And with that, if possible at all, there is no single fix either.
Get fucked by an umbrella, RFK
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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Welcome to 2015. This is not new.
Sometimes it's worth having new studies that add confirmation and detail to conclusions people have already reached. This article does seem to be reporting on new research.
Been saying this for years, feels vindicating. I'm ADD and I've been wondering about the possibility of autism, every time I try to look into the symptoms it seems wildly varied, poorly defined and vastly misunderstood. At least with ADHD/ADD you can blame the blood ghosts and do a cocaine about it.
Technically, we do a meth about it! Cocaine does almost nothing for me since I've received a doctor-ordered double dose of meth daily since my diagnosis at 17. Damn the blood ghosts for cockblocking all the potential cocaine connections I've missed out on!
The only thing “technically meth” about Ritalin is that it has the word “methyl” in it. I know you are making a lighthearted joke but it’s still really harmful because a majority of the population still literally believe that the doctor wants to give their kid meth and then withhold critical treatment that people need.
Ritalin isn't methamphetamine, but Desoxyn is, and that's also used for ADHD.
It is extremely, extremely, extremely rare for someone to be prescribed Desoxyn in the modern age. Nobody you know with ADHD is taking that.
So if autism is a broader term that includes multiple conditions shouldn't we stop using it and start using the names of the actual conditions? Isn't it basically like hysteria which was split into epilepsy, dissociative disorders, personality disorders and so on?
Or we can take the process-based approach, where we stop caring about defining boxes perfectly and we start caring about patterns of thoughts and behaviors. This may sound woowoo or without empirical basis, but some of the most successful programs for verbal autism are based on these ideas, the AIM and PEAK programs.
When they're understood well enough to have individual names, yes.
In most cases the diagnosis is observational. Blood tests and brain scans aren't used for this kind of thing, although that could change someday.
IMO, as a 'high-functioning autist':
Yes.
The field of psychology is constantly redefining things based on ever shifting subjective analysis of behavioral patterns, and uh, being someone who very much prefers concrete, consistent, definable rules and categories, logically followable mechanistic processes...
Fucking yes, please, be more accurate and precise in a more objective way, based on far superior methodology, fucking please.
They do for many, but sometimes I think they don’t know exactly what or it could be multiple things which is why it’s the Autism Spectrum and it’s easier to say they are “on the spectrum” or “autistic” if you can’t pinpoint exactly what.
The analysis, published last week in the journal Nature, showed that children diagnosed before the age of 6 were more likely to have behavioral difficulties—such as problems with social interaction—from an early age. In contrast, those diagnosed after the age of 10 were more likely to experience social and behavioral difficulties during adolescence.
So if you have behavioral problems early, you're more likely to get diagnosed early, when you have behavioral difficulties later, you're more likely to get diagnosed later.
The phrasing here seems to want to imply a reverse causal relationship, but I'm pretty sure the conclusion here is that kids don't get tested for autism before they display autism-like behaviour.
As for the actual causes of autism, I recently read that the genetic and family is about 60-90% of the causes, making it by far the biggest cause, and not environmental factors like RFK likes to suggest. But it's not a single gene, it might be other stuff, and it's not an on/off thing but a big pile of factors that add up.
But there are also environmental factors that do have an impact. Not vaccines or Tylenol, but some kinds of pesticides, for example. Maybe that's something RFK could focus on.
Its more than a tautology, you are oversimplifying.
Or, well, as always with writings on or about science aimed at a general audience... the writers are oversimplifying, always read the paper.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09542-6
What they are describing is that those diagnosed early have a different behavioral psychological profile, different set of observed behaviors, than those diagnosed later.
They are saying that ASD has roughly two different sets of distinguishable behavioral profiles, and one of those sets is so obvious it tends to get diagnosed early, and another set is less obvious such that it tends to get diagnosed later.
While they seem hesitant to use the terminology of saying 'there may be two fairly distinct subtypes of autism', likely because they want to emphasize that more research needs to be done, they do not want to lead to people making rash and non nuanced conclusions... that basically is what they are saying, that there appear to be distinct genetic profiles that produce observably different 'kinds' of autism.
They ran a battery of statstical meta analysis on different genomes and behavioral profiles of Autists, and this chart I think summarizes it best:
(Those bars are 95% confidence intervals)
Two, fairly distinct behavioral/neurodevelopmental/phenotypical profiles, that also go along with two, fairly distinct underlying genomic profiles.
That is much clearer than the article puts it. Thank you.
Thank you for appreciating the summary! =D
Scientists concluded this in the 1990s, and then had to produce yet another study to unequivocally state it again after every time someone claimed to have found the “cause”.
This is part of the reason it was re-named ASD in the first place; it describes a set of atypical neurological development symptoms, not an identifiable state of being. Kind of like “cancer” describes an atypical cellular reproductive state, not a pathogen attacking your cells. Both can be caused by many different factors or combination of factors.
Of course, with ASD, it doesn’t even mean there’s anything particularly wrong most of the time; just atypical, resulting in a person whose thoughts are weighted differently than historically typical, with less interpretation of social cues and a greater ability to focus.
This seems similar to the phenomenon where antidepressants are only effective for about 15% of patients. The benefit is large for those who benefit. For the rest, they're no better than placebo, suggesting the drugs treat one of several causes for the syndrome known as depression.
Yeah but we're not allowed to talk about how that 85% has been prescribed stuff that doesn't help them, very often has negative, deleterious, harmful mental and physical sideeffects, oh and also often cause dependency/addiction.
Because then when you look at it that way, that would mean basically all currently active, prescribing pscyhiatrists would be open to malpractice lawsuits, and/or drugmakers would be open to gigantic class action lawsuits.
You know, like with opioid pain killers?
But uh nope, nope, that can't be allowed to be considered, so .... just don't talk about it.
Doctors are generally not subject to malpractice suits for engaging in what was believed to be the best practice at the time. That's how it should be, because that's how science works.
Knowing that antidepressants don't work for most people presents a difficult problem though. There is no test to determine whether they will work other than trying them for months. Never trying them would be unethical because they can be life saving and life changing for those who respond. Using them indiscriminately is also unethical because they have side effects and withdrawal symptoms.
I would at least appreciate it if doctors were permitted to jump ahead to the actually effective stuff (i.e. ketamine, psilocybin therapy) without having to force the patient through the gauntlet of ineffective drugs first. I believe it's insurance companies to blame for that one. They would rather not pay out for quarterly/yearly/one time ketamine treatments that actually work, because that means their money isn't flowing in the preferred direction. I guess they prefer us to die buying tainted drugs off the street.
Doctors are generally not subject to malpractice suits for engaging in what was believed to be the best practice at the time. That's how it should be, because that's how science works.
We electroshocked and then lobotomized the patient, they're basically a 4 year old now mentally, but thats all fine because the science at the time said so.
We smoked in our office consults with pregnant women, but thats all fine because science said so at the time.
... Uh, nah, no, at least from a morality perspective.
So, so much tangible quantifiable financial damage done to so many people by sideffects and then meds for those sideffects...
Legally, yeah, maybe not malpractice if ... thats the actual legal standard, maybe it falls on the drug mfgrs legally, but uh what ever happened to harm reduction, is it now maybe time to have some kind of actual reckoning with this as a field/industry?
To me, at this point, in the US, psychiatrists are basically very snobby and arrogant drug salesmen, who will confidently tell you they know what they're doing and then oops turns out they don't.
Your second paragraph illustrates this perfectly.
Don't even have a method of assessing how any of this should work.
Just no clue, none, might as well be popping random pills at a rave, nearly the same epistemic level of 'will this do what the person i got it from said it will', difference being stuff from a psych is very unlikely to be cut.
This is is mad scientist level shit.
15% chance it works, 85% chance it doesn't, you're all experimental test subjects actually who were not informed of that.
I dunno about you but I don't tend to trust people who tell me to do something and tell me its all very well understood, and then oh haha, no it isn't.
I had MDD for a while and my psychs ran me through an ever increasing gauntlet of drugs for it that justade everything worse and worse, to the point I now have them all listed as things I am allergic to, turns out I just needed less stress and pressurr in my life and to get away from my abusive family.
This should be a nationwide scandal.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db528.htm
Roughly 1 in 10 people in the US are on anti-depressants, ... and for 85% of them, that can basically only be neutral to harmful.
Maybe revoke all these things as approved treatments and move them back to the experimental trials phase, stop using about 30 million people as test subjects, and also lying about that?
None of those things are "fine". They just shouldn't result in penalties for individual doctors who were following established best practices.
The problem should be addressed at institutional and structural levels. Drug companies shouldn't be allowed to throw away 30 studies with inconclusive results and get approved based only on the two with positive results. Drugs that work by inducing a structural change like SSRIs shouldn't be approved for indefinite use, and if that evidence is found after their initial approval, the approval should be amended. Drug companies should never have been allowed to advertise that depression is a "chemical imbalance in the brain" which is corrected by their drugs when there was never evidence for that beyond the drugs having an effect.
Sure, ok, yeah, we need systemic change at a fundamental level, yep, totally agreed.
Anyway, do any psychiatrists have any morals?
Why do we even have medical ethicists when basically the entire system is fundamentally broken, the extent and details of this are well known to experts, but they just content themselves with 'doing their best', and require layman to investigate how full of shit all of this is?
How can you work in this field and sleep soundly at night at the same time?
Sorry, right, like, I'm an anarchist, the 'point' of a system is what it actually does, not what it claims to do or aspires to do.
Road to hell, good intentions, all that.
This is all provably ludicrous, and imo, the field should be on fire, revolting in droves at how fucked up this situation is and how they won't participate in a massively harmful and morally dubious system.
Otherwise, I guess the Hippocratic Oath isn't a thing for psychiatrists, this is just their day job.
with less interpretation of social cues and a greater ability to focus.
"ability to focus" is more accurately described as "tendency to focus". "ability to focus" connotes control over focus, which... from lived experience and what I've read, just isn't generally true. Autistic inertia – the inability to defocus and then focus on a new context – is very real. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder not just because of an ignorance of social cues but because of how rigid, inflexible patterns of behavior often interfere with daily life.
Autist here:
Yeah, describing it as simply 'greater' or 'lesser' ability to control or maintain focus is... well, too simplistic.
I can, when it comes to task, hyperfocus on something like writing a piece of complex code / software, try to solve a real world engineering problem, do a comprehensive data analysis of some topic, write a chapter of a novel... I can hyperfocus on that for a solid day or week or month, and I have to actively remind myself to do things like eat and sleep regularly, because I know I tend to get obsessively focused on 'the task'.
Shifting to another task, another very different ... realm of thinking, or way of thinking, is often very jarring and exhausting.
But on the flip side, when socializing, people tend to say I am scatter brained, overwhelming, because I just flow all the way through my entire chain of concept associations to end up with a resulting... thing I am trying to say.
Sort of like how modern agentic AI has an 'explain its thinking process' mode.
Thats just the default for me, its all an explicit, conscious train of thought.
For me, summarizing that chain of thought into just a resultant 'thing to say' is the difficult part, that I get worse at the more mentally exhausted I am.
Also, I would say most, not all, but most autists... its not that we are inattentive to or ignorant of social cues.
Its that neurotypicals tend to process social cues mostly subconsciously, whereas autists tend to process social cues mostly consciously...
... and that most neurotypicals actually all have widely variable, inconsistent and imprecise standards by which they judge and perform social cues, but most of them are unaware of this, to the point that they are overly confident that everyone has the same rubric and understanding of social cues as they do, when this very obviously is not the case.
So, this confuses/overwhelms many/most autists, because they are presented with an inconsistent and variable ruleset, and then also told that this ruleset is consistent and invariable.
Neurotypicals will often get angry/rude/frustrated/overwhelmed when you try to break this down and explain this to them, presumably because they largely are not aware of / do not have this explicit, conscious thought process, and tend to interperet being asked to formulate it in consistent, precise detail just as a rude, unreasonable thing to ask for.
Basically, imo, NTs use a fuzzy, fast, less accurate, mostly unconscious heuristic to evaluate and perform social cues, and they tend to be very confident they are doing this correctly...
... whereas Autists tend to logically and consciously go through an entire evaluation system, which is more robust and thorough in that its basically a discrete series of probabilistic associations, but this is all much slower, much more 'computationally costly' to perform.
So, when an Autist is oversocialized, under too much pressure to perform socially, they can get overwhelmed and then either basically shutdown or freak out.
This also works, imo, to explain why Autists tend to take longer to initially learn socialization cues and concepts... because they are having to build a much more conscious, step by step evaluation model of all possible micro/macro expressions, tonal shifts, inflexions, vocab choices, all possibly relevant context, etc, and this can often be much more difficult to establish when Neurotypicals are nearly entirely unaware of or dismissive of their own inconsistencies and variability when it comes to those things.
This also works to explain why Autists are often seen as overly straightforward or blunt: They're just telling you the result of their attempt to evaluate a social interaction.
And this also explains why almost no NT person I've ever met can accurately assess my emotional state / social interaction disposition, yet they almost all are very confident they can do so correctly and precisely.
EDIT
And I will here comment on the meta-irony of all of this, that ... any scientist could just ask a 'high-functioning' autist to explain how this works, and they could... you know, trust what a person says about how their own thought processes work?
But nope, nope, still we are pathologized as if we are strange, alien, confused and confusing others, not valid sources of information as to how our own minds work, when our whole 'problem' is that we are way too aware of how our minds work.
Why do you think PTSD coincides with the later Autism diagnosis group more strongly than the early diagnosis group?
Because we have been saying shit like this our whole lives, and broadly, nobody cares and just makes up whatever explanation or understanding they prefer, which is almost always significantly innacurate/incomplete, so we tend to live lives of constantly being slandered and mocked, rarely being respected as human beings with full agency.
Great so now I’ve been downing Tylenol for no reason?
FUCK!
It says no single thing, so you need to do multiple things, yeah? Get circumcized. 🤷♂️
Think you're safe as long as you don't also get a vaccine at the same time.
Here's the source instead of a paywalled news article https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-reveals-genetic-and-developmental-differences-in-people-with-earlier-versus-later-autism
Scientists from Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry found that children diagnosed as autistic earlier in life (typically before six years old) were more likely to show behavioural difficulties from early childhood, such as problems with social interaction.
However, those diagnosed with autism later on in life (in late childhood or beyond) were more likely to experience social and behavioural difficulties during adolescence.
I assume that the paper itself frames this a little differently, because what this is saying is trust there’s a correlation between when traits become noticeable and when people get a diagnosis. Which is what you’d expect. You don’t tend to diagnose people who don’t exhibit the traits required for diagnosis.
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.
Folic Acid has been taken by pregnant women for over 40 years. Folic --> folinic
... ok?
This paper is talking about using administered folinic acid to address a deficiency of folate transport within the brain, where that deficiency is caused by a known cluster of genetic mutations, in a person diagnosed with ASD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_folate_deficiency
This is not talking about causing autism via the mother taking something during pregnancy.
It is talking about how, for a subset of ASD people, who have this particular cluster of genetic mutations, that taking folinic acid can alleviate some of the symptoms associated with folate deficiency.
Nothing to do with folic or folinic acid taken by the mother during pregnancy causing autism.
Its talking about a potential subset of autism being potentially treateable, that subset being broadly in line with what the OP Nature article/paper here describes as 'early diagnosis autism', which has much more readily apparent and obviously recognizable behavior patterns than 'late diagnosis autism'.
If you go into that paper, you will indeed see that they found that amongst people with ASD, but without the associated folate disorder connected mutations, giving them folinic acid doesn't really make any noticeable difference...
... which arguably lends creedence to the idea that there are at least two different 'kinds' of actual things going on that, which are currently all being lumped together as ASD.
But chief US stientists have discovered that it's all caused by Tylenol!
That's not true. RFK Jr recently said it was from circumcisions.
If you take tylonol for the soreness after being circumcised you are 100% going to catch the autism.
If you’re smart, you’ll buy Tylenol stock and bank on the rebound.
It’s multiple conditions we group together naively based on surface level symptoms. Same for many disorders.
The type that comes with gender and sexual fluidity, bendyness, ADHD = rccx caused ASD.
Then that will have multiple subtypes based on mutation combination within the rccx module.
(The RCCX module would’ve been excluded from the genetic analysis the report this article is based on - due to its complexity).
Severe/non-verbal ASD is more likely completely unrelated and caused by dendritic abnormalities (reduced or excessive branching, immature spines, disrupted morphology, etc)
You seem to have a more in depth grasp of the precise genetics involved here than I do, what would your opinion be of Dr. Frye's concept of "Cerebral Folate Disorder" that I mention in another comment?
Here's a paper from him and his team, he has many though:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5794882/
As best I can tell, he is focused on the non-syndromic, non-verbal, uh, what this recent paper OP is about seems to categorize as 'early diagnosis autism'.
He's got a cluster of specific mutations that produce an evidenced, differing neurochemistry in the brain, and apparently a potential treatment for that 'subypr/component' as well?
I... don't agree with his general description of autism as basically only the kind that makes you developmentally delayed, but, if you can get past that... do you think he may be onto something as far as that being an distinct 'type' of autism?
Also, apologies if I am using some terms incorrectly or innacurately, I am not a neuroscientist.
I thought we already knew, it's a spectrum
The 'spectrum' terminology comes about from the field of peychology only being able to attempt to analyze ... basically, 'symptoms', behavioral profiles, phenotypes, and also the field of psychology constantly changing how it does those analyses as well as categorize observable behaviors into conditions/disorders.
What this new understsnding is pointing toward is that there is an actual, identifiable, genomic variance of mutation clusters that actually explains how differences in that spectrum of 'symptoms' actually work, what actually causes which ones.
A spectrum suggests varying degrees of a single condition, and would be compatible with both the hypothesis that all occurrences of this condition share a cause and the hypothesis of multiple causes. So to claim there are multiple causes is different from saying that cases fall on a spectrum. It tells you that multiple conditions can appear the same way, so they get diagnostically grouped together based on symptoms even though the underlying causes, and so the appropriate treatments, can be quite different.
But now it's a conclusion and presumably a publication that can be referred to.
In other news: scientists reconfirmed the wheel to be round.