\u201cWhen you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven\u2019t.\u201d \u2014 Thomas A. Edison<\/p>\n
As a writer and a scientist, I have to say: writing is a lot easier than sciencing. In science, if you recommend a drug that doesn\u2019t work, people may die. In writing, the worst that can happen is that people die of boredom<\/a>. Fortunately, they usually revive.<\/p>\n For such a nerdy field, science can be surprisingly cutthroat. Witness a recent article that says gut-autism research is so bad they might as well just throw in the towel.<\/p>\n The article<\/a> from the journal Neuron<\/a> argues that the gut-autism axis is a house of cards built on lousy studies with inconsistent data. They assert that the studies are contradictory and that too much emphasis is placed on dubious mouse models.<\/p>\n They may have a point.<\/p>\n It is notoriously challenging to nail down microbial causes of disease\u2014it is hard enough to simply identify a normal microbiome<\/a>. Moreover, many of these studies were done with mice, and what exactly is an autistic<\/a> mouse?<\/p>\n One of their strongest critiques is that the studies have causality backward: Instead of microbes causing autism, they posit that people with autism have strange diets that compromise their microbiome.<\/p>\n But this may be a straw man argument. Microbiome studies are particularly prone to this criticism because there is some inherent circularity in the gut-brain axis<\/a>. Your diet<\/a> will clearly alter your microbiome, but your microbes can cause cravings that alter your diet. The take-home is that when you change either your diet or your microbes, you can convert a vicious cycle into a virtuous one. It isn\u2019t necessary to pin down causality in order to make an improvement.<\/p>\n More importantly, none of this research asserts that microbes cause autism. Rather, they find that changes in the microbiome can ameliorate certain symptoms. That seems uncontroversial and extremely useful. Let\u2019s look at some of the studies.<\/p>\n The microbial connection<\/p>\n One study found an interesting connection between autism and microbes in the mouth. According to Kathy Kar-man Shum at the University of Hong Kong, there is a microbial signature of autism in the mouth microbiome. Simply by looking at oral microbes, the researchers can predict if a child will develop autism with 80 percent accuracy. That\u2019s important for early identification and intervention, when therapy<\/a> is most effective.<\/p>\n Gut-brain studies<\/p>\n