Hacker News Reader

Comment by neurotech1 | Hacker News Reader

A well written paper. Glad to see you included females with autism. Typically research papers under-represent or ignore females with autism, which is plain wrong.

I used to work as an EEG technician, and came across some autistic children.

Was there any consideration for using quantitative EEG analysis to help identify subgroups of autistic children?

View on HN

I'm interested in the neurological differences in the male and female brain as they relate to ASD. If we accept the findings in Ingalhalikar et al.[0] it seems to me like there is some explanatory power in the evident disproportion of occurrence of ASD in females. On one hand it appears the female connectome tends to favor a strategy of "indiscretion" whereas men do the opposite, instead relying on discrete processes. If we follow another study, they reason that the increased male variability in brain development may lead to susceptibility of certain disorders[1]. From the "purely neurological" pathology, is this something that might fit your findings? Where, if women aren't less susceptible then perhaps men are in terms of brain development?

And then we might consider the process of socialization as well, which I'd expect could lead to differing outcomes on the nose.

I don't know how extensive the issue is, or why it is, but I read a Wired article that indicated most pain medication studies focused exclusively on male subjects, and 96% did not compare differences between genders[2]. But also indicated differences in the way that pain is handled. If we extrapolate this into a trend, what else might we missing in the long run with such an oversight? Not to say that it is one, but if.

[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/111/2/823 [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33044802/ [3] https://www.wired.com/story/womens-pain-is-different-from-me...

This is absolutely correct. Early medical research was dominated by the assumption that males and females will react similarly to drugs, which is just not the case. Our labs has focused on recruiting females with autism in part because concerns of equity, but also because it might give us insight of the causal mechanisms underlying autism.

Thank you for the kind words. We do, in fact. Here is a link to a recent paper using ERP: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839322...

The quality of life of a female with Asperger’s is dramatically higher than that of a male. My whole family has it and it’s clear. There’s something about the female brain that is not impacted the same way. The liberal media loves to ignore this and they lean in super hard on “shielding” or whatever where they say the discrepancy is explained by the fact that females just deal with it better. And the rest of the gap is explained by sexism, of course. It’s a fucking lie and it’s bullshit.

My wife has Asperger's and had a hell of a time getting bullied in school.

Women with Asperger's are also more likely to get into abusive relationships and/or abuse drugs.

You sound really angry in this comment and make a lot of assumptions.

Do you feel that the others in your family afflicted with Asperger's had it easier due to their gender? Seems to be a bit of a sore point for you.

Over the years I have become very attuned to the signs of autism. A lot of people who have autism don’t show any obvious signs and are undiagnosed. There are absolute tons of women who have autism and nobody realizes it. The two most common symptoms are being “bossy” or having a hard time keeping their observations to themselves and also being overly sexually promiscuous. These women have sons who are on the spectrum almost without variation. And these females are all very well adjusted and often have very good careers. It’s kind of maddening when you see these women giving birth to tons and tons of men who are super disadvantaged and often end up really badly, much worse than their mothers. Once you learn how to spot it you see it absolutely everywhere. I think it’s unfair that boys are being fucked so hard and there’s no help or recognition for their situation.

So no, women who have diagnosed autism do poorly but as everyone knows, even the liberal media, the disease doesnt treat the sexes equally.

I think you are projecting anger. I always become frustrated when the truth is brushed aside because of petty political or moral reasons. The truth is the light in this dark world.

Asperger's is just part of the spectrum,and the experiences of individuals on the spectrum vary widely. Calibrated autism severity scores in our sample are pretty equivalent in males and females, but there are differences between the sexes.

> Calibrated autism severity scores in our sample are pretty equivalent in males and females

Did the "calibration" cause you to find what you wanted to find? How do you even calibrate something like that.

No. It was not calibrated to equalize genders, but for language ability and age.

https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/clinical-research-new-test...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com