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Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

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Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#181

Post by burnte »

djhope99 wrote: post #176
burnte wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's genetics, but then there's gene expression which is affected by the world, so they clearly grew differently.

Thank you this is helpful. The genetic part makes sense to me, my wife has PCOS and they have a history of ovarian problems in their family. There are studies linking PCOS and autism and to high levels of testosterone. The mystery to me was why they are so different.

Yep, for decades thought genes were everything, then we started to realize epigenetics and proteomics are even more important. DNA is the code, and as we all know code can run differently in different environments.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#182

Post by wizzwizz4 »

djhope99 wrote: post #176
burnte wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's genetics, but then there's gene expression which is affected by the world, so they clearly grew differently.

Thank you this is helpful. The genetic part makes sense to me, my wife has PCOS and they have a history of ovarian problems in their family. There are studies linking PCOS and autism and to high levels of testosterone. The mystery to me was why they are so different.

Those studies were designed to confirm Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen's "extreme male brain" theory (which, by the way, is a crock of shit). High androgen levels and high oestrogen levels are associated with autism (ref: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-019-0454-9) and there's no reason to believe the arrow of causality points in any particular direction.

I recommend you not focus overmuch on why your kids are autistic. (The most likely reason is that one or both of the biological parents are autistic.) Disabilities are contextual, and autism can be a significant disability if you want to "live a normal life", so the best approach is not to impose arbitrary constraints and unrealistic expectations on them. (And really, who wants to keep up with the Joneses, anyway? https://xkcd.com/308/)

If you're interested in the topic generally, by all means learn about it, but none of this will help your daughters. There's no way to "cure" autism, because there's nothing to cure: it's just a way to describe a way that some people are. (Though some associated conditions, such as difficulty focusing can be treated with medication (I'd recommend not putting kids on ADHD drugs, because it's hard to distinguish between a genuine problem with cognition and mere excitable boredom from the outside.), others (e.g. hypermobility, coordination issues) can be mitigated with physiotherapy, and yet others (e.g. social anxiety, miscalibrated hunger / thirst detectors) can be alleviated with explanation, strategies, and practice.)

A good part of the differences in "severity" of their "autism symptoms" will be the extent to which they grok the things in question. For example, if you're not interested in verbal communication, you're not going to study it intensely to pick up on how other people instinctively behave, so you won't learn to imitate it. No amount of wanting what verbal communication can get you will give you the intrinsic motivation you need for (years of) extended, generalisable study – at least, not unless you happen to be good at long-chain motivation. If, however, there's a fun game you like, and playing that game involves developing proficiency in the (inherently boring) skill… well, there's a reason so many kids learn English by playing competitive video games.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#183

Post by djhope99 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #182
djhope99 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you this is helpful. The genetic part makes sense to me, my wife has PCOS and they have a history of ovarian problems in their family. There are studies linking PCOS and autism and to high levels of testosterone. The mystery to me was why they are so different.

Those studies were designed to confirm Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen's "extreme male brain" theory (which, by the way, is a crock of shit). High androgen levels and high oestrogen levels are associated with autism (ref: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-019-0454-9 ) and there's no reason to believe the arrow of causality points in any particular direction. I recommend you not focus overmuch on why your kids are autist…

Thanks for taking the time to write this. I appreciate it, I read it to my wife and she agrees we should stop thinking about the why.

It’s not so much that we want them to be normal or are particularly worried about that, we are very anxious though about what happens to them when we die and what abuse they might face.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#184

Post by mkoubaa »

nradov wrote: post #59
mkoubaa wrote: post #28

Wasn't there a theory that autism was affected by ultrasounds during pregnancy?

There was never such a theory . At one point a few researchers had a hypothesis that fetal ultrasounds might cause autism, however multiple studies have failed to turn up any causative relationship. https://doi.org/10.1111/ppe.12998

Thank you for the clarification!

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#185

Post by resoluteteeth »

djhope99 wrote: post #159

My 8 yr old identical twin daughter’s have severe autism but one is definitely worse than the other, one of them can use some words but the other is completely unable to communicate. I have absolutely no explanation for this, I cannot think of anything different that happened to them. They didn’t have antibiotics or surgery at a young age like in this story either.

One theory about autism is that it's caused by some sort of problem in synaptic pruning early in development. I don't think there's actually that much evidence for this theory, but if it is in fact caused by something like that, there could perhaps be a high degree of randomness in terms of how it affects different areas of the brain.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#186

Post by mkoubaa »

reilly3000 wrote: post #164
mkoubaa wrote: post #28

Wasn't there a theory that autism was affected by ultrasounds during pregnancy?

It’s strongly correlated with genetics down to a handful of SNPs. There is also a lot of evidence to suggest physiological differences in amygdala mass as well as hormone production. No exterior factor has been proven. No scapegoat is needed either, autists tend to like who they are and have unique and important value.

I don't intend to scapegoat. I'm on the spectrum and I'm grateful for who I am

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#187

Post by crisply5706 »

ejstronge wrote: post #58
empressplay wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There appears to be some correlation between Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and autism https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7711487/ It makes a certain amount of sense that a collagen / connective tissue disorder is going to have wide-ranging effects, including the nervous system

Another way to think of this is that 'autism' is a broad series of disorders where individuals do not follow the social-relational cues we expect. There are many ways to violate unspoken social expectations, so there should be many ways to be autistic. In this setting, it's not unreasonable that any genetic syndrome would be more associated with autism; indeed, it's more interesting to find lesions that have a lower…

Yeah, I suspect it's quite likely that autism is correlated with/caused by genetic disorders in general, rather than being its own thing that just happens to be comorbid with a suspicious number of other disorders.

There's too many correlations that aren't common enough, I really think we've got the causality backwards. But then again I don't know anything

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#188

Post by adolph »

verall wrote: post #150
adolph wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that include mouth/teeth/saliva as part of the extended gut or are you talking stomach down?

All of them and also seed oils. (I hope noone is taking this seriously..)

Would you also accept the nose-ear-throat-trachea-lung microbiome as well?

Also nose biome interacts with the finger and fingernail biome quite often.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#189

Post by Anotheroneagain »

genericresponse wrote: post #168
ChiperSoft wrote: post #162

This article annoys me to all ends. It started out badly by referring to autism as a disability, but it got worse in the fact that they’re assuming all of John’s symptoms are because he’s autistic. All of his disabilities can much easier be ascribed to brain damage post-partum. That hole in his heart meant he was getting less blood flow and less oxygen at a critical time in his brain development. The fact that both t…

Definitionally, at least in the US, Autism is a disability. It's a qualifier for the Americans with Disabilities Act. The specific definition: "A disability is a physical or mental impairment that makes it harder for a person to perform certain activities or interact with the world around them." For many ASD makes it harder to interact with the world around them, whether that's overstimulation, communication challeng…

>For many ASD makes it harder to interact with the world around them, whether that's overstimulation, communication challenges, or something else.

No it doesn't. They get frustrated by the other's inability to do so. They need to live in a society, and instead are surrounded by individuals who hardly interact, and hardly any culture, as everything has degraded to what the brain damaged majority can deal with. The music has simplified to a simple beat, the movies have simplified to beasts screaming half sentences at each other, and beating each other up, or, whatever.

Re: Identical twins both grew up with autism, but took different paths

#190

Post by GoblinSlayer »

genericresponse wrote: post #168
ChiperSoft wrote: post #162

This article annoys me to all ends. It started out badly by referring to autism as a disability, but it got worse in the fact that they’re assuming all of John’s symptoms are because he’s autistic. All of his disabilities can much easier be ascribed to brain damage post-partum. That hole in his heart meant he was getting less blood flow and less oxygen at a critical time in his brain development. The fact that both t…

Definitionally, at least in the US, Autism is a disability. It's a qualifier for the Americans with Disabilities Act. The specific definition: "A disability is a physical or mental impairment that makes it harder for a person to perform certain activities or interact with the world around them." For many ASD makes it harder to interact with the world around them, whether that's overstimulation, communication challeng…

One needs to be all but infallible to not match that definition, but normies are far from infallibility, they have difficulty with responsibility, technology, monopolies, network effect, propaganda, peer pressure, i.e. they can't interact quite well with either world or society.
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