r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Feb 08 '25

Neuroscience Specific neurons that secrete oxytocin in the brain are disrupted in a mouse model of autism, neuroscientists have found. Stimulating these neurons restored social behaviors in these mice. These findings could help to develop new ways to treat autism.

https://www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/research_news/rr/20250207_1/index.html
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u/bigasssuperstar Feb 08 '25

Scientists' presumptions that what looks like autism in their judgment of mouse behaviour is the same thing as what they think looks like autism in human behaviour is still stuck in the idea that what makes humans autistic can be understood from analysis of behaviour by non-autistic people.

IOW, they think they understand human autism; they think mouse autism is that, too; they think helping mouse autism will help autistic humans. But I don't believe they understand human autism at the start of that chain.

I don't question the methods they're using to test their hypotheses, but this is so many steps removed from autistic adults and what they say about their experience of the world that I don't trust it to be applicable to human autism.

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u/Solwake- Feb 09 '25

You're absolutely correct about the limitations of mouse models of human health conditions, especially ones related to behaviour. There is always a tendency to over-attribute mouse findings to humans both on the science communication side and the lay population side, because it's exciting and you want people to read the article. There is also the whole ethics of "treating autism" ofc, but we won't get into that.

In science, a model is a model is a model. In this case, the valproic acid exposure rodent model is a pragmatic tool to approximately explore one sliver of the phenomenon of autism. It's used as a model because we have strong evidence that valproic acid exposure in humans leads to one kind of autism in humans and that exposure in mice leads to consequences that in some ways looks like autism at the behavioural level AND physiological level. While there is always talk of "treatment", this kind of science is also a tool we use to better understand human autism, because as you rightly point out, there's still a lot we don't know. It's much faster to find something interesting in a rodent model and then develop a safe/ethical way to look for the same thing in humans to see if it means anything for human autism. No scientist worth their salt would draw conclusions about the human condition based findings in a rodent model like this. It's just one step in a very long chain towards human research.

The broader issue with this kind of research imo has more to do with how autism is over-medicalized and therefore research priorities, funding, and overall framing is geared towards answering research questions about the "dysfunctional aspects" of autism.