researchers used a more scientific method of case discovery and pathological classification, collected data on a large scale through previous multi-site case-control studies, subdivided each autism case based on symptoms, and assessed maternal birth history. They ultimately concluded that having birth intervals that are too short or too long without professional evaluation significantly increases the risk of having a child with autism.
The U.S. Department of Health recommends that mothers wait at least 18 months before getting pregnant again to ensure they have the nutrients needed to have a healthy next baby and to avoid premature birth, low birth weight, placental abruption, and other complications.
(Source: Internet)
07
Advanced Paternal Age May Affect the Health of Mothers and Children
In modern society, people’s lives are becoming increasingly stressful. More and more men are choosing to delay fatherhood for their careers or to provide their children with better conditions in the future, but few people understand the risks involved in doing so.
Recently, researchers at Rutgers University in the United States published a paper in the “European Menopause Journal” stating that excessive delay in paternal age is not advisable, as it may affect the health of their partners and children.
In this study, researchers analyzed research on the impact of parental age on pregnancy, childbirth, and child health in the United States over the past 40 years. They found that once men are over 45 years old, not only may their fertility decrease, but it may also increase the risk of their partners developing gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and premature birth.
At the same time, their children are more likely to be born prematurely or postmature, have low birth weight, low Apgar scores (a physiological index of organ systems and vital signs at birth), and are at a higher risk of congenital defects such as epilepsy, congenital heart disease, and cleft lip as they age. As they grow older, these children are more likely to develop childhood cancer, mental illnesses, cognitive impairments, and autism.
There is currently no clear age at which men are considered advanced paternal age, but it is generally believed to be between 35 and 45 years old. Gloria Bachmann, Director of the Women’s Health Research Institute at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at Rutgers University and one of the paper’s authors, pointed out that people generally understand that physiological changes in women after the age of 35 can affect fertility, pregnancy, and child health, but there is limited awareness of the health risks of advanced paternal age.
She suggested that if a person does not want to become a father too early, they should consult a doctor on this issue and ideally freeze their healthy sperm before the age of 35, or at least before the age of 45, to minimize the health risks to their future partners and children.
(Source: Internet)
08
AI Helps Diagnose Autism, Parents no Longer Need to Wait
How difficult is it to get an appointment with the experts at the Child Development and Behavior Center? Some parents have to wait for six months, eight months, or even a year. Once this artificial intelligence system is developed, it can help experts diagnose autism in advance; parents of autistic children no longer need to wait anxiously for an appointment with an authoritative expert to confirm the diagnosis.
The Guangdong Provincial Mental and Neurological Disease Research Center (Brain Disease Research Center) has been established at Sun Yat-sen University Third Hospital. Rong Limin, the director of Sun Yat-sen Third Hospital and the director of this center, stated that in the future, the center will integrate the strength of various disciplines in brain-related medical fields, such as the Child Development and Behavior Center, Psychiatric Psychology, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Spinal Surgery, Rehabilitation, and Biological Treatment Center, relying on stem cell technology and a big data artificial intelligence platform, focusing on four major medical fields represented by autism, spinal cord injury, rehabilitation after nerve injury, and depression. They aim to build a national-level brain science translational medicine platform.
It is reported that the application of artificial intelligence and big data is one of the main research directions. The preliminary work on research projects such as early diagnosis and treatment of childhood autism and precise diagnosis and treatment of adult depression using artificial intelligence and big data has started. It will soon be available for patients. The clinical research in stem cell therapy for spinal cord injury, Alzheimer’s disease, and other conditions at the Biological Treatment Center has made great breakthroughs.
By utilizing clinical big data from the entire hospital and hundreds of specialized alliances covering 58 hospitals of all levels and hundreds of specialized alliances, the Mental and Neurological Disease Research Center plans to develop an artificial intelligence-assisted diagnostic system to alleviate the difficulty that patients face in seeking medical treatment.
Regarding artificial intelligence-assisted diagnosis of autism, in the research of the Child Behavioral Development Center of the hospital, AI is able to diagnose autism through behavioral observation and imaging analysis. The accuracy of diagnosis has reached the team level and even surpassed some individuals.
Rong Limin said, “Through repeated analysis of massive data and deep learning, an experience that a doctor accumulates in ten years can be completed by artificial intelligence in an hour. In analyzing and judging imaging results, artificial intelligence also has a stronger advantage compared to human visual judgment.”
(Source: Internet)
