Thursday, July 18, 2013
Antibodies and autism
The report studied the possibility that there might be maternal antibodies to brain proteins in the developing baby. (Followed from SciTechDaily) I'm not familiar enough with the methods to decide if their approach is solid, but they do find indications that mothers with certain antibodies mostly have an autistic child. At this point there's not enough known to decide if the antibody reaction causes problems or merely indicates them, nor is this a source of all kinds of autism, but it looks like another part of the puzzle.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hard to see how that would be any kind of adaptive over time. It suggests that the current constellation we call autism is a fairly recent development. Other similar conditions could have cropped up throughout history, certainly. Newton looks as if he had some of the features.
And Wycliffe.
The problem is that the simple and the fools didn't get that much attention, and so I (at least) have no sense of how prevalent autism might have been in the past.
When you have clear-cut roles (your father was a miller, and so are you; being reliable matters more than being a lively conversationalist), mild autism may not have mattered so much.
Post a Comment