It’s extremely common for young kids to receive antibiotics. In some countries, antibiotics are over the counter and many parents will give their kids antibiotics for nearly any infection. Antibiotic misuse is rampant in some countries where they aren’t gated behind prescriptions.
Any such link with autism would therefore be an extremely rare side effect. The rate of antibiotic use in children is far higher than the rate of autism.
I don’t think this case supports the antibiotic theory by itself at all. I think it’s confirmation bias because antibiotics are one of the current trending theories among mainstream discussion.
This is not «extremely common».
Given that antibiotics are common but extreme infections and extended hospitalizations are not, why would anyone focus on the antibiotics as the root cause?
Not all antibiotics are created equal nor do they affect gut bacteria the same. There isn’t a singular scale for antibiotic power. Often, antibiotics are given via vein because they aren’t absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract, for example. This doesn’t tell us anything about the magnitude of impact on gut bacteria relative to an antibiotic that actually starts its journey in your gut.
This is a complicated case. Reducing the entire complicated episode to “it was the antibiotics” is extremely reductionist.
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.
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 hope noone is taking this seriously..)
Also nose biome interacts with the finger and fingernail biome quite often.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science#Healing_prac...
Christian Science is very much a dying religion, and is not "prominent" anywhere so I'm not surprised that you never heard of them if you're young. The mother church is in Boston though.
"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."
There are so many confounding factors here. Could be no connection to the episode whatever. Could be that the infection that required the antibiotics contributed to the autism. Could be the antibiotics contributed directly. Could be the overall trauma of the surgery, treatment and recovery.
Seems like the gut thing is the least likely culprit and requires quite a lot of creativity to even consider it.