Thanks to researchers at Warwick University in the United Kingdom, we may be able to diagnose Autism with far greater accuracy than ever before.
That’s because these researchers have developed a brand new diagnosis test. And this test has the ability to find Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) protein changes in the patient’s blood and urine samples.
Dr. Rabbani of the Warwick University and her team have been trying out their new test by collecting samples of blood and urine of 38 children, ages 5-12, who have been given an ASD diagnosis.
They also took samples of blood and urine from another group of 31 children in the same age range that did not have ASD.
Through using this test, the researchers found connection between ASD and damage to certain proteins in the samples’ plasma (aka the fluid which carries white and red blood cells throughout the body).
According to Medical News Today:
Of the several blood and urine tests that the scientists developed, the most accurate one found that children with ASD had higher levels of a compound called dityrosine and another class of compounds called advanced glycation end-products (AGEs).
“Dityrosine is a marker of oxidation damage, and AGEs are the result of glycation, which is a process wherein sugars combine with amino acids, the “building blocks of proteins.”
Dr. Rabbani and colleagues then fed this information into a computer algorithm, which resulted in a diagnostic test with 92 percent sensitivity. Sensitivity refers to the ability of a medical test to accurately identify people who have a disease.”
Dr. Rabbani is hopeful of these findings, and says they may lead to earlier ASD intervention and diagnosis.
She is also optimistic that this test will help lead to improvements in ASD diagnoses, and that it may even begin to show new causes of ASD that doctors were previously not testing for.
