Mothers of children with autism have ‘significantly different’ metabolite levels | Hacker News Reader

Mothers of children with autism have ‘significantly different’ metabolite levels

studyfinds.org

21 pointsrajnathani17 comments

The response "what were the levels at birth" is the only thing this article should be interested in.

There are way too many factors to draw any meaningful conclusions especially at 59 participants at 2-5 years AFTER birth.

Yes, especially since many families take on special diets as part of autism therapy.

Did they account for stress? Did they account for potentially deliberate changes in the diet of the family because they want to put their kids on a special diet? Doesn't look like it so can't take thr results too seriously

There is a project called American Gut project which a crowd sourced project that collects information about different gut bacteria. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5954204/pdf/mSy...

You could try with Biogaia Gastrus Limosilactobacillus reuteri (formerly known as Lactobacillus reuteri) Gastrus (L. reuteri DSM 17938 and L. reuteri ATCC PTA 6475) https://www.biogaia.com/product-country/biogaia-gastrus-usa-...

Please search for autism and DSM 17938 and L. reuteri ATCC PTA 6475

Ie you offset the different gut bacteria metabolite with Probiotic good bacteria to try and change the biome to good.

Link to article with mouse model of PTA 6475 and autism https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...

The original study contains a much more legible (no pop-up ads for one) summary of results in its introduction:

https://bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12887...

"Even though the study collected samples years after the births actually took place, study authors say these initial findings open the door toward many more questions."

Many pregnant women I know do change their diet a lot when pregnant, either consciously of because of "urges". I wonder how that plays into this.

Oh, don't tell them that. This will unleash several levels of DOOM on you.

IDDQD, IDKFA and I'm in.

This should not be a headline until reproduced.

So vegetarianism, lots of b vitamins, folate, and blood tests?

Very interesting. That said, sample size of 59...

What does that sample size tell you?

Sample size is an important metric in statistics. It defines how many people were tested/asked/whatever. Higher numbers are better because that levels out quirks that might have happened.

Asking 59 people is obviously not a big sample size and therefore the results of this study are "not very reliable". To say it friendly.

The sample size isn't a problem here, because it doesn't matter: Even a 59,000-person sample would not overcome the 2-5 year delay.

And of course the researchers knew that. They weren't even trying to do what you imply. They weren't looking for reliably anything. Rather, they were looking for something interesting, along the lines of "are these interesting questions to pose in a much more expensive study that avoids the 2-5-year problem?"

Agreed with your push-back on the sample size thing being operative (this is a point I've made frequently on HN study threads), and agree that the primary design consideration is the post-"treatment" measurement of the outcome making it more likely that having an autistic kid changes metabolites than that having different metabolites influences chance of having an autistic kid.

Still, even with contemporaneous measurement, my guess is that there'd be a very real selection issue here; a non-random subset of people who could receive an autism diagnosis do, and to the extent the confounders into diagnosis (one presumes all the standard SES/race/access to healthcare factors are confounders here) constitutes a selection on the dependent variable, even a contemporaneous sample would not generalize to the population of interest.

I don't get the downvotes. It is nigh-impossible to conclude something from a tiny sample, other than it's worth looking at more. But there are tons of things worth looking at more, most of which come out to nothing. Covid produced so many small-sample "promising effect" papers, most of which came to nothing at all.

It's not a critique of the study, either. You can't recruit tens of thousands of people for every little study.

So to rephrase, the headline could read "we found a relationship that probably doesn't actually hold, but just might".

59 is not a tiny sample, they are being downvoted because they're demonstrating a lack of understanding of significance in statistics.

The researchers conclude "Mothers of children with ASD have many significantly different metabolite levels compared to mothers of typically developing children at 2–5 years after birth."

And they back that conclusion up by describing their analytical process. If GP wants to dispute this conclusion, then the GP should explain why their method is flawed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com