American doctors have developed a method to screen for autism in newborns, based on the observation of the mother’s placenta. It could be the first biological marker of this disease.
What if the placenta could help doctors identify future autistic people? This is not a divinatory practice but a new approach, presented last week in the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry.
It was developed by Professor Harvey Kliman of Yale Medical School in the United States. This doctor has been interested for years in the placentas and their potential role in the development of behavioral diseases. He notably analyzed in 2006 the placenta of 13 autistic children. One observation intrigued him: the surface of these placentas is full of crevices, as if they were damaged. An idea then came to him: what if these cavities could, from birth, predict the onset of a form of autism? But faced with the difficulty of obtaining placentas (the disease being diagnosed only after several years), his experience stops.
It could have stopped there, but he then learns that other doctors at Davis University in California are studying the placenta of mothers said to be at risk. These are mainly women who have already had an autistic child, and have just given birth to a second child. Blessed bread for Harvey Kliman, who can then resume his observations on 217 cuts of the placenta (of which 117 are at risk, and the others witnesses).
Its results are clear: more than two-thirds of the control placentas show no cavity, and no section contains more than two. Conversely, two thirds of the placentas at risk do have a rough surface and contain up to fifteen asperities. In other words, an at-risk placenta has up to 8 times more crevices than a healthy placenta, which makes it easy to distinguish these two cases.
Listen to Danièle Langloys, president of the association Autism France ” We do not know of a biological marker for autism. ”
While many diseases can be identified biologically, for autism, therefore, there is still no reliable clue. Doctors must therefore rely on a behavioral diagnosis, without being able to rely on any biological data.
Listen to Danièle Langloys : ” The sooner we do it, the more we limit the additional handicap related to autism “.
The other advantage of this method, if it were to be used, is the time saving it allows. This would save a few precious months, which can be of crucial importance. Even in parents at risk, in whom the disease is nevertheless expected, the diagnosis sometimes arrives late.
As encouraging as it is, this study does raise some questions. It is not known, for example, to what extent these placental inclusions are specific to autism: they can also herald other behavioral disorders. To elucidate this question, further studies will be necessary.
Be that as it may, the challenge of discovering reliable and early biological tools to detect autism, which affects nearly 650,000 people in France, remains intact. This is also one of the major axes promised by the Ministry of Health, which will soon unveil the 3rd autism plan.
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