Male autism is linked to brain aromatase disruption by maternal bisphenol A | Hacker News Reader

Male autism is linked to brain aromatase disruption by maternal bisphenol A

nature.com

52 pointsdavikr14 comments

"Strikingly, up to 80% of individuals diagnosed with ASD are male, suggesting sex-specific neurodevelopment underlies this condition."

There's also a suggestion that women have more social pressure/conditioning to act a certain way and thus are more efficient at an early age at "masking" symptoms of ASD and less likely to get an opportunity to be tested. Maybe there can be multiple suggestions though (yes, rtfad).

80% is indeed a striking imbalance though, I had no idea it was this high, and I don't know if social conditioning alone is enough to explain it. Not to mention that according to this study itself, when considering ASD-like behaviours, "an estrogenic fatty acid alleviated these features and reversed detrimental neurodevelopmental gene expression." So it seems to really be something based in the biology.

There’s a growing consensus that this number is way, way off, considering just how good women tend to be at masking compared to men.

I’ve met many women with the same story that didn’t even know they were autistic until they heard someone explain “masking” behavior as an autistic coping mechanism, and they said: “wait, isn’t that what everybody does?” They then go to a doctor to help them understand, etc. Lots of actresses have it, some of them are public about it.

I’m surprised to see that 80% number cited without bold caveats mentioning the limitations.

Historically most clinical studies up until around the 2000’s were done with a large percentage of participants being white men, often times there were NO WOMEN in the study.

A lot of rework is being done, which is great to see, but that’s going to take a long time before we have a true understanding of the variations between sexes caused by nature and/or nurture.

Gonna take HRT to cure myself brb

Females are often under-diagnosed with ADHD as well, the going theory being that males are more often hyperactive type and females inattentive (people can also have both characteristics). The boy running around the class being disruptive is more likely noticed than the girl always looking out the windown.

This seems like a massively important result that more or less confirms what we already know (plastic as hormone disruptor) so I don’t understand why it’s not getting more attention

Because it's a study about injecting mice with bpa which doesn't necessarily give us that much additional information about how dangerous bpa exposure actually is to humans in the real world beyond what we already knew?

But there are enough concerns about bisphenols that they should probably be phased out anyway to be safe.

Also, the human study they refer to found “an association between high prenatal BPA exposure (top quartile (>2.18 μg/L) and greater ASP scores was only seen in males with low aromatase activity”, so they didnt find that bpa was associated with development of autism.

Overall the link seems pretty weak, and they have to do a lot of scientific gymnastics to publish this paper.

> Although bisphenol A (BPA) has since been replaced by other bisphenols such as bisphenol S in BPA-free plastics, all bisphenols are endocrine-disrupting chemicals that can alter steroid signaling and metabolism.

There is some awareness of BPAs role in affecting the endocrine system. As the paper mentions merely being BPA-free doesn't mean one is out of the woods. All bisphenols are to some extent as disruptive as BPA is. Hadn't known that.

There's a list of other bisphenols here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol

Bisphenol A - BPA - an industrial chemical that has been used to make certain plastics and resins since the 1950s.

BPAs and modern vaccines have been around for roughly the same length of time, so I find it interesting that the random facebook posts being spread about saying "there wasn't as much autism in olden times because they didn't have vaccines" might have been at least a little bit accurate, even if they were wrong about the cause(vaccines).

Also, BPAs have a lot of other affects and frankly shouldn't be allowed, even if this study isn't replicable.

TIL that _mice_ can have autism.

They can't, what's generally used is a mouse model of an "autism like condition".

Whats the smallest (lab worthy) animal that can have autistic like conditions?

Smaller than a mouse? For something other than a mammal you would have to talk to someone else.

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