Study: Weak Synapses May Be Cause of Autism

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The New York Sun

Harvard researchers have discovered half a dozen new genes involved in autism that suggest the disorder strikes in a brain that can’t properly form new connections.

The findings also may help explain why intense education programs do help some autistic children — because certain genes that respond to experience weren’t missing, they were just stuck in the “off” position.

But the study’s bigger message is that autism is too strikingly individual to envision an easy gene test for it. Instead, patients are turning out to have a wide variety, almost a custom set, of gene defects.

“Almost every kid with autism has their own particular cause of it,” the chief of genetics at Children’s Hospital Boston, who led the research published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, Dr. Christopher Walsh, said.

Dr. Walsh’s team took a new tack turned to the Middle East, a part of the world with large families and a tendency for cousins to marry, characteristics that increase the odds of finding rare genes.

They recruited 88 families with cousin marriages and a high incidence of autism, from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. They compared the DNA of family members to search for what are called recessive mutations — where mom and dad can be healthy carriers of a gene defect but a child who inherits that defect from both parents gets sick.

In some of the families, they found large chunks of missing DNA regions that followed that recessive rule. The missing regions varied among families, but they affected at least six genes that play a role in autism.

Here’s why this matters: All the genes seem to be part of a network involved in a basic foundation of learning — how neurons respond to new experiences by forming connections between each other, called synapses.

Associated Press

Eating Tomatoes May Protect Skin From the Sun

Experts at Manchester and Newcastle Universities in Britain found the fruit improved the skin’s ability to protect itself against ultra-violet light.

Researchers studied the skin of 20 people, half of whom were given five tablespoons of standard tomato paste, the equivalent of five or six cooked tomatoes, with 10 grams of olive oil. The other half of the sample received just olive oil.

The experiment was carried out over 12 weeks and the group was exposed to ultra-violet light at the beginning and the end of the trial.

The results, presented to the British Society for Investigative Dermatology in Oxford, found that those who had eaten the paste had 33% more protection against sunburn, which can lead to skin cancer.

“You don’t have to eat an excessive amount of tomatoes to experience the effect, if you are already eating a tomato-based diet with plenty of things like spaghetti and pizza toppings,” a dermatology scientist at Newcastle University, Mark Birch-Machin, said. “Eating tomatoes is going to have this benefit in the sun, but it is still important to use conventional methods of protecting yourself against the sun such as sunscreens, shade, and clothing.”

The Daily Telegraph


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