| ▲ | directevolve 4 hours ago |
| Many autistic children have extremely limited diets. For example, a geneticist friend of mine saw a case where an autistic child had been referred for genetic testing because of horrific, chronic, spontaneous wounds on gums and skin. Turned out to be scurvy, because he had exclusively eaten Wheat Thins for the last 3-4 years, which aren’t fortified with vitamin C. I would fully expect that a monotonous diet leads to a heavy skew in the gut microbiome as specific bacterial species that thrive on that diet are selected for, others against. It makes some sense that a fecal transplant could repair the damage. If the diet has shifted or expanded, the transplant could lead to long term benefits by restoring newly-viable bacterial species, perhaps by facilitating digestion of the new types of food. I’d be curious to see a factoring out of the diet composition, gut microbiome, genetics, and severity of autism symptoms. |
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| ▲ | dimes 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Just to play devil’s advocate, isn’t it also possible that the preference for a monotonous diet is driven by gut makeup? |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The microbiome might have some modulating effect, but the fidelity of gut-brain axis communication isn’t so strong that our gut microbiome is driving us around with highly specific inputs. The theories for how gut-brain axis modulation works include altering the balance of nutrients that get absorbed and modulating the vagus nerve, primarily. For someone with autism it might be possible that altering some of these balances could make the condition better or worse, but that’s all theory without much foundation. What is known, however, is that diet has a massive impact on the microbiome. Even the mechanism for that is obvious: Bacteria thrive on different foods, so if you eat more of one class of nutrients and less of another then the microbiome proportions will adjust based on which ones thrive on that diet. | | |
| ▲ | dimes 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m not going to pretend to be an expert here, but I remember a study that found gut bacteria composition predicted whether or not an individual was chocolate-craving or not in individuals eating identical diets: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17929959 | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You have to be careful with microbiome research because it’s a buzzword that gets crammed into a lot of research papers to imply something bigger. This is a single paper from Nestle Research Center (yes that Nestle) from 2007 that doesn’t even cite a number of people sampled in the abstract. They didn’t run any experiments trying to change the diet or microbiome. They just correlated dietary preferences with some markers that might be correlated with the microbiome. The paper does not say anything about how changing the microbiome might change preferences. The simplest and most well tested explanation is that dietary preference are driving the microbiome. There’s a lot of woo-woo microbiome discussion out there that misses the really obvious basics of how the microbiome comes to exist and thrive: What you eat is what the microbiome eats, so changing what you eat will change the composition of bacteria that thrive. People who prefer chocolate are correlated with people who prefer sweet diets. High sugar intake is proven to alter the microbiome. | |
| ▲ | mrtesthah 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It makes sense for chocolate given that cocoa flavanols are prebiotic fiber for GABA-secreting bacteria which of course affects the parasympathetic nervous system. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis an hour ago | parent [-] | | The paper didn’t say that the microbiome was driving food preferences. It measured some bio markers and some dietary preferences and claims some correlation. The correlation is that what you eat fuels the microbiome. So your diet influences the microbiome by fueling or starving different bacteria. Complex theories about causality going the other way through complex chains of flavonoids to bacteria to neurotransmitters to the parasympathetic nervous system sound impressive with all of the big words, but it’s such a complex theory that would need other testing to even begin to understand if there was something there. Testing the other direction is easy and obvious. You can grow many bacteria in a Petri dish and see that some grow better or worse with different nutrients. |
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| ▲ | toddmorey 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes! My son who has autism would eat anything we put in front of him until age 3, when his weight, appetite and health suddenly and alarmingly crashed. Ever since that episode, he's had a much more restrictive diet and food preferences. Night and day. They never successfully identified what happened. Just diagnosed it generally as failure to thrive. | | |
| ▲ | jtc331 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There’s some research on sudden onset autism being treated with antifungals; so at least sometimes a sudden change may be the result of something very specific in the gut. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 28 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There is not reasonable evidence supporting the idea that autism can be treated with antifungals. Case reports are unreliable due to placebo effect. The antifungal myth has been tested by too many well-meaning parents with no results. |
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| ▲ | stephenitis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You seed the gut with nutrients. having lots of fiber and a varied diet increases the number of species that an adult has which is between a couple hundred to a thousand or so.
Our guts are generally dominated by a bunch of beneficial bacteria. which for many is not the case for a variety of social economic or behavioral reasons. Add in with explosions of bacterial populations due to alcohol or sugar and you can see how we can change our gut biome drastically from week to week. | | |
| ▲ | therobots927 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’ve noticed I really need to keep alcohol and sugar consumption in check. Sometimes it seems like one drink is enough to kick off a gut ecosystem collapse, and other times my gut is more resistant to the effects. Definitely trying to increase fiber consumption significantly. | | |
| ▲ | swores 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How are you judging the impact of things on your gut/microbiome? | | | |
| ▲ | formerly_proven 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Simple starches and sugars (the former being rapidly converted into the latter) are probably the most harmful ingredient once we exclude actual poisons. And they’re just as normalized with most food being primarily composed of them, even though normal people barely need them. |
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| ▲ | user_7832 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | drzaiusx11 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | smallnix 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Imagine the factor overlooked is the nasty but nutritional hospital food they got when receiving the transplant (assuming they got hospitalized). |
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| ▲ | SoftTalker 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Doesn't seem like something that would require an inpatient stay. | | |
| ▲ | delecti an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > [...] the treatment, which involved a bowel cleanse and daily transplants of fecal microbiota over a period of seven to eight weeks Maybe I'm misinterpreting what the process of that daily transplant looked like, but I expect they ate a not insignificant amount of hospital food if there were 7-8 weeks of daily treatments. | |
| ▲ | mrgoldenbrown an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | In my experience (instant cure for recurrent c. diff) a fecal transplant is easier and simpler than a colonoscopy, which themselves are easy enough to be outpatient. |
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