[crisply5706]

My theory is that this causation is flipped. Something about whatever the precursor to autism is causes the body to experience more physical failures or malformed structures.

Something like whatever mechanisms decode structure from the genome are faulty and produce slightly wrong structures throughout the brain and body.

Anecdotally, I see a higher rate of general illness and physical birth defects in autistic people.

[notamy]

There’s a correlation between autism and mitochondrial dysfunction:

https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2010136

> Most ASD/MD cases (79%) were not associated with genetic abnormalities, raising the possibility of secondary mitochondrial dysfunction. Treatment studies for ASD/MD were limited, although improvements were noted in some studies with carnitine, co-enzyme Q10 and B-vitamins. Many studies suffered from limitations, including small sample sizes, referral or publication biases, and variability in protocols for selecting children for MD workup, collecting mitochondrial biomarkers and defining MD. Overall, this evidence supports the notion that mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with ASD. Additional studies are needed to further define the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in ASD.

[empressplay]

There appears to be some correlation between Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and autism

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7711487/

It makes a certain amount of sense that a collagen / connective tissue disorder is going to have wide-ranging effects, including the nervous system

[ejstronge]

Another way to think of this is that 'autism' is a broad series of disorders where individuals do not follow the social-relational cues we expect. There are many ways to violate unspoken social expectations, so there should be many ways to be autistic.

In this setting, it's not unreasonable that any genetic syndrome would be more associated with autism; indeed, it's more interesting to find lesions that have a lower proportion of autistic carriers compared to the general population.

[crisply5706]

Yeah, I suspect it's quite likely that autism is correlated with/caused by genetic disorders in general, rather than being its own thing that just happens to be comorbid with a suspicious number of other disorders.

There's too many correlations that aren't common enough, I really think we've got the causality backwards. But then again I don't know anything

[b800h]

Wow, I'm hypermobile and my sons have what appears to be mild autism (see my other comment above). Yet more to unpick!

[b800h]

FWIW, I have identical twin sons who probably have mild autism. One had an umbilical hernia like the lad in the story. They both had a couple of other small developmental anomalies. But they were both slightly premature (like most twins) and shared a womb. So what's the driver here? One of the above, or possibly the hormones which they were (incorrectly) given to promote lung function? There's a lot to unpick.