News

Copy pasting some sections of my own comments from similar discussions over the last month or so:

IRT Folinic Acid as a 'treatment' for Autism:

...there are early preliminary studies indicating that this may be a way of alliviating some of the effecfs of non-syndromic ASD.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5794882/

Non-syndromic ASD is essentially nonverbal, nonresponsive ASD.

… There are many autistic people and kids who are not non-syndromic, an ASD diagnosis does not even require this kind of behavior.

Further, the proposed mechanism of action in using folinic acid to ‘treat’ autism is that it acts upon an abnormal level of folate blockers…

While it is true that ASD folks tend to have more of these folate blockers than non ASD folks…

Many of them do not.

Generally speaking, abnormal folate pathways… appear to be called Cerebral Folate Disorder (CFD) by this Dr. Frye who seems to be spearheading this line of research.

So... this would arguably be an identifiable subtype or subcomponent of ASD, that has an actual, physically identifiable (and seemingly potentially treatable) aspect to it, caused by a known cluster of genetic mutations, which themselves cause... basically, your neural pathways in your brain to just literally be different from those without the genetic mutation cluster.

Of course, epigenetics, to what extent and under what conditions genes actually express themselves is a complicating factor here.

Nurture can change how your Nature works, at a fundamental level.

More general commentary on the idea of Autism subtypes/conponents:

There is an emerging, but far from totally agreed on and fully explained… view, that, well, autistic brains, or at least certain potential subclasses of autistic brains… actually do have physically distinct brain chemistry and activity patterns than non autistic brains.

Basically, more and more actual genes and gene clusters are being identified, and at least some of those are being found to alter brain neurochemistry in measurable and mechanistically understood ways that nobody seems to have even known were possible before.

There could possibly thus be a propsensity toward an actually physically different reaction to many kinds of drugs from at least some autists.

But this is also fairly confusing because what is … currently being called ‘Autism Spectrum Disorder’ via psychological diagnosis… well, some autistic people have some of these mutations, some have all of them, some have none.

So… its far from fully understood, but it may be the case that in 5 or 10 years, Autism ends up being actually subclassed partially based on genetics and epigenetics, beyond just based on a description of behavioral patterns.