One of the most detailed studies to date has firmly established a link between autism and substances found in the gut.
The new analysis looked not only at the bacteria that live in the digestive tract, but also at the fungi, archaea, and viruses that inhabit it.
A team led by researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong has developed a comprehensive test that correlates changes in the overall composition of the gut microbiome with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
Although this link is still being elucidated, accumulating evidence offers new ways to diagnose and understand autism.
“The exciting thing about this study is that it opens up the possibility of investigating specific biochemical pathways and their impact on different autism traits,” says Bhismadev Chakrabarti, a neuroscientist at the University of Reading in the UK, who was not involved in the study.
“If microbial markers prove to enhance the ability of genetic and behavioral tests to detect autism, they may also provide new ways to detect the condition. Future platforms that can combine genetic, microbial, and simple behavioral assessments may help close the detection gap.”
Although the causes of the link between changes in the composition of our gut microbiome and autism are still unclear, evidence is mounting. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about how our gut microbiome – the population of microorganisms that live in our digestive tract – influences how we feel, think, and behave. Even decision making.
Previous studies of the link between the microbiome and autism have focused solely on differences in bacteria, but to investigate the phenomenon in more detail, gastroenterologist Siew Ng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and his colleagues expanded their research to include the entire gut metagenome.
They analyzed fecal samples from 1,627 children with and without autism diagnosis. Kingdom It’s home to a wide variety of microorganisms, and the analysis revealed some notable differences in the microbiomes of children with autism.
The researchers identified 14 archaeal species, 51 bacterial species, 7 fungal species, 18 viral species, 27 microbial genes, and 12 metabolic pathways that differed between neurologically normal and autistic children.
When the data were fed into a machine learning algorithm, any one of these kingdoms gave better diagnostic accuracy than random guessing, but not spectacularly better, but combining all the data from the multi-kingdom assessment, which included 31 markers, gave a much higher diagnostic accuracy. Diagnostic accuracyThis varies depending on the age group, but ranges from 79.5% to 88.6%.
This is one of the most extensive and comprehensive studies of its kind conducted to date, and the results not only support a link between the gut and autism, but also advance research into both the mechanisms behind autism and the ability to test for autism in children with relatively simple, non-invasive methods.
“This is a well-designed and well-conducted project that took into account a range of confounding factors and validated the results in multiple independent samples,” Chakrabarti says.
“The results of this study have certainly broadened our perspective on the microbiome in autism, and may even help us diagnose autism using multi-kingdom microbial markers.”
This study Nature Microbiology.
