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Asperger Syndrome Tied To Low Cortisol Levels
caffiend666 writes "According to a Health Day article, low levels of a stress hormone may be responsible for the obsession with routine and dislike for new experiences common in children with a certain type of autism. 'This study suggests that children with AS may not adjust normally to the challenge of a new environment on waking,' study researcher David Jessop, from the University of Bristol, said in the news release. 'This may affect the way they subsequently engage with the world around them.'"
Wait, What?! They can cure my Asperger's?! I DONT WANT THEM TO! I like everything the way it is! LEAVE ME ALONE! AHHHHHHHHHH
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
... to prevent AS in my own children I should make their infancy more stressful? Like run them through mazes with electrodes along the wrong routes or something?
I read the article, but it didn't go much into the implications of this finding. Does this mean a Cortisol injection would help? Or do you need a drug to stimulate the adrenal gland? Or is it more complicated than this?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
He has six small wheels, a short stumpy funnel, a short stumpy cab, a short stumpy firebox and a short stumpy dome.
ITT you got aspergers because you got scared by watching Thomas the tank engine crash too much.
To give social misfits an excuse. 92% of all cases are self-diagnosed.
Anyway....
I never see these studies that say they weed out child abuse. I know for a fact (sorry no cites or sites and I'm relying on personal experience here ... ) that child abuse will result in the same symptoms as Asperger's. That's what I'm wondering. You have one crowd who's looking for a biological reason and another who's looking for a behavioral.
I don't know what to say. We're complex and any studies like this needs to be taken with a grain of salt or two.
I thought Asperger's was usually linked to anti-social techies, but working in the IT business is damn stressful.
How can this every be correct?
Many people in the spectrum have problems with anxiety and such yet this seems to indicate they would have low levels of at least this particular stress hormone. How does that figure in to the anxiety problems?
What would happen if injected with cortisol in the morning? More anxiety or less?
I'm in the spectrum and my entire life I have never liked mornings. It's not about staying up late or not sleeping, I just feel like crap in the morning. Could that be related to the cortisol? I have problems with anxiety too.
Anyone know if there are there drugs/herbs, whatever that might help with this cortisol issue?
So, the logical followup question TFA doesn't address, is do cortisol injections or pills on waking produce a change in the symptoms? In other words, is the cortisol level a cause of the differences in behavior / thought processes, a result of them, or is there a common underlying cause?
*sigh*
And every SINGLE goddamn Aspergers-related article will result in a million awful (as in no good at it) trolls crawling out of ED pretending to hold a candle to GNAA.
Is that why RMS's pee smells so badly? He had some aspergers as a side with dinner?
in the morning does wonders to that small cortisol problem. Have been living by it since 1991.
...for a fake disease.
Let me be the first to say buns on a bun rule!!
If I'm reading them correctly, the studies being quoted (BTW, here's one of them if you have ScienceDirect) are NOT saying that Asperger's can be cured or prevented by altering a child's exposure to stress. They're saying Asperger's brains have a different neurochemical reaction to sudden changes than ordinary brains do.
1: This may (or may not) point toward changing how Asperger's kids are trained to deal with stress.
2: More interesting to me, this may point to targeted pharmaceuticals able to provide long-term remission.
3: This may just be a side effect of Asperger's, and the actual cause is somewhere else entirely.
Is Cortisol related to Prednisone? 40 mg of Prednisone made me *feel* Autistic - I couldn't look at people when they were talking, it was too overstimulating to see their lips move while I listened to their voice.
Hmm, I always thought it was contagious and this was how it was contracted:
http://i.somethingawful.com/u/elpintogrande/july07/aspergersdefinition.gif
...does this ever fit.
Anecdotally--
He is on a medication but boy is that first 15 minutes after waking up every morning freaking difficult.
I can relate to him usually quite well as I'm sure I'm somewhere on the A.S.D. line (never diagnosed though).
It is my job in the morning, every morning, to attempt to calmly wake him up and get his one pill into his system ASAP so he can get his routine started. ... not that the rest of the day is a cakewalk.
In my view (and I have many AS traits), Asperger's Syndrome is not a bad thing - AS people are more creative, more courageous and morally/ethically more daring than the average (so-called neurotypical) person. AS people are disproportionately more responsible for human advancements. They're also very honest (mostly not capable of lying and conversely, naively trusting that everybody else is like them, unable to lie).
We need more aspies, not less.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"You are obviously one [...] who need to be educated"
"just like someone using child abuse as an excuse"
"you're obviously ignorant"
I say the above are pretty good examples of someone with Asperger's misbehaving, by not considering what effect their words have on the readers.
If we cut you slack, it's because of your handicap, not despite it.
After reading the article, and absorbing the researchers' suggestion, I would like to point out that caregivers of people with AS, and other issues, have been doing the redirection technique for quite a while now. Publish something when you have something to publish.
This story about spanking (and cortisol) was posted just the other day and today we have this one. Hmmmm...
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
Looking around, Cortisol is one of those good/bad things.
http://www.south-florida-personal-trainer.com/stress.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol
Looks like it's mostly understood on a physical level with only a little understood about it's neurological impacts. Physically, it sounds like it tells your body to 'break down and rebuild'. A little bit of cortisol, it works like growth hormone. A lot of cortisol, your body ends up useless mush. I can imagine no cortisol means your body is basically incapable of new things; Wikipedia lists low-cortisol impacts like Addison's_disease, Hypoglycemia , and learning impairment. Sounds like the researchers are taking a physical effect and applying it mentally as well.
Here's to losing my Karma Bonus again....
Low cortisol levels are probably being caused by something else -- enzyme deficiency, some unknown pollutant, genetic defect, etc. This root cause is what leads to Aspergers. As usual the researchers say it's all in your head and it's all the fault of the way the parents treated their children. What they really need to do is look further into the cortisol production mechanism in the body and see if that is damaged by something in Asperger sufferers.
Frankly I'm getting a bit tired of all the links to things that cause autism/asperger etc. Every day its a new thing.
So far we have:
Weather
Premature Birth
Environment
PVC
MMR vaccine
Genes
Vinyl Flooring
Shampoo
(There are probably a lot more)
As a parent of a autistic boy, I'm frankly tired of these so called empirical 'studies' which quite frankly don't prove a thing. The only thing that has helped with my son is ABA. I wish the editors would stop putting each and every one of these on the front page.
And you work on research to find other ways to increase Cortisol production.
Rather than cortisol deficient. Perhaps "normal" levels simply cause particular anxiety.
Deleted
To cure or not to cure?
``This thread's parent mocks, but I would not want to be "cured" if I indeed have it.''
That's where my mind immediately went, as soon as someone mentioned "treatment" and "long term remission of symptoms" in an earlier posting.
Just because someone removes or suppresses the root cause of you not learning social skills some 20 years after the window when supposedly normal people learn how to interact with each other without running little simulations of each other in their heads doesn't mean you will now somehow be magically gifted with those social skills you missed out on learning back in school.
What's worse, you might find that with the suppression of the root cause, you also suppressed the foundation on which you built your coping skills that you've developed subsequently is ripped out from under you -- which would be a much more traumatic situation than having your livelihood ripped out from under you, which the parent suggests might happen as well.
-- Terry
Are you suggesting there's something wrong with doing that?
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
If, say, Population A (which lives in an area with a 50/50 mix of foot & automobile traffic) eats a lot of kumquats, and Population B (which lives in an area with almost entirely foot traffic) eats virtually no kumquats, statistical analysis will determine there is a strong relationship (at least in these two populations) between kumquat eating & automobile caused deaths.
That relationship is correlation. That is, if you randomly select a person with out of the entire population who eats many kumquats, it is much more likely that their death will be caused by automobile accidents.
It is not, however, causation. That, and really nothing else, is what 'correlation is not causation' means.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Take that, scientists!
Spend three minutes on Wikipedia with some of the topics of those studies (PVC, vinyl flooring, shampoo, phthalates) and look what you get:
"A recent British study showed that the phthalate di(n-butyl) phthalate (DBP) or its metabolite monobutyl phthalate (MBP) suppresses steroidogenesis by fetal-type Leydig cells in primates"
"Steroidogenesis is the process wherein desired forms of steroids are generated by transformation of other steroids."
"Products of steroidogenesis include: cortisol"
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
...i mean, how neurotypical...
-- thinkyhead software and media
According to this study highlighted on Wired http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/poordevelopment.html?cid=151882641#comment-151882641 poverty goes straight to the brain and the stress of poverty may influence memory.
There isn't a 'cure' to autism anyway.
The only thing I would change about my Asperger's is possibly getting diagnosed with it at an early age instead of almost 40.
Life was hell but now (a year after finding out) I feel like an 18 year old kid again. (though my body begins to complain)
I wouldn't trade my Asperger's for anything in the world. True, my priorities usually lie with logical necessity or personal curiosity so my wife takes care of the color matching and bill paying. I just give her money.
On the other hand, if I had been diagnosed at an early age, I could have skipped a lot of the garbage I dealt with for 30+ years. That would most likely have left me like most people; one-dimensional and only knowing one trade/skill well. What a tragedy THAT would have been. *shudder*
I recently experienced an Addisonian Crisis, in which my cortisol levels dropped very low. It was a nightmarish state to be in, and I could not think or function properly until weeks later when my cortisol came back into balance. If AS is even a small step in the direction of that low-cortisol dementia, I would highly recommend at least trying the treatment. One might discover entire aspects of their mind and self that have been unavailable before.
Your account of how low cortisol feels "nightmarish" is interesting in light of this bit from Wikipedia on post-traumatic stress disorder neuroendrocrinology:
Low cortisol levels may predispose individuals to PTSD; following war trauma, Swedish soldiers serving in Bosnia and Herzegovina with low pre-service salivary cortisol levels had a higher risk of reacting with PTSD symptoms, following war trauma, than soldiers with normal pre-service levels.[16] Because cortisol is normally important in restoring homeostasis after the stress response, it is thought that trauma survivors with low cortisol experience a poorly containedâ"that is, longer and more distressingâ"response, setting the stage for PTSD.
From reading dozens of 1st-person Asperger's and autistic blogs it seems like PTSD is almost a defining characteristic of autism-spectrum disorders. Certainly the way parents, psychologists and teachers often treat people with ASDs seems to be universally perceived as traumatic by such writers. If cortisol supplements might ameliorate the harm to people who are not just treated badly but predisposed to be traumatized by such treatment, then I think it is certainly worth researching.
Autistic self-advocates are right to cling to their right to neurological freedom, but I think it is very unlikely that cortisol would be anything like a "cure" or a means of enforcing conformity with society; rather, it holds out he possibility of giving autistics a line of defense against the assault of unreasonable demands of neurotypical society. If so, then this could give autistics greater ability to effectively challenge the causes and perpetrators of traumatic experience, rather than being derailed so often by needing to deal with the emotional effects of trauma such as dissociation and meltdowns.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry