August 26, 2020
New Study Points to Abnormal Cholesterol Metabolism Association with Autism
Using DNA analyses of brain samples, a team of scientists from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University has recently established a link between lipid dysfunction and autism. The researchers assert that dyslipidemia is a new subtype of autism, which they maintain is caused by a cluster of genes which regulate cholesterol metabolism and brain development. While confident in their findings, the authors acknowledge that their new discovery leads to new questions, two of the most critical being, how do lipid variations cause neurodevelopmental dysfunction and could repairing lipid metabolism improve disease outcomes?
