PLT Test Blog

Regular readers of this blog, and the small number of other autism science blogs, will have noticed how often research findings are contradictory.  In autism there is often a good reason why things are contradictory, because in some of the underlying dysfunctions both too much, or too little, (hyper or hypo) both lead to “autism”.      Take the relatively simple case of GI problems in autism;  estimates of prevalence range from 9 to 91% .   Such a variation  is of course absurd and on the basis of which study you choose to quote, you can make whatever case you want.       Given that autism is not a single disease like say rheumatic fever , another very odd inflammatory disease, it makes anything very much harder to prove. In the wider world of medical research there is an ongoing debate about research studies in general.  Most of this research is in much simpler types of disease, where you can accurately include in your trial ...

Farewell to Pingu I usually succeed in keeping to the science in this blog and refrain from sharing my other wider opinions.  Today I slipped up. Rather like James Simons, founder of the Simons Foundation, I do not have a high opinion of many supposed experts, particularly when it comes to autism. Autism is often a backwater, where “academics” can still write the occasional quasi-scientific paper on some touchy-feely aspect that they consider important and make a name for themselves.  On the back of this, they can advocate for their perception of autism and often encourage ever-wider diagnosis in people who are less and less severely affected. So far this is fine; we are all entitled to have our own opinions, so no comments on Autism Speaks, Autism One, or the various National Autism Societies. They all have the best intentions. I should highlight the Simons Foundation and the UC Davis MIND Institute as being excellent scientific sources of objective information. The only re...

The original idea of this blog was to try to keep complicated things as simple as possible, so at times things may get over-simplified.   This post starts out simple and then gets rather involved in oxidative stress. When people think about genes, they are nearly always thinking about the “blueprints” that are encoded on your DNA.  As it turns out only about 5% of your DNA is dedicated to this function; this 5% is contained in the exome . Much autism research is dedicated to finding faulty “blueprints” that might account for autism.   There are now several hundred so called “autism genes”, where an error in the “blueprints”, means that the associated protein is not produced to its intended specification. We also have seen that genetic defects just lead to a possibility of something going wrong.  A “faulty gene” creates the possibility of a specific dysfunction happening, it does not mean 100% that it will happen.  Partial dysfunctions and partial deficiency...