Analyzing a stool sample could one day make it possible to diagnose autism much earlier and much more quickly, allowing patients to be treated more quickly.
At least, this is what we can hope for from work carried out at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the results of which were recently published in the medical journal Nature Biology.
The study authors examined stool samples from 1,627 children ages 1 to 13, including some who had autism. They got a comprehensive picture of the samples by analyzing them for bacteria, viruses, fungi and single-celled microorganisms called archaea.
They found that 51 types of bacteria, 18 viruses, 14 archaea and seven fungi were different in autistic children. The artificial intelligence was then able to identify autistic children with 82% accuracy.
“The stool examination they did is absolutely not simple,” said Dr.r Mickael Bouin, who is a gastroenterologist at the CHUM. It is very complex and there are not many teams in the world that are capable of doing it at the moment.
At the very least, he added, this study opens a new avenue “to try to better understand the disease.” It could also one day make it possible to screen children more quickly in order to prioritize certain ones, he added.
“Autism remains a developmental disorder,” recalled Dr.r Bouin: The diagnosis should always be validated by an autism expert, not by an expert in the intestinal microbiota.
Previous studies have already shown that autistic people have a different gut microbiota, he said. Experiments in mice have produced similar results, in addition to showing that you can reduce symptoms in autistic mice by changing their microbiota and that you can give healthy mice symptoms of autism by giving them the gut microbiota of an autistic mouse.
“It’s a chicken and egg question,” said Dr.r Bouin. But we feel that [le microbiote intestinal] has an effect on the brain, and we know this for several diseases.
Indeed, the authors of the study admit that it is not currently possible to say whether autism is responsible for this different microbiota, or whether the different microbiota is responsible for autism.
But in light of their findings, the authors believe that the microbiota may influence the severity or expression of symptoms of autism spectrum disorder. This raises the possibility that patients could one day be offered personalized interventions to give them a more diverse gut microbiota.