First evidence of immune response targeting brain cells in autism

rvallee

rvallee

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
In a paper published in Annals of Neurology, Matthew Anderson, HMS associate professor of pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and colleagues, report the presence of cellular features consistent with an immune response targeting specialized brain cells in more than two-thirds of autistic brains analyzed postmortem.
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Anderson was examining brains donated to Autism BrainNet, a nonprofit tissue bank, when he noticed the presence of perivascular lymphocyte cuffs—an accumulation of immune cells surrounding blood vessels in the brain.

He also noted mysterious bubbles or blisters that scientists call blebs accumulating around these cuffed blood vessels. Anderson and colleagues subsequently found these blebs contained debris from a subset of brain cells called astrocytes.

Not previously linked to autism, perivascular lymphocyte cuffing is a well-known indicator of chronic inflammation in the brain. Lymphocyte cuffs in the brain are telltale signs of viral infections or autoimmune disorders.
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But the pattern Anderson observed did not match any previously documented infection or autoimmune disorder of the brain. In the brains Anderson examined, the cuffs were subtle but distinct. “I’ve seen enough brains to know you shouldn’t see that,” he said.
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In a second set of experiments, Anderson’s team determined that the perivascular cuffs were made up of killer T cells, a subset of immune cells responsible for attacking and killing damaged, infected or cancerous cells or normal cells in autoimmune diseases.

With no apparent evidence of viruses known to infect the brain, the presence of these tissue-attacking immune cells throughout the autistic brains suggested one of two scenarios, explained Anderson. Either the T cells are reacting normally to a pathogen such as a virus, or they are reacting abnormally to normal tissue—the definition of an autoimmune disorder.
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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
 
Sarah94 said:
Wouldn't you expect living autistic people to then show immune abnormalities in the blood?
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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.
 
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