Gut microbiota markers for autism spectrum disorder

There's so much talk of replenishing gut biota, of changing its composition, but I still don't have a mental image of how easy and how fast that can be done. Is it a matter of days? weeks? more?

My wife is an educational therapist. Helps kids with autism/add/dyslexia/other. She told me it's a thing now to get autistic kids off gluten, sugar, and milk. She said it helps to reduce/isolate triggers, and as a behaviour resurfaces you can start addressing them one by one.

“From this metagenomic information, the researchers developed a 31-marker microbial panel. Using a machine learning model, they tested the panel. They found that it accurately predicted ASD diagnosis across different ages, sexes, populations, and geographical locations, much better than using a single species of microorganism, such as bacteria.”

From the abstract: “Machine learning using single-kingdom panels showed area under the curve (AUC) of 0.68 to 0.87 in differentiating children with ASD from those that are neurotypical. A panel of 31 multikingdom and functional markers showed a superior diagnostic accuracy with an AUC of 0.91, with comparable performance for males and females. Accuracy of the model was predominantly driven by the biosynthesis pathways of ubiquinol-7 or thiamine diphosphate, which were less abundant in children with ASD. Collectively, our findings highlight the potential application of multikingdom and functional gut microbiota markers as non-invasive diagnostic tools in ASD.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01739-1

Weren't a lot of ASD <=> Gut hypotheses very closely knit with Wakefield's MMR vax-equals-autism scare? Still, looks promising.

The fascinating bit is "Accuracy of the model was predominantly driven by the biosynthesis pathways of ubiquinol-7 or thiamine diphosphate, which were less abundant in children with ASD"

That gives us something interesting to work with.

i wonder if they controlled for the selective diets asd children have?

Why is it being viewed as a medical condition? As something to be "cured"?

Is it just me or has there been an article trying to deduce the cause of Autism at least once a week for a while now?

new autism cure: yakult

Wasn't this previously attributed to lifestyle differences in another study?

Correlation or causation: sensory issues leading to food preferences and therefore different biome?

Any hope for a “cure”? Autism might be a superpower for a tech career, but it’s debilitating in every other way. I’d love to get rid of it from my self as soon as possible, even if it means losing the ability to make the $$$ that all other spergy techbros use to protect themselves.

It is pretty fascinating the more we find out about out gut biome and how it affects us.

I can't read the full paper and the article also does not have this information but I have a few questions.

I am curious more about the sample size, all we know is that 1627 Children were studied, but what was the breakdown of neurotypical and Children with ASD. The only percent given is female (which seems odd that in the abstract that that is the percent they chose to give).

I am also curious about the diversity of the children studied. From a culture, income, etc. All things that would impact their diets and possibly the biome.

Finally, "considered neurotypical", does that imply that they were actually tested or that they are assumed neurotypical?

Just some questions I don't see answered that jump out to me as big questions that I wish this article brought up.