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Comment by tsoukase | Hacker News Reader

Autism is rooted during fetal brain development. Behavioural and metabolic changes show up later. There is no an egg and chicken problem. The primary disease starts in the CNS and everything else follows

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How do you know that?

Schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's have links with the gut too. But I "know" they start from the brain. No advanced or complicated hypothesis

How would you prove or disprove this theory?

The gut hypothesis hype is trendy right now. There is some correlation but when things settle down, some of the effect will be attributed to "picky eating".

Proving that the source of mental disorders is the brain and not the gut (as it was believed in the distant past) is easy: 100% of patients show brain damage while a fraction of them have an abnormal gut

How do you eliminate models where brain damage is a proximate cause?

Exclusion of either cause directions is impossible by definition. This is science not mathematics. But saying that the primary mechanism of mental disease lies outside the brain must not contradict decades of research and simple observation (eg a small brain damage leads to a profound behavioural image while cutting 5 meters of small intestine to none) Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Why the reliance on physical trauma explanations? How do you rule out biochemical models of disease?

There’s so much brain development that happens in the first few years after birth that there’s absolutely no way you can say that with confidence.

No developmental anomaly can start after birth. It must preexist but is not detected. Proof: heavy cases of autism are diagnosed at birth, so the beginning lies sometime in uterus. The same holds for the lighter cases too.

Nonsense. Developmental disorders can be caused by any number of factors in early childhood, like stress, neglect, infection, injury, and exposure to substances in the environment like lead. A multifactorial disorder like autism may have many different causes, and we don’t know enough to say for certain that they all originate before birth. I’d wager they do not.

What the fuck? Of course developmental anomalies can start after birth. Yeah, many initially develop in the womb, but like, the time in the womb is a trivial percentage of a child's development.

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