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by erikgaas 2506 days ago
I took a neuroscience course back in the day that discussed findings related to autism. I don't remember everything, but there was a discussion on excess dopamine early in the brain and a later depression of glutamate levels. All in all this would lead to more sparsity of neural activations in the brain. This made sense. Too much dopamine would lead to excess plasticity, causing a normal amount of glutamate to have too great of an effect, so the brain compensates by producing less glutamate, producing the same amount of neural activations but now sparsely spread out in a post-plastic brain. From my naive common sense perspective, it would make sense that an autism prevention would be some mechanism to limit plasticity during development. I'm really stretching argument here, but maybe this has some connection to autism brains "kicking in" early.

The connection to estrogen is an interesting one. Estrogen does have an important effect on neurotransmitter receptors, including dopaminergic, but my speculation is worthless here. Is there anyone here that has a better understanding of this that can provide some clarity?
1 comments
AstralStorm 2506 days ago
You're building a theoretical treatment based on a theory you have not validated. (I'm not aware of any reasonable validation in e.g. a model organism at least.)

So, go back, and first check or devise a model. Model organism for autism is a very hard problem.

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therealx 2506 days ago
He said his comment is worthless (in a truly medical way), so I don't see the point in your comment.

Fwiw I found his comment to be interesting conjecture. I too have many dopamine related issues and until we have a better true understanding, all we can do is hypothesize and guess based on the small bits we do know.

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im3w1l 2506 days ago
I guess this is "how it's done". But why should it be? As long as all the hypotheses he states can be directly measured in humans that should be enough.

Treating humans as black boxes isn't necessary anymore. We have very good measuring tools now. I believe we can make much faster progress if we just look inside and use logic inference.

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