The analysis, published last week in the journal Nature, showed that children diagnosed before the age of 6 were more likely to have behavioral difficulties—such as problems with social interaction—from an early age. In contrast, those diagnosed after the age of 10 were more likely to experience social and behavioral difficulties during adolescence.
So if you have behavioral problems early, you’re more likely to get diagnosed early, when you have behavioral difficulties later, you’re more likely to get diagnosed later.
The phrasing here seems to want to imply a reverse causal relationship, but I’m pretty sure the conclusion here is that kids don’t get tested for autism before they display autism-like behaviour.
As for the actual causes of autism, I recently read that the genetic and family is about 60-90% of the causes, making it by far the biggest cause, and not environmental factors like RFK likes to suggest. But it’s not a single gene, it might be other stuff, and it’s not an on/off thing but a big pile of factors that add up.
But there are also environmental factors that do have an impact. Not vaccines or Tylenol, but some kinds of pesticides, for example. Maybe that’s something RFK could focus on.
What they are describing is that those diagnosed early have a different behavioral psychological profile, different set of observed behaviors, than those diagnosed later.
They are saying that ASD has roughly two different sets of distinguishable behavioral profiles, and one of those sets is so obvious it tends to get diagnosed early, and another set is less obvious such that it tends to get diagnosed later.
While they seem hesitant to use the terminology of saying ‘there may be two fairly distinct subtypes of autism’, likely because they want to emphasize that more research needs to be done, they do not want to lead to people making rash and non nuanced conclusions… that basically is what they are saying, that there appear to be distinct genetic profiles that produce observably different ‘kinds’ of autism.
They ran a battery of statstical meta analysis on different genomes and behavioral profiles of Autists, and this chart I think summarizes it best:
(Those bars are 95% confidence intervals)
Two, fairly distinct behavioral/neurodevelopmental/phenotypical profiles, that also go along with two, fairly distinct underlying genomic profiles.
So if you have behavioral problems early, you’re more likely to get diagnosed early, when you have behavioral difficulties later, you’re more likely to get diagnosed later.
The phrasing here seems to want to imply a reverse causal relationship, but I’m pretty sure the conclusion here is that kids don’t get tested for autism before they display autism-like behaviour.
As for the actual causes of autism, I recently read that the genetic and family is about 60-90% of the causes, making it by far the biggest cause, and not environmental factors like RFK likes to suggest. But it’s not a single gene, it might be other stuff, and it’s not an on/off thing but a big pile of factors that add up.
But there are also environmental factors that do have an impact. Not vaccines or Tylenol, but some kinds of pesticides, for example. Maybe that’s something RFK could focus on.
Its more than a tautology, you are oversimplifying.
Or, well, as always with writings on or about science aimed at a general audience… the writers are oversimplifying, always read the paper.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09542-6
What they are describing is that those diagnosed early have a different behavioral psychological profile, different set of observed behaviors, than those diagnosed later.
They are saying that ASD has roughly two different sets of distinguishable behavioral profiles, and one of those sets is so obvious it tends to get diagnosed early, and another set is less obvious such that it tends to get diagnosed later.
While they seem hesitant to use the terminology of saying ‘there may be two fairly distinct subtypes of autism’, likely because they want to emphasize that more research needs to be done, they do not want to lead to people making rash and non nuanced conclusions… that basically is what they are saying, that there appear to be distinct genetic profiles that produce observably different ‘kinds’ of autism.
They ran a battery of statstical meta analysis on different genomes and behavioral profiles of Autists, and this chart I think summarizes it best:
(Those bars are 95% confidence intervals)
Two, fairly distinct behavioral/neurodevelopmental/phenotypical profiles, that also go along with two, fairly distinct underlying genomic profiles.
That is much clearer than the article puts it. Thank you.
Thank you for appreciating the summary! =D