Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.
Today's article is actually a set of articles, detailing different findings about the autistic brain from studying brain tissue samples. Theories of the past about autism have focused rather intently on genetics, with hopes that if we could just figure out which genes are associated with autism, we could figure out how autism works.
Those theories have borne no fruit. There are apparently hundreds of genes associated with autism, and those genes are not shared overall. Furthermore, genetics itself is a far more complicated matter than simply "this gene means brown eyes, that one means blue eyes."
If genetics is the "nature," epigenetics is the "nurture": what kind of environment you live in may turn genes on and off. Your genetics may predispose you to have depression, but if you grow up in a stable, loving environment with plenty of movement and good nutrition, and suffer very little by way of trauma, that gene may never activate and you may never need anti-depressants.
Instead, it seems the key to autism may be in neurology: differences in the connections between parts of the brain, number of neurons, and other brain structures. These features can vary quite widely, which goes a long way to explaining why autistic people ourselves vary so widely.
(Pst! If you like seeing the latest autism-relevant research, visit my Twitter, which has links and brief comments on studies that were interesting, but didn't get a whole Reading the Research article about them.)
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