Brain overgrowth dictates autism severity, new research suggests

I had severe issues as a kid with both my head and brain size (which well, still haunts me today, this big head, hehe), but I never got that autism diagnostic, or actively looked for a doctor for it.<p>A doctor wanted to operate my brain as a baby, but my mother didn&#x27;t let it, and in the end, it was the right choice as it had a meaningful chance of my death.<p>I also struggled with language at first, and I went to many years of speech therapy, but eventually, it got better. My learning rate with languages is definitely not the best, but I still speak three languages after a good amount of effort and can communicate effectively.<p>It also gave me plenty of advantages; I always scored pretty high on IQ tests and had very good long-term memory.<p>Because I don&#x27;t buy this narrative from the article or in medical research that there are two kinds of autism. In my opinion, there&#x27;s only one, and that one has SEVERE conditions; I had a relative who had autism, and it was complicated for both the person and their parents. To me, this seems like a naming issue like software engineers do, who struggle to name an abstraction correctly, and after three years, that abstraction means everything.<p>Having a different kind of brain wiring isn&#x27;t some sort of sickness or anomaly. All brains are very different, just like your toes. When you compare them to others, you&#x27;ll see quite a few differences.

This reminds me of a twitter thread I read a few years ago making this prediction:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinygnomes.com&#x2F;qwiki.cgi?mode=previewSynd&amp;uuid=BCXKLB9VJN4XU8EU4VQ2PSX6K4QT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinygnomes.com&#x2F;qwiki.cgi?mode=previewSynd&amp;uuid=B...</a><p>We had already known from autopsies that neural density in certain brain regions is much higher among autists.

These summary is just wrong wrt this study:<p>&gt;”Now that Courchesne and Muotri have established that brain overgrowth begins in the womb, they hope to pinpoint its cause, in a bid to develop a therapy that might ease intellectual and social functioning for those with the condition.”<p>There is a slight difference between “beginning in the womb” snd beginning in some odd organoid derived from blood cells.<p>Autism research imho tends to be flaky and this type of press release does not help.

This growth pattern has been documented pretty well? I used to teach it in undergrad courses.<p>Autism spectrum issues are associated with overgrowth and then deceleration more than normal. This seems like a hyperexperimental version of it. Still interesting and good to see corroborating evidence, also useful as a model for therapies and other things.

I&#x27;ve been trying to tell everybody for decades that my problem is that my brain is too damn big, but they all laughed at me!

Also macrocephaly is significantly more common in autistic people than the general population (that is, macrocephaly is a head circumference at the 97th percentile or higher, but ~20% of autistic people have it).

Overgrowth is a normal process in the development of the fetal brain. It is followed by a reorganization, which means the pruning and migration of neurons to the right locations in the brain.

Paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;molecularautism.biomedcentral.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10.1186&#x2F;s13229-024-00602-8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;molecularautism.biomedcentral.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;10.1186&#x2F;s...</a>

New research? I remember years ago (2019-ish?) a young man in #aspergers asked how he can prune his neurons to cure his aspergers. (The residents however did not appreciate the suggestion that they needed curing.)

This is the best I could find of the actual paper<p><i>This research has a very small sample size</i> (n=31)<p>Also indicated by the scatter plots too.<p>From the research: “total of 10 toddlers with ASD and 6 controls ... In a 2021 batch, we measured BCOs from 10 ASD and 5 controls.“<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;380876463_Embryonic_origin_of_two_ASD_subtypes_of_social_symptom_severity_the_larger_the_brain_cortical_organoid_size_the_more_severe_the_social_symptoms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;380876463_Embryonic...</a>

So is it in some sense similar to having a brain tumour? Some part of the brain is growing too much and depriving others of space?

This is what I was thought in school 15 years ago. I suppose this stuff comes in and out of fashion

i&#x27;m not a biologist (and so maybe it&#x27;s table-stakes for modern biological research), but this idea of creating personalized in-vitro synthetic biological models to study disease process in individual living beings seems pretty cool to me!

Autism is a sensory processing disorder in which symptoms are triggered by your brain receiving too much stimulus.<p>That’s why autistic people like to do repetitive behaviors (it’s easy to predict the outcome), don’t like change, and so on. It’s why autistic people tend to be highly sensitive to certain senses (loud noises, bright lights, touch). And it’s why they struggle in social situations-there is too much complexity to process it and decide what to do.<p>The research about too large brain size and too many connections seems consistent with this, being a physical explanation for these effects.

This essentially can become a blood test for autism, or at least to identify babies at risk of autism, right?

I am instantly skeptical of any article that boils down to, &quot;here is one study that may point in one direction but is far from the final world on the matter.&quot; The comments are filled with anecdata that reeks of confirmation bias.<p>In other news, I have a big head and as a kid my older sister would bully me and call me &quot;King Tut.&quot; She would also mock me by pointing out my long eyelashes and say, &quot;You know, in ancient Egypt, long eyelashes were a sign of beauty in men.&quot; She was 10 or 11? Anyway, we&#x27;re close now. I just wanted to share what bullying is like in an extremely dorky family.

For those who&#x27;s instinctive approach to autism (or other flavors of significant neruodivergence) is to treat it as something that has inherent tradeoffs, or as something that &quot;obviously&quot; people would want to manage or choose to not have when given the option: I highly recommend this article [1] and the book written by the same author, to recontextualize autism (in specific) and neurodiversity (in general) not as things to be managed but as forms of diversity in the human expression to be wholly welcomed in wider society.<p>Put differently: Autism is not something to be managed away.<p>&gt; I don&#x27;t think anyone who was somehow given the choice of autism or no autism at birth would choose autism would they?<p>I test in the statistically-likely range for autism on multiple diagnostic tests, though I don&#x27;t carry a diagnosis from a psychiatric professional, so grain of salt, etc; but I find this kind of hypothetical offensive and degrading. It rings so much of how we approached queer identities throughout the years: blindly assuming that because wider society has difficulty interacting with autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people that THOSE PEOPLE would prefer to be like those more neurotypical members.<p>I like my brain. I don&#x27;t want it to change. I don&#x27;t want to be different. I don&#x27;t want to be treated as someone suffering some condition, or like there&#x27;s &quot;tradeoffs&quot; in my experience of the world that&#x27;re any more significant or worthy of commentary than anyone else&#x27;s experience of the world.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neuroqueer.com&#x2F;throw-away-the-masters-tools&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neuroqueer.com&#x2F;throw-away-the-masters-tools&#x2F;</a>

Wow so Brett was also autistic.

That damn food pyramid

makes sense why cutting back on carbs is relevant

Well, that explains my programming abilities then!

This is a phenomenal discovery and treatment could consist of both increasing the space for the brain or decreasing the mass of the brain.<p>Would be super cool if there could be found a way to enlarge the skull size during growth to have enough space for that special autism brains.

It’s a shame that some media still call this a disease where it is clearly not a disadvantage in some contexts for some instances. Where’s as the words disease doesn’t conjure up any impressions of upside.

Autism is a mental illness not a physical illness.

the positive correlation between vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy and autism has been known for quite some time. One more aspect of this correlation related to the original post:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;karger.com&#x2F;neo&#x2F;article&#x2F;113&#x2F;4&#x2F;305&#x2F;227927&#x2F;Vitamin-D-and-Its-Role-in-Neonatal-Hypoxic#" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;karger.com&#x2F;neo&#x2F;article&#x2F;113&#x2F;4&#x2F;305&#x2F;227927&#x2F;Vitamin-D-an...</a><p>&quot;the vitamin D-deficient infants have a greater brain mass than pups born to vitamin D-sufficient mothers, indicating impairment of appropriate neuronal pruning&quot;<p>&quot;deficiency early in pregnancy is more likely to affect brain structure during the period of organogenesis whereas the pruning of neuronal cells occurs later in gestation, so later deficiency would likely present with differences in brain size. &quot;<p>That also dovetails with that Sweden study that autism is more correlated with vitamin D deficiency in the 3rd trimester.