Hi again, I am trying to formulate a view on drug treatment. Its quite difficult to do. Does anyone want to discuss with me. Some background to this suggestion is that: I see that a fellow is given drugs, but i dont see that he has given consent. Ostensibly the issue is that of behavioural problems and the drugs meet a need which control antisocial behaviour. How does a person in that position express his true will? (unwilling(?) and unable to communicate). Its a huge ethical question.
Lately, normies have been trying to attribute everything to genes. I would not be surprised to learn that autism is just nature's way of keeping us all that little bit different.
Tenacious, will you be so kind to give me the study/ies confirming that autism is genetic and which particular gene is the affected one?
I will really appreciated that information. Thank you.
I don't have time to search right now... but I recall some studies on chromosome 15 and 23.
Maybe you should browse the section on genetics - I'm sure people would have posted more info on genes in the past.
K
Humans have 22 pairs of chromosomes plus X and Y--no chromosome 23, sorry, unless it hasn't been discovered yet. My guess is that to the extent that genes predisposing to autism will be identified, they will pertain at least initially to LFA and from families with high incidences. Since 2000, the human genome has been entirely sequenced, and so-called "haplotype maps" are being constructed that will help researchers hone in on which regions of various chromosomes have genes that predispose to variations in physiology or behaviors. But for complex diseases or behaviors, it's a non-trivial problem to clearly identify which gene variations are involved.
These are the generic challenges:
1. There are likely to be many genes involved in the phenotype you're studying, and once you identify the genes, you still have to figure out which variations in which genes cause which effects.
2. The populations with the "phenotype" are heterogeneous--there can be several groups of genetic causes that result in a similar effect--so people have to be "stratified" using "classifiers" and defining the appropriate classifiers is a research project in itself.
3. There may be different related phenotypes with different sets of causes.
4. There is the problem of "incomplete penetrance" whereby not everyone with a set of predisposing genes manifests the phenotype in question.
I think it'll be awhile before the "autism genes" are defined, but I could be wrong.
They cannot even identify which gene structure is that of diabetes or schizophrenia, two ailments that they have intimate knowledge of the causes for, so autism is a long way off.
I agree--the search for genetic predispositions to type 1 diabetes have been intensive for years, because the disease is relatively common and really serious. Based on conversations I've had with some folks I know who are working on this, it's not completely clear exactly what causes the beta cells that make insulin to die--is it a screwed up immune system that causes them to be killed, or some internal cellular process, or something else? Cells are freaking complicated!!!!!!!
And the brain..someone once said:
If the brain were sufficiently simple that we could understand it, we'd be so simple we couldn't.
Actually, solving the diabetes riddle is relatively simple. In cases where it does occur, one can just create new Islet cells that are genetically coded so that the immune system will not reject them. The real problem is that a lot of the time, the research is being blocked by scaremongers who deserve to go back to the era of wiping one's butt on fig leaves.
But yes, the actual genetic coding that announces "this individual will have diabetes before their eighteenth birthday" is still a big mystery, and is in no danger of being decoded while I am not elderly.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
I am curious, have you read Mr. Cranky's review of The 6th Day? It hits the nail on the head about anti-cloning hysteria.
The cause is definitely autoimmune, but it is more a disease of the wider digestive system. Diseases often do not affect the place where they start. For instance, colds and flus generally start in the lungs, intestines, and other such areas where bacteria or virii can hang about.
Isabelle, I don't know anything about the specific circumstances surrounding your son, so this is intended as a more general point. A strong side reaction to a drug may not have anything to do with autism directly, but could be due to other genes--presumably the drug is affecting multiple types of cell networks, and there could be thousands of genes involved with these networks. There could be a genetic variation in one or more of these genes that makes your son particularly vulnerable to side effects.
In the "personalized medicine" grand vision, there would be a scientifically based body of knowledge about what each of the 30,000 or so human genes actually does. (Right now, there's no clue about the function of many thousands of these genes.) Biologists would also know how genes work together in cellular networks, what makes networks get screwed up so that malfunctions happen, and how various types of malfunctions can be correlated with specific genetic variations. Basically, more needs to be made clear about how cellular networks are supposed to work when healthy. Then, in terms of drugs, it would be great to know which drugs are most effective and most safe for restoring disturbed cellular networks back to health. And it would be clear which genetic variations make a given drug more or less effective or safe, so mistakes in what is prescribed would happen far less often. The goal would be to make the drugs much more selective and specific, that is, better targeted to the exact problem the drug is supposed to fix.
Okay, we're talking grand vision, right? Along with all the above, each person would have their genome (their DNA for the genes) sequenced, so the best therapeutic decisions could be made because they would be specifically tailored to the person. Ideally, problems in cellular networks could be caught at the earliest stages -- by putting together knowledge about one's genetic susceptibility to various health problems with non-invasive tests to monitor what is actually going on in the body.
Um, we're not there yet.
There are some examples, such as the BRCA1/2 genes associated with higher risk of breast cancer, and some drugs whose effectiveness can be fairly well predicted based on a test for genetic variation.
For more info on personalized medicine, see:
http://www.personalizedmedicinecoalition...erview.php
As for autism genes, I know of no genes that have been definitively associated with autism across the whole spectrum. Autism is genetic, and maybe also partly environmental, because brain development is genetic, and also partly environmental--but what specific genes and variations within these genes explain autism is, as best I can tell from literature searches, still not known.
Sorry--hope this wasn't too long-winded. I'm sort of interested in this stuff.
Of course we still have to define what a normal healthy person is first before we can start figuering out what a normal healthy cellular network is suppose to be.
Oh-oh, if this is true, biology may be in big trouble.
Biology currently relies a great deal on so-called model systems, like yeast and fruit flies or mice, from which extrapolations to the physiology of human cells can be made in some cases--the idea being that while organisms such as human beings and fruitflies are quite different, many of the cellular processes inside these organisms are similar. Or, for humans, one can still do investigations of cells that have been cultured and learn much about the functions of genes, always keeping in mind that what appears to be true for a group of cells may not be true for the entire living creature. It's sort of an issue of levels--cells versus a person.
But maybe you're right, Dark Code--the distinctions between health and disease may be easier to figure out than distinctions among different types of neurological wiring, some of which are currently defined as "normal."
This is all complicated and I wish I understood it, really, but I don't.
I find I need twice as much of a lot of drugs to get the same effect. Codeine and ibuprofen for instance. Some, like Paracetamol, will barely have an effect at all.
Could there in fact be more then one "correct" model system.
The fact is when you do studies, first one starts with some questions you want answered and with other questions one assumps to know the answer to already. Like if your asking "Why is A like B", your assuming that the question "Are A and B alike" is yes. Of course the questions we want answered tend to be more complex and the questions we assume to know the answer to already tend to be many and more complex.
And so the answers can be wrong--not so much because they are false but because they missed key parts of the complexity inherent to the questions. Analogies focus on similarities and hide differences between things being compared--so when a difference is discovered to be important--oops, the analogy is shown to have been perhaps the wrong way to think about the problem. This all makes research hard, but interesting.
Hey, Dark Code, referring to another thread, where you said you had no interests---have you considered philosophy of biology?
But maybe you're right, Dark Code--the distinctions between health and disease may be easier to figure out than distinctions among different types of neurological wiring, some of which are currently defined as "normal."
This bit makes me think you misunderstood me. I actually think it would be far easier to tell the difference between types of neurological wiring than it would be to then judge the neurological wiring and say certain wirings are healthy and certain ones are diseased. The first being more objective and the later being more biased/subjective.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I don't think we disagree. By health and disease above, I was referring more to standard diseases, like arthritis or cancer. That is, one can presumably figure out relatively easily when such a disease exists (although I'm not really sure about this) because there would be more agreement over what the non-diseased state of being looks like. With respect to neurological wiring, the matter seems less clear to me, for the reason you suggest--what is normal?
In case anyone's interested, the following link gives a fairly technical overview of different types of vaccines.
http://pathmicro.med.sc.edu/lecture/vaccines.htm
Here's how I understand it. The purpose of a vaccine is to stimulate a person's immune system to make antibodies against infectious viruses or microorganisms so that he or she will be far less likely to become ill if they are exposed to the virus or microorganism later. This isn't done by changing the human DNA in the genome. Instead, it's done by amplifying the population of immune cells capable of responding to the protein signals put out by the infectious agent the vaccine is designed for. These immune cells already exist before the vaccine is given, but at a low level.