More evidence that autism is linked to gut bacteria
economist.com
economist.com
The salient points are:
* Very small N.
* Behavioral studies of mice can be very subjective in their own right, so you can definitely get bias, particularly with small N.
* There's no generally accepted model of autism in mice. In other words, mice might not even be capable of getting autism in the first place, so saying that "these behaviors in mice correlate with autism in humans" is a bit of a limb.
* No measurement of the microbiome in the descendants-of-the-implanted-microbiome (the ones that were actually tested) was demonstrated.
So you can come away from the paper with the feeling that they set out to test a hypothesis, interpreted subjective results in the way that best matches the hypothesis, and failed to (or perhaps even purposefully excluded) test for alternate hypotheses that might explain the evidence better.
What is the probability that 8 ASD kids out of 18 would be neurotypical after 2 years even without the treatment?
That said, poor gut biodiversity could in turn lead to exacerbated presentation of symptoms, due to gut flora's involvement in neurotransmitter systems, interactions with the gut's nervous system, or simply painful intestinal distress.
> Crucially, these changes in gut bacteria have translated into behavioural changes. Even 18 weeks after treatment started the children had begun showing reduced symptoms of autism. After two years, only three of them still rated as severe, while eight fell below the diagnostic cut-off point for asd altogether. These eight thus now count as neurotypical.
Regulatory capture for bacteria.
I mean, look at what Toxoplasma gondii does to mice...
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.201400...
Given the selection pressures involved, we might even expect most gut bacteria to do that.
Imagine a world where you can buy your food tastes through a yogurt.
Consider anything you do that takes conscious effort, in life or work. Now try doing it with a headache, or on lack of sleep, or with a stomach pain. You'll do worse!
A core feature of autism is sensory abnormality, so perhaps the symptoms present in severe cases can be explained by increased sensitivity to these negative internal stimuli.
Additionally, I think it's important to note that we would discount many of these symptoms from a diagnosis, if a more observable and salient cause (e.g. an itchy skin condition) were seen. Gastrointestinal discomfort being poorly observable creates a bias.
I believe many medicines are tested in males only because it would be unethical to test them in possibly pregnant females. However, one ridiculous example is birth control pills.
How did you know about that?
The problem with autism research on mice is that it is not at all clear that the mouse autism model has anything to do with autism in humans.
I’m sure there are differences between ASD and non-ASD kids in terms of diet, but picky and selective eating is present in a lot of children that are never diagnosed as ASD.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/05/31/au...
more criticism: https://twitter.com/WiringTheBrain/status/113412941545626419... https://twitter.com/DrBrocktagon/status/1134339288907206656
With that being said, some googling just now to make sure I'm not just spouting nonsense hasn't turned up a 7 year figure. But it has returned a bunch of articles pointing to studies that suggest it takes a long time. [1] says after 10 months there's still a disturbance.
[1] https://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/medication/long-do...
Taking antibiotics massively reduces the quantity of gut bacteria. It often radically changes the balance as their numbers recover, resulting in a proportional increase in resistant strains.
Eating a ketogenic (almost no carbs) or fruitarian (almost entirely carbs) diet, is much more likely to create an imbalance in types of gut flora.
[1]: https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/2016/09/1001...
The data were compiled with uBiome SmartGut and Explorer
kits over a 3 year period. I directly parsed the .json
files they provided. The plots were generated with
matplotlib and the source code is available here:
https://github.com/isaacgerg/ubiome_longitudinal_analysis
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/bnrkqm/oc_...
Since killing bacteria is one of the legitimate functions of bleach, I can see them claiming that their bleach therapy will work by killing off that bad, autism-linked gut bacteria.
Shifts like this happen and lead to huge difference in people's lives. Now mostly forgotten, but it was believed that ulcers are caused by stress and food and not bacteria. I have a family member that didn't survive surgery for mistreated ulcer. Then, for me it was a simple matter of taking antibiotics for few weeks.
- Kefir
For probiotic foods to have any meaningful effect, though, make sure your gut is healthy first. Probiotics foods are good for one type of bacteria but you also need to neutralise the bad types. Stop eating sugars, saturated fats etc. Your stomach is an ecosystem that will suffer any changes quite badly at first, but will thank you in the long term.
Introducing the bacteria is only part of the problem though. If you want to have a diverse community of gut flora, you need to have a nutritionally balanced diet.
There's also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant
I am no scientist and I am not wanting to push a diet choice on anyone, I went vegetarian simply because the food was better at school for the few that were specially catered for as vegetarian, with larger portion sizes being key to my motivation at the time.
However, as a science experiment you could go vegetarian for a year to selectively cull the bacteria that go with eating meat. You could go full on vegan too but that isn't as easy a change as going merely vegetarian.
Expect some flatulence that will sort itself out in time, something you might also want to look into as part of your experiment.
Allegedly people in Africa who actually eat have the most diverse gut bacteria and these guys ain't eating hamburgers.
I think that a change over to full vegan would be with health negatives to consider, a change to vegetarian would not run that risk. It is worth remembering that anyone who is anyone in Hollywood is in the serious business of looking after their looks, they tend to be not eating steaks. In sport there are also athletes that only hit the high notes of performance after going on a mostly plant based diet.
The probiotics business is a business, they have something to sell. Nobody except for book authors are going to sell you the idea of removing rather than adding something from your diet.
As mentioned I am vegetarian by chance - a school dinner lady just happened to do much nicer vegetarian food than meat eater food and I blatantly lied on my first day at that school about being vegetarian just to benefit from the better portion sizes. I had to stick to that lie thereafter and my parents were okay with me not having meat at home. I don't have any skin in the ethics game unlike some recent converts to veganism. However, that said, I can see the upsides financially whenever I dine out. Although bills get split I am aware that my part of the bill is 2/3 the price of whatever everyone else is having or even less than that. I am okay with a bowl of pasta whereas others around the table have some endangered species from some ocean on the far side of the planet, it is obvious what is going to be the cheaper option.
You can conservatively estimate four figure savings by spending a year in vegetarian mode so maybe think of something you want to put that money towards in order to cope better with the hardship of not scoffing burgers etc. for a year.
Because you can't live off just meat alone (unless you are a dog or other carnivore with a short intestine) there isn't the option to cut out the plants and just live off burgers and sausages for a year, to clear out and reset the gut bacteria that like a bit of plant material. Going vegetarian is therefore a safe personal experiment.
The problem with processed foods - even if natural and without additives - is that they don't make it past the small intestine with any nutrients in them for the gut flora of the lower intestine.
For the record, you can.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson demonstrated this in the USA a century ago, but this was based on his experiences watching and living in the arctic where we have much longer natural experiments to refer to.
Of course, whether you should or not, and the nature of the long term effects, are separate considerations.
I qualified my idea by stating that I don't eat the dead stuff.
It is cool you can write snarky and pedantic comments but it has nothing to do with sharing ideas which is what other people like to read.
In short, most scientific approaches will often conflate reducing autism with helping people handle their autism better. It's a pretty chronic problem for understanding the disease, but much less impactful for generating practical treatments. Mental healthcare in general doesn't care much whether it reduces the severity of neurodivergence or the distress and socially problematic behavior caused by neurodivergence.
Maybe this is about hints, not evidence?
evidence
noun
The available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid.
‘the study finds little evidence of overt discrimination’
At the risk of stating the obvious. Gut bacteria are bacteria... in the gut. Like if you tell me they affect the absorption of nutrients - I can see that. Maybe they make something more bioavailable or maybe they break something else down. If you tell me their involved in deficiencies and over/underweight that kinda makes sense.
Tell me they affect appetite through manipulating our signals ok. Not as obvious but not implausible either.
Tell me they cause highly complex behavioral differences... it just seems implausible. But maybe gaba can indeed explain it.
Nowadays, the gut is sometimes referred to as the "second brain" because of your enteric nervous system which is located inside the gut. It probably has more influence over you than you're aware of, as it operates independently of your CNS.
If you're talking about the time before there was strong evidence for pathogenic bacteria- then that would have been the only rational and justified behaviour.
Why should anyone believe something that sounds implausible given current knowledge, before strong evidence is presented to support it?
So, the hype cycle for tech products is not really as useful in the study of microbes in the human body.
It is true there have been hype waves. But there also have been huge medicinal revolutions too (e.g. vaccines, antibiotics, etc)
It sounds to me that you're just lumping all "great claims" into the "false" category with no basis. It doesn't sound like you read the studies and take issue.
Anecdotally, I began to regularly consume more fermented foods (e.g. plain Greek yogurt, kimchi, kombucha, kefir) about 8 or 9 months ago, which helped trigger a cascade of other positive changes and led to gradual but marked improvements to my health.
If we separate microbiome from diet a little here, then it's quite easy to say that many people are sick because of their poor diet. Heart disease and cancer are by a large margin the largest killers of people in the United States, both of which have obesity as a major factor. Type 2 Diabetes, high blood pressure, and a host of other diseases also result from poor diets. I'm practically certain it's one of the primary causes of premature death.
There are lots of regrettable trends.
The story posted is primarily about the results of experiments with 18 humans between the ages 7-16, over two years, and a section at the end describing some earlier studies involving mice.
The results of the human experiments are astonishingly positive.
I mention this just in case you breezed too rapidly over those large parts of the article.