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.”
> "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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2010136
> Most ASD/MD cases (79%) were not associated with genetic abnormalities, raising the possibility of secondary mitochondrial dysfunction. Treatment studies for ASD/MD were limited, although improvements were noted in some studies with carnitine, co-enzyme Q10 and B-vitamins. Many studies suffered from limitations, including small sample sizes, referral or publication biases, and variability in protocols for selecting children for MD workup, collecting mitochondrial biomarkers and defining MD. Overall, this evidence supports the notion that mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with ASD. Additional studies are needed to further define the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in ASD.
I think this may be specific to Heart surgery.
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.