ME = Late onset Autism?

Hello

I see scatterings of conversations around this topic here but couldn't find a single thread which dealt with this overall assertion. That ME is late onset ASD and that PEM and autistic overload may be related. Naviaux seems to be the touch point, but I am asking regarding the overall topic including his thinking, but not just his.

It makes experiential sense to me, but recent discussion showed Gulf War Syndrome and ME PEM to be qualitatively similar but neurologically different. It may also just be the result of overlapping Venn diagrams of symptoms, comorbidities and comorbidities of comorbidities. Correlation is not causation, Christmas cards do not cause Christmas. Causation may appear backwards after a few cycles. Or they may merely be correlated with another cause

But I'm so curious about the assertion, esp in view of nascent microbiomal evidence re ASD. I'd love to see this idea dissected by people who can say more than me on it.

Some subjective narrative: https://www.syndromea.org/2018/10/29/autism-and-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/

Some tentative similarities:

Reduced HRV and HF HRV in people with autism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30972967/

Autonomic underarousal: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28006949/

Low cortisol, sleep disruptions and maybe overarousal: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30896090/

General
https://www.omf.ngo/2017/10/19/treating-autism-and-mecfs-could-one-drug-do-both/

Apologies if I missed where a previous thread became more general to this topic.

 

I have not read all these links properly. It's been merely a collation of a few others' collations

 

An interesting thread, but though there are significant overlaps between ME and Autism, there are also differences.

As I commented in today’s poll on PEM triggered by mental factors, I see such as sensory overload or mental processing overload as features or symptoms of the ME but as distinct from PEM.

I recognise there a significant overlaps between ME sensory and cognitive overload and autistic overload which may have some commonality in the neurological or brain processing factors involve, but are they the same as PEM?

For me these overloads are immediate and respond rapidly to time out from the trigger and tend to be modality specific, where as I see PEM as a general response involving potentially all the ME symptoms that can continue to worsen even when the triggers are removed, and that tends to operate on a longer time scale.

Overload is more likely when experiencing PEM and can contribute towards triggering PEM especially if attempts are made to push through it, so the two interact but that does not necessarily mean they are the same. I would see risk of overload as a symptom that can be made worse by PEM, rather than PEM itself. The symptom would something like reduce processing capacity or limited processing band width, the overload being when we hit the processing limit.

In the example I gave in the other thread, smelling lots of different perfumes when shopping with my then teenage goddaughter, resulted in overload involving general cognitive difficulties, a seem of discomfort or distress, a headache, etc, but going out of the shop for five/ten minutes resulted in rapid recovery, enabling me to return to comment on the two or three that were selected as the preferred options.

(Note my goddaughter went through a period of fascination with perfumes and had an enormous capacity to compare and contrast large numbers when selecting her preferences.)

This is my personal perspective and it would be interesting if others made the same subjective distinctions or not. At one level it may be a matter of semantics, but I think the discussion can help us think about how we define PEM.

[Added So for me the question is do people with Autism also experience the non modality specific more general PEM that continues to worsen some time after the trigger is removed, or may not even begin until long after the trigger is gone. This would be distinct from feeling tired after the overload event.]

 

Hi I'm autistic (and I have ME)

I've been autistic my whole life. I've had ME for less than 20% of my life.

I don't think you would find any autistic people agreeing with the idea that "ME is late onset autism".

Autism does not involve any deficits in energy production or any exercise intolerance.

Yes symptomatic similarities can be found in terms of sensory sensitivities, 'overload' phenomena, sleep issues, and maybe some other things too (I am just thinking off the top of my head). For me these things, which I already had, were amplified 100x when I developed ME / as my ME became more severe.

 

OT but I am fairly sure that Christmas cards did cause the spread and adoption of what we now consider Christmas.

Before the Victorians introduced the custom of Christmas cards, Christmas, if celebrated, was primarily a religious festival, not as it is now.

Care to hazard a guess as to my ASD status

 

Are there any time series studies that look at comorbidities statistically/ with machine learning as a pure data mining exercise to offer hypotheses for consideration to seed/direction real research (I saw the prevalence estimation machine learning paper)? I mean a paper without presupposing what to look for based on medical assumptions a priori? I know there are studies that have looked at comorbidities (Wessley did one, if I recall properly), but if I put an computational econometrician's hat on, none of it was very exciting or useful.

This is an important and sound observation that I can relate to. It's exactly this observation that I was wondering if there was an opposing thesis, some response that is not selective.

The idea is certainly provocative and needs addressing head on in a single thread as a result. The interplay between the overlapping Venns will be even more poorly understood than ME alone, also allowing conclusions to be dangerously jumped to. The standalone idea that ME/CFS is autism seems a stretch to take too far by itself.

In terms of my own experience, I find it interesting that it is ME that made me consider whether I had ASD traits, something I'd never considered. And many things made sense going back thru childhood and across family members. In my own case, I've wondered if ME practicalities brought these other realities to the surface. My own experience 'feels' as if I couldn't compensate for things anymore, things I never realised that I compensated for.

My sample size is 1, just me

Hehehe

for you

 

Data would be the problem, presumably.

Re the potential of not initially presupposing anything medically, we are now at the point where machine learning can predict the behaviour of the universe, dark matter and more in ways we didn't even expect (https://m.phys.org/news/2019-06-ai-universe-sim-fast-accurateand.html). The power of presupposing very little.

But it all comes back to data, data, data and relevant scientists exploring what the necessary data would be. And I don't just mean gene data, the usual example, I also mean diagnostic history. Time series of data/chronology risks being a missing angle when talking big data and ME to open up new questions to research. Hopefully I'm wrong and it's being considered!

 

This last post is probably best moved to a new thread - I know how to quote, but how do I move?

 

Post deleted

 

Isn't Dr Wakefield the guy who said that the MMR vaccine causes autism? That's now been throughly debunked?

Many autistic people will find this notion highly offensive. ME is very clearly an illness. Autism on the other hand, few autistics would call it an illness, many see it as 'neurodiversity', that is, a diversity of our 'neurotype' (potential neurotypes include 'typical', autistic, and ADHD).

I'm not sure if there is any evidence that autism is caused by any type of "injury"? Or, indeed, that autism has any kind of "onset" at all? The standard view in the UK is that autism is present from before birth. It just often isn't noticeable until a child is a few years old.

I'm also not sure about your statement about "not having a fully developed brain in autism" - what is your evidence for this statement? Again, many autistics would take offense at this statement. My brain is fully developed thank you very much, it's just developed in some ways differently to the 'normal'.

Edit: oh, I just realised that when you said "not fully developed brain", you were probably referring to children not having fully developed brains? In which case I take back my last comment. But again, I don't know if there is any evidence that autism is a thing which has "onset". Also, ME can be onset in early childhood too.

 

Dr. David Bell writes that in pediatric ME/CFS, "The cognitive symptoms from age 3 to age 12 are indistinguishable from attention deficit disorder, and this is another area that has never been adequately studied."

https://www.omf.ngo/2016/06/25/mecfs-in-children-by-dr-david-s-bell-2/

 

Interesting, but clearly the two conditions can be distinguished by the fact that ME involves physical fatigue, PEM etc, and often a plethora of other symptoms, and ADHD doesn't.

Also I highly doubt that the cognitive symptoms of pediatric ME are indistinguishable from ADHD in severe (or even moderate) cases of pediatric ME. Children with ADHD do not have brain fog making them unable to think, they do not have a brain feeling like it is full of sludge.

 

Dr. Bell also writes in the same article that "not all children describe post-exertional malaise". Some only describe "activity limitation". And that problems may start early in childhood, "but not that the whole symptom pattern was present."

Edit: Pediatric ME/CFS definitely needs more study.

 

Autism is defined as deficits in social interaction, social communication and social imagination

ME is a disease where there is an abnormal reaction to exercise which leads to PEM and a prolonged recovery.

Both share symptoms, especially overload, but in the same way that sharing fatigue with MS or Parkinson's does not mean it has the same cause, we can't say much at this stage of whether overload is caused by the same things.

One intriguing possibility is that sleep deficits are causing problems in both conditions. The screaming non sleep of babies who go on to be diagnosed with autism are the thing of legend in our family. Now we are gathering so much information about the processes involved in sleep I am sure the consequences for us will be determined sooner rather than later.

 

At this point in the conversation, I think it's worth inserting here that autism is a highly variable category.

Many autistic people function well and are certainly not diseased.

On the other hand, many autistic people have one or more of: intellectual disability, harmful repetitive behavior, significant gastrointestinal problems, etc. - The kinds of things that certainly would meet the threshold of disease; in some cases, abject misery.

We should be sensitive to the full range of presentations when we discuss autism.

__

As for the topic of this thread, it seems like a pet idea. It could be that some illuminating relationship will appear in the future, but right now there are no specifics so I would say fixating on this would lead to pet-theory-indulgent type research that doesn't really help actually get to useful findings for either condition.

 

You can epigenetically switch things off / on . Perhaps this is what is suggested?

 

ADD is slightly different from ADHD ( doesn't t have the hyperactive part, if anything less active and engaged).
A friend's daughter was recently diagnosed at 21 with ADD. Noone picked up on it. Idiosyncracies were simply out down to her personality until she could not cope at uni.

 

I meant a fully matured brain ie still in development,growing,I’ll change that bit
And the regression sometimes seen in the early years in autism
Epigenetics was the thing I meant,yes
I was just quoting dr Wakefield for interest
What mutates when a person develops cancer I remember seeing the anti smoking campaign saying every cigarette causes an increased chance of mutations
https://www.bionews.org.uk/page_9394
3

I have Autism and EBV onset PVFS trying to understand it.

I’m wondering if something nuclear related maybe my mutagen