Just to play devil’s advocate, isn’t it also possible that the preference for a monotonous diet is driven by gut makeup?

We usually call these our "safe foods" and yes, it is a very real problem for many of us in the autistic community, specifically around nutritional deficiencies. In a similar vein, as a child I went several years just eating plain Cheerios. For a close friend it was chicken nuggets.

Given how many kids are told to just "shut up and eat it" - and/or didn't have extreme pickiness but got DX'ed perhaps as an adult - I'd say there's a ton of research required to even suggest this as a plausible cause (even for a limited number of cases). It might make things worse, but I highly doubt it's causative.

Imagine the factor overlooked is the nasty but nutritional hospital food they got when receiving the transplant (assuming they got hospitalized).

I agree about the updates. However, news sites like this one aren’t combing through research to find things to update. They’re responding to PR outreach from companies. Did you notice there isn’t actually a link to a new publication? It’s only quotes from the company. They’re repeating PR material, not updates on the research.

There’s a subtext here that isn’t immediately obvious without reading more from the company trying to commercialize this formula: Their small phase 2 trial is underway but results haven’t fully been released as far as I can tell. It appears they’re trying to do a PR push based on their early claims of positive results, before publishing everything. If anyone can find more details please correct me if I’m wrong.

This can be a little suspicious when companies do this because before the full results are available because it’s usually associated with a rushed push to drive investor interest at the time they think it’s most optimal. When the optimal PR push timing is before full results are released, it’s not a good signal that the results are on track to be great.

The typical publishing methods kind of favors that approach of publishing new articles instead of updating existing ones though, for better or worse.

Maybe science journalism should just adopt a wiki-model instead, where there is one article per "subject" then any new (confirmed?) information/data goes into that, and interested people can subscribe to updates there instead.

Wikis generally have much better long-term maintenance given the right individuals running it, compared to a "publication journal" where things tend to get out of date eventually, with no way of actually seeing when old articles get updated.

Study completed in 2022, but still no results posted or study published.

Often universities do this, they may own the patent and license it to the company or take a cut etc. Arizona State University appear to do this through Skysong Innovations:

https://skysonginnovations.com/startups/list/

It's interesting they got a lot of funding from over 100 families with autism children:

https://skysonginnovations.com/startups/list/

This is how it works. Universities are doing research, they aren't doing products. If a commercially viable product comes out of their research it is far outside the scope of universities.

Also keep in mind that most sciences usually don't produce commercially viable research (think social sciences, archeology, geography etc.)

And as others said: how the universities gets a cut from the spin offs differs from university to university.

As others have said, very common. A famous example is Lyrica, which made an enormous amount of money for Northwestern, probably around $1 billion dollars. It played a not-insignificant role in the university's rise in the last 10-20 years.

Universities love this and encourage it. Any big place will have an office of "technology transfer" or similar to help researchers make this happen.

It's quite common historically. The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato looks at this phenomenon of companies privatizing the benefits of publicly funded research and, she argues, not giving enough in return

I think the university gets a cut. Kinda like how Gatorade is making I can’t remember which university incredible amounts of money for the last several decades.

> So the university researchers use time and money from the university

Don’t worry, the money is usually coming from taxpayers so the universities don’t have to dip into their endowments

> So the university researchers use time and money from the university to make a discovery, extending on previous published research, and then patent it and start their own for-profit?

it happens all the time, and in many countries. Its quite common in the UK.

Universities often keep up to 50% of rights over IP in such cases but I am unsure about this specific case.

Yes this is very common and a big part of why scientific progress often seems so hamstrung

Yes, it's really common. Most universities actually support this and there is a specific contractual framework for staff which basically says "If you create a company during or after your work at university which touches the field you were researching in, we get 1% (or 10% or 20%) of your annual revenue as license fees".

The alternatives are lengthy court battles between universities and their best (e.g. most commercial) researchers. This creates bad PR for the university and uncertainty for the researcher & their startups because potential investors don't like open court cases.

So people came around to make this kind of license fee contract and researchers check it before deciding to join a certain university.

Not a fan of gene / bacteria patents though.

Yes this is really common. Not all universities own the research you do. I have a similar setup within my university. They get to use the research technique I've worked on, but I have the rights to take it out of the university and sell it.

I think the terminology of "incredible" is the operative word but I agree, if it could help, great. But I'm very skeptical. I find it hard to think that your gut biome can affect your brain so much that you struggle with social queues but are able to have an amazing memory.

But then I've met people not on "the spectrum" who have an amazing memory, such as a professor I recently met with who could remember the page numbers for certain phrases in books. Perhaps Asperger-level people just have the ability with the added challenges of autism?

who knows

The microbiota is passed from mother to son on birth, not totally from the environment.

What we currently don’t understand is why for some people they never got them (we have techniques to transport the biota from the mother during birth for non-natural procedures) or they loose them.

Even with the transplant, the microbes won’t stick around on those people (not taking about autistic people here, but people in general).

Diverse food really helps, just as not eating ultraprocessed (they won’t reach the end of the intestines).

Fermented and other pre or probiotics will really help too.

But none of those will recover the biota in some people.

The lower intestinal region is guarded by a vat of acid. Not sure how much of those probiotic pills get through.

Why did you follow a strict carnivore diet? Health? Accident? Aside from the constipation did it benefit your health?

>I got bad chronic constipation after four years as a strict carnivore.

2 questions:

1) Did your constipation start right after you did strict carnivore? Or was it after 4 years?

2) List all foods that you ate on strict carnivore. (Include salt, water etc. I presume it won't be a long list)

I had a similar question to. From my understanding of the study, which was double blind placebo study, it does not treat autism but its shown to greatly improve symptoms of autism.

They basically wiped the gut clean with antibiotics then started treating and saw improvements.

Could be that GI issues increase irritability which makes the measured autism symptoms more aggressive but it looks very promising for families.

Not affiliated just read the study.

True that, but it could be both cause and effect. There are reports that gut bacteria can induce depression, which benefits the bacteria because it sends more calorie-rich, highly processed food down the gullet (think ice cream binges when depressed). Not hard to believe that gut bacteria optimized for a particular kind of food could evolve the ability to induce their host to eat that food exclusively. It would have the side-benefit (for the bacteria) of reducing competition from other microbes that aren't optimized for that, by starving them out. Things aren't always just cause or effect, especially in biology.

They say that they started a phase 2 trial with placebo control in 2022 and they see better outcome than placebo

> Our phase 2 study for adults with autism found that the treatment group improved more than placebo on the primary outcome (autism symptoms) and on a secondary outcome (daily stool record),

I'm guessing that the kids now have less stomachpain, constipation, and are feeling less bloated/nauseous. Thus have less voilent reactions

If it was anything else but gut bacteria, I would be inclined to agree with you, but gut microbiota is slowly turning out to be an extremely important factor in our health and it also turns out that modern highly processed diet tends to damage it and make it less diverse. Even higher frequency of Caesarian section seems to make gut microbiota less diverse and there seem to be some diseases downstream from that.

At the same time, gut microbiota is extremely complex to study.

So, this may be a plausible result. I cannot judge the plausibilities right away in the way you suggest it.

Kids got into tech industry and now it’s their spouses that have to deal with their tism, instead of parents

It worked completely fine in my Firefox with uBlock Origin. I didn't have to do anything to read it, not even disabling UBO.

Aren't probiotics essentially gut bacteria? Is the problem that they aren't the right gut bacteria, or that they get released at the wrong stage of the digestive pipeline? If it's the latter, is it just a matter of making the capsule release at the right point?

Or is the problem that there are different sets of issues, and finding the right mix of bacteria to fix the issue is difficult?

What did you think a fecal transplant was?

Autism fetishism.

This comment should be deleted.

Well no, what they're saying is it seems to be capable of reducing autism-related struggles and misbehavior, not that it can somehow remove autism. Truly removing autism in any meaningful way is probably impossible since the brain was trained with it since birth.

You don't eat it, don't be silly.... you stick the poop up your butt

my wife is autistic and suffers from many gastro illnesses including MCAS and SIBO. The amount of times i've seriously thought of figuring out the logistics of giving her a fecal transplant from my iron stomach...

That’s valid English. You take ibuprofen for headaches, or go to the hospital for a broken bone. Assuming the word ‘for’ means ‘causes’ is incorrect.

Did you also think "treatment for cancer" caused cancer where there was none?