It is important that they tell you what you have, but also when they tell you. One in 100 people born with some type of autistic spectrum disorder. Not being a disease, but a condition, with different intensities and manifestations ,. It can be detected from the year and a half of life, but the average age to which it is diagnosed in Spain is five and a half years. There are even many people who discover it in adulthood. In part because its diagnosis has an observational base and there are different degrees. Perhaps your environment is less attentive, you may learn to hide it, or it may be a very mild disorder that goes unnoticed. But also, and this is a novelty, because there are genetic differences.
Directed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, it has discovered that autism diagnosed in early childhood has a genetic and development profile different from autism diagnosed from late childhood. These findings question the belief that autism is a single condition with a unified underlying cause. The study, published Wednesday by the scientific journal Natureanalyzed behavioral data during childhood and adolescence in the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as genetic data of more than 45,000 autistic people of various large cohorts in Europe and the United States.
He identified different genetic patterns between those diagnosed in early childhood and those diagnosed later. He found that these patterns could be hereditary. That is, the children would not only inherit from their parents the disorder, but an approximate age in which it manifests.
“The truth is that we did not expect such wide genetic variation between the profiles stratified by age at the time of diagnosis,” he explains in an exchange of messages, neurologist at the University of Cambridge and main author of the study.
In this way they were able to verify not especially surprising details, such as that children diagnosed before the age of six were more likely to show behavioral difficulties from early childhood. But also some less expected. Late diagnostic autism is usually accompanied by other mental health problems, such as depression. In fact, its average genetic profile is closer to that of ADHD, to the depressive or affected by posttraumatic stress disorder than to the autism diagnosed in early childhood.
“The article, the result of a powerful international collaboration, demonstrates that autism is not a unitary condition,” Uta Fith summarizes the University College London. “It makes it clear that children diagnosed early and those diagnosed later constitute two very different subgroups,” adds this expert in developmental disorders in statements to the SMC specialized portal. Fith concludes that the results of this study must influence the current public debate, propitiated by decisions such as that they link autism to a cause, paracetamol, without sufficient scientific evidence: “It is time to recognize that autism has become a drawer of tailor of different conditions. If there is talk of an ‘autism epidemic’, a ’cause of autism’ or a ‘treatment for autism’, the immediate question must be: the immediate question must be: the immediate question must be: What kind of autism do we talk about?
Warrier underlines the multifactorial condition of autism and mental health problems that usually come with him: “We believe that it is due to a complex correlation between genes and the environment.” “Poor support, social isolation, etc., are factors that can influence,” he adds. This would also explain why some cases are diagnosed later. There are children with ASD whose symptoms are more subtle. But as they grow, environmental factors can alter their clinical characteristics, which finally leads them to receive a diagnosis in the latest stages of life.
“With this type of studies it is very difficult to demonstrate causality, since they are based solely on correlations without subsequent validation,” Raúl Menéndez, biochemist from the IRB Barcelona Biomedical Research Institute, explains in an exchange of messages. Menéndez captained recently that he discovered the genetic mechanism that could explain a high percentage of autistic spectrum disorders. “Our approach was much more mechanistic,” he explains. “This is a bioinformatic analysis, focused on the association of gene variants with severity and diagnostic age.”
Autism is a general term that covers many differences within neurodevelopmental disorder, but the clear ways of distinguishing these differences remain limited. There are social factors that can influence their detection age. For example, different experts have been pointing out how autism is usually infradiagnose in women. A study published in the scientific journal , He assured that men are approximately three times more likely than women to receive a diagnosis of autism. The characteristics of autism are the same for boys and girls, but external manifestation is different. They learn to. Their difficulties go unnoticed, which causes diagnoses to be late.
Although social factors such as age at the time of diagnosis have been linked, the role of genetics has not been thoroughly studied. This study is one of the first to do so, according to its authors. The common genetic variants would explain about 11% of the variation in age at the time of autism diagnosis, which is not a very high figure. “It’s true,” says Warrier. “But it is similar or superior to most other factors that we have evaluated: concurrent language delays, intellectual disability, sex, socioeconomic status of parents, deprivations of the environment. On average, none of the variables analyzed represents more than 10%.”
Autism diagnoses have been going up for years. , observed an increase in the incidence of diagnosis of 0.07% to 0.23% between 2009 and 2017. That is, more than triple new cases per year. This does not necessarily mean that the cases are increasing, only that they are detected more thanks to greater awareness. Many of these new cases are diagnosed. The diagnostic rates of autism among adults from 26 to 34 years in the last decade. Understanding the reasons for this increase and differentiate between the different autisms that occur within the spectrum is one of the challenges facing scientists. To put solutions to this disorder and, which links this disorder with vaccines or the consumption of Tylenol (paracetamol) during pregnancy without a solid base.
The findings of this study suggest that autism diagnosed at different ages can reflect different development trajectories and provides a clearer way to understand the variation within this condition. These findings could guide future research and support strategies. Perhaps in the future let’s not talk about autism, but of autisms. The authors conclude that more research on genetic diversity is needed to understand it.
