Researchers Say They've Created a 90% Accurate Blood Test for Autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a complicated neurological condition caused by a variety of risk factors, including our genes and environment (but no, not vaccines), that interact in ways we still understand little about. Its symptoms are varied, too—from problems with social interaction to being unable to speak or process sensations normally. This complexity extends all the way to how it’s diagnosed: Children can start to show visible signs of autism by the age of 18 months, but there is no single medical test that can diagnose it, and it often takes years to confirm a suspected case, potentially delaying treatment.

New research, published Sunday in the journal Molecular Autism, might provide one of the first steps needed toward developing an accurate blood test for the condition. And along the way, it might also help us better understand why autism occurs in the first place.

European researchers looked at the blood and urine of 38 Italian children diagnosed with ASD and compared them to a similarly matched control group of 31 children who did not have autism. The children with autism were 7 and a half years old, on average. In those children, they found signs of damage to certain proteins found in blood plasma that were caused by complex processes that involve either oxygen or glucose.

They then created four different predictive algorithms that tried to tell whether a child had ASD or not, based on the presence of these biomarkers. Among other things, the most successful algorithm looked for higher levels of a molecule called dityrosine, which appear when proteins are changed by oxygen-containing free radicals (a process known as oxidation), and advanced glycation end products (AGE), which are proteins or fats that have been altered by contact with glucose. This algorithm predicted if a child had autism with 90 percent accuracy, and predicted if a child didn’t with 87 percent accuracy.

Source: gizmodo