[thornjm]

I have no evidence to support this, but to me, autism seems like a poor label for a broad and diverse set of traits we don’t fully understand.

Over time I think the number of things autism describes will shrink and eventually the term will disappear as we correctly understand all the underlying conditions / factors.

[Gibbon1]

I get barked at for this but autism isn't a disease it's label.

The reason I believe that is my brother and his friends who all have a couple of mild to bad cognitive issues. Thing is they have different set of issues. And over time the severity of those issues has lessened as they learn to compensate.

My working theory is different parts of the brain are primed developmentally to handle certain cognitive tasks. If something goes sideways then you get a deficit. It's harder for the person to learn or perform that task. You get delays and impairments. Some of those can cause socialization issues. Others don't, like dyslexia.

What's the underlying cause, huge numbers of things probably.

[bluSCALE4]

You're right in that it's not a disease but it's also not a label. It's an identity. You can stop being poor, but you can't stop being black. Just like you can learn to compensate if you are autistic but never stop being autistic. I mean, there are documented shifts to becoming nuero-typical but of the few I'd read about, the change was bitter sweet.

[Cthulhu_]

This is why the autism "treatments" are so dangerous; they cause serious mental damage, not to treat or "cure" autism, but to force people to mask it, to pretend they're neurotypical. At least these treatments are being banned left and right.

(brainfart, I can't think of the name of these treatments atm)

Anyway, autistic people tend to have to learn how they're expected to behave, it costs them energy and analytical capacity, etc. In general they learn to manage, and you probably won't be able to tell someone is on the spectrum at first glance. This is especially true in women with ASD, who grow up with higher societal expectations. Same with ADHD really.

[hyperman1]

Isn’t this basically the meaning of the word ’syndrom’? There exist symptomps, which are standardized descriptions for biological issues. Then there are syndroms, which describe common collections of symptomps. Asperger syndrom basically means Asperger noticed a cluster of symptomps recurring together, and they looked a bit like a lighter variant of Autism. If we were sure they are always to be treated, and we had an orgaized idea about how, it would be a disease and not a syndrom.

[h0l0cube]

The modern understanding of ASD is that it's a cluster of traits, and generalized into the broader autism phenotype. I think this paper is taking some of those traits and understanding the selection mechanisms that increase their prevalence, and also builds upon earlier work suggesting that ASD could be caused by the amplification of typically attractive and useful traits by sexual selection.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23713510/

[dd36]

I have a hypothesis: autism prevalence is up because of the “back to sleep” campaign, which babies hate because it massively decreases sleep quality. This reduced sleep quality adversely affects brain development.

[h0l0cube]

I didn't know prevalence to be up, or that an increase in prevalence could be easily disentangled from better diagnosis due to increased awareness of autism. Do you have data on this increase?

[WhyNotHugo]

One of my therapists at one point described how the mental health community wanted to move away from labelling people into boxes (especially for Autism and ADHD).

They're a series of traits which people can have at in different quantities individually.

One of the challenges seems to be that health insurances work expecting a concrete diagnose, and this labelling satisfies this need.

[vermilingua]

That’s virtually what the article suggests.

[eyelidlessness]

That seems like an odd response to an article identifying a clear set of commonalities across the ASD spectrum.