First evidence of immune response targeting brain cells in autism

Preliminary but interesting. Autism has been researched far more than ME and somehow this had been missed entirely. I would really like to see research done on post-mortem ME brains and spinal cords. This is the reason the researchers named this disease and there doesn't seem to have been any attempts made since.

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/origin-story

 

What did these people die of?

 

Wouldn't you expect living autistic people to then show immune abnormalities in the blood?

 

Out of my league but it looks like this is happening on the wrong side of the blood-brain barrier. We kinda have the same problem of not being able to peer into the central nervous system in live subjects and likely there are other immune abnormalities but they are not clear enough yet to form the basis of a test.

Bit weird that those blisters are considered typical of autoimmune diseases yet were entirely missed until now. Maybe all this past behavioral nonsense and ridiculous psychosocial theories like bad parenting or immaturity had a negative impact on autism research as well, discouraging hypothesis-building exploratory research because of false assumptions. We certainly know all about how that happens.

 

The psychologization that ME/CFS has faced is not unusual. It is a recurring problem in medicine that affects many health problems. The keep trying to explain and solve health problems by paying a lot of attention to and speculating about the psychology of patients. I think this comes from Freud, who by the way, was a fraud that just made up his success stories.

 

And a fortune in research money has gone into disproving that vaccines cause autism. Now they are managing to move on.