Skip to main content

Spectrum: Autism Research News

News

Community Newsletter: Autism biomarkers; language preferences; octopus brain atlas

by  /  11 December 2022
Speech bubble formed by a network of communication


Illustration by Laurène Boglio

Is the search for biomarkers of autism a worthwhile endeavor? Noah Sasson, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Dallas, mulled over this question in a recent tweet thread, which began with a quote from a new review of autism biomarker research: “There is currently no response biomarker with sufficient evidence to inform ASD clinical trials.”

In theory, biomarkers could enable early detection, Sasson wrote, but “I’m skeptical about their potential utility in this regard for several reasons, and question whether they offer improvement over established clinical practice.”

“Autism is multifaceted with tremendous heterogeneity and likely doesn’t have a uniform underlying physiology,” Sasson noted.

“Always surprises me when researchers believe that a group of behaviours … will have a common biological marker across the autistic population,” remarked Twitter user Graham Mead.

One of Sasson’s points highlights the opportunity cost of biomarker research, which “comes at the expense of other funding needs.”

Sue Fletcher-Watson, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, called it an “excellent thread neatly summarising the pointless quest for autism biomarkers.”

In another thread, the U21 Autism Research Network — a collaboration among six research groups around the world — detailed its new study, which “asked 654 autistic adults across multiple countries … to tell us about their autism-related language preferences.”

Respondents favored the term ‘autistic person’ over ‘person on the spectrum’ and ‘person with autism,’ and they preferred the terms ‘differences,’ ‘challenges’ and ‘difficulties’ over medicalized words such as ‘disease,’ ‘impairments’ and ‘deficits.’ The data “demonstrate that there is no universally accepted way to talk about autism,” the researchers concluded. They also noted that their findings may not be representative of those with intellectual disabilities or communicative differences, because they did not ask participants to provide this information.

The Birmingham Psychology Autism Research Team called the thread a “must-read for researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and society more broadly.”

“So happy to see this work published where we asked English-speaking #ActuallyAutistic adults around the world about their autism-related language preferences,” tweeted Sophie Sowden, lead investigator of the research network.

Sarah O’Brien, a graduate student at King’s College London in the United Kingdom, tweeted that the research “builds upon conversations that have long existed within the autistic community and really solidifies the convictions I have about language when it comes to how we, as autistic people, refer to ourselves and others.”

The last thread to catch our attention this week came from Ruth Styfhals, a graduate student of developmental neurobiology at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, who described her and her colleagues’ “work on the mysterious cell types in the octopus brain.” Along with sharing some beautiful imagery — one commenter remarked that the octopuses looked like Christmas tree ornaments — Styfhals detailed how they sequenced the octopus brain to uncover the “cell types that control their sophisticated behavioral repertoire.”

Along with an octopus emoji, the Siegenthaler Lab at the University of Colorado in Aurora tweeted, “New work on octopus brain atlas…and my day just got better because octopus appear to have meninges?!?!”

“It’s incredible how complex an invertebrate mollusk brain is, even at this early stage of development,” tweeted Eric Chang, assistant professor of neuroscience at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, also using an octopus emoji.

Grisha Zolotarov, a graduate student at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, shared a cartoon he created in which octopuses are learning how to build their brains.

That’s it for this week’s Community Newsletter! If you have any suggestions for interesting social posts you saw in the autism research sphere, feel free to send an email to [email protected].

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter (@Spectrum), Instagram and LinkedIn.

Subscribe to get the best of Spectrum straight to your inbox.

Cite this article: https://doi.org/10.53053/GBZB8978

TAGS:   autism, community, community newsletter
Read the Commenting Guidelines

By joining the discussion, you agree to our privacy policy.