News-Letter

Not only did the team discover that the behavioral changes were more pronounced in the mice injected with the antibodies of the mothers of autistic children, but the team also found that the course of the disorder's development followed a similar pattern to that seen in the human disorder: Symptoms intensified as the mice aged. This is similar to the clinical progression of autism, in which a child will develop normally until a certain point, when regression usually begins to occur.

Unfortunately, it is overly tempting to assume that these antibodies are the direct cause of autism-spectrum disorders, just because they seemingly contribute to the development of certain behavioral patterns.

However, this is probably not the case. In a more likely scenario, autism is the result of several confluent factors, including but not limited to abnormal immune responses, environmental factors, genetic influences etc.

This finding does, however, further demonstrate that certain maternal antibodies do cross the placenta into the baby's environment, and that these antibodies seem to play a role in the development of the disease, possibly through induced inflammation of the brain and subsequent cell death due to a faulty immune response.

Further research is needed to determine which proteins or brain regions are affected by these antibodies, as well as to see whether these antibodies can be blocked. This may eventually lead to the ability to inhibit their transfer from mother to offspring, decreasing the risk of the child developing an autism-spectrum disorder.

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