Fear, Digestion, and Allergies - Autism Explained

hey guys today marks the fifth in the series i am doing all this month on explaining lesser talked about parts of autism and i left yesterday off saying that today i was going to cover fear being difference and increased fear response and autism the digestion problems in autism and the decreased rate of allergic responses in autism things that sound like they have absolutely nothing to do with each other but actually do so for today we're going to need to be talking about hormones and four hormones in particular um ones that don't get talked about all that often or do but only like one or two of their effects so assuming you know very little about this hormones are chemicals in the body that are responsible for signaling um kind of like a less fast version of the nervous system so they'll still relay messages throughout the body triggering certain things but it's not the ultra quick like oh you see something and immediately process it kind of thing they're more efficient less quick but incredibly important nearly every single form of life has some level of hormones going on even outside of the animal kingdom one of these hormones is histamine which you almost certainly recognize as having something to do with allergies and you would be correct but it has a lot more to do with that see nature likes being really really efficient and so if it can figure out how to reuse something for multiple purposes it's going to histamine has roles in regulating blood pressure and that's actually where the allergic response comes from at least part of it histamine has sort of two components there um but by causing your blood vessels to dilate or get bigger uh it helps certain chemicals uh sort of fall out of your blood and get picked up by the lymphatic system swept out of the body so it's i mean that's that's sort of why it gets used as part of the immune response and shows up with allergies but it that that blood pressure um role is useful for other reasons as well and i'll touch more on that after we cover the four hormones and i start talking about what they have in common so then the one everybody really knows is the nasal response that you get a runny nose tend to be a bit itchy um eyes get a little bit watery that kind of thing now i'm not going to be citing with specific studies there's a lot for this one but in there is findings that when well controlled for allergies are shown to only exist in about 9.4 percent of people with autism which sounds high except that allergies show up in 30 to 40 percent of the population you are three times less likely or a third less likely a third as likely um to have allergies if you're autistic now there are some studies that say the allergic response or more particularly the uh prevalence of asthma is more common in the autistic why i said good controls and this will be a repeated thing throughout this series figured that out yet is that and the studies do say this which is surprising that they don't realize their own mistake these samples that they are using the parents of individuals with autism are more likely to be smokers and so that throws the whole thing off because now you're looking at okay when you combine autism and parents who smoke which means likely second-hand exposure to smoke how do the asthma and allergy rates uh uh how are they affected this is why uh what good controls are important you only want to be looking at how does autism affect allergic response and like i said seems to be about 9.4 versus 30 to 40. so quite a bit lower histamine also has roles in your sleep wake cycle and how alert you are i wasn't kidding when i said but nature likes to be really efficient with reusing things and then histamine also has roles with the production of gastric acid produce more histamine get more gastric acid or your stomach acid which is obviously an important thing in being able to digest the food you eat you don't have enough stomach acid you're going to have a hard time digesting the foods that gastric acid is used to digest next up we have acetylcholine which is also a regulator of blood pressure also alertness not so much with the sleep wake cycle but it does have that shared role with how alert you are overall similarly with attention uh those two have a lot to do with each other but they are technically different things um acetylcholine also has a role with your urination and again with gastric acid but also with saliva now histamine doesn't have too much of an effect with saliva but acetylcholine does both of them share with the gastric acid next up we have vasopressin specifically in humans it's arginine vasopressin although others and other animals this again has a role with regulating blood pressure again with the sleep wake cycle again with urination but also another curveball one with social bonding and i'll get into specifically what is meant by that because there's actually a surprising amount of nuance when it comes to what a pro social hormone really is and then lastly we have oxytocin the love hormone although several months ago i had ranted on twitter about how we really need to stop calling it the love hormone there's a lot of stuff going on there that it's actually pretty complicated but oxytocin shares an effect on your urination unsurprisingly with social bonding and then also how you perform facial analysis so obviously enough a lot of this is tightly tied together but also is going to be building up on stuff we've talked about before so to sort of summarize the general effects these hormones have we're talking about regulating the rest and digest versus flight or flight states not the fight-or-flight response that would be from catecholamines like epinephrine and norepinephrine but the state so what i mean by that is if you're in the fight-or-flight state you're you know paying more attention to what's going on your gastrointestinal motility is down because why would it need to be you're more in the like hey i'm out hunting not hey i'm eating and need to be moving that um you're going to be paying more attention to what's going on around you you are going to be more tense um those kinds of things it's the state not the actual response the response what you'd have after something startles you or oh hey that's prey i need to start chasing down obviously it doesn't really apply to humans in modern society but that this biology is still there and still relics from how things used to be next up is the share a lot of role in social bonding and specifically what i mean by this because for a good while it was thought that oxytocin especially and vasopressin to a lesser extent were just kind of pro-social the more of them you had the more sociable you'd be end of story rather nuanced i know i do have a link down in the video description for the specific claim oxytocin in particular although this was found a little bit with vasopressin specifically how the social bonding works is it causes you to bind more closely to your in-group or especially your romantic partner uh or your child and simultaneously to develop an anxiety or lack of trust towards individuals in the out group so what rather than just saying like pro-social what i think is a good way to characterize the role of these hormones as far as sociality goes is that it causes you to be more group oriented or more clique oriented rather than more of like egalitarian everybody on equal footing that's has actually very major implications in how autism works um i'm going to finish summarizing these and then i'll talk specifically in how that ties how how all of this ties into autism particularly but then considering what i've said about how many of these have effects on gastric acid production and saliva production there are some lesser foundations um roles in how they have to do with gastric fertility so that would be the peristalsis or sort of squeezing contractions that the intestines do that help move everything through your body that is less pronounced so this winds up leading to several issues but primarily constipation you can digest your food as well you can't move that less digested food as good through your stomach through your through your gi tract and constipation is an incredibly widely reported problem with autism it got ignored for the longest time two of the studies that i linked down have reported rates of constipation upwards of 80 percent which is extremely common um it is prevalent enough that it probably should be considered part of the diagnostic criteria uh not being constipated not autistic clearly roughly 20 don't present constipation then you can be autistic and not constipated but that's another one of those identifying factors that makes it clear that okay this person is autistic it's not that they're like weren't taught how to socialize properly by their parents there's more going on here clearly it's a useful little uh tip um this may although i'm not entirely certain be a significant part in why the autistic tend to be much more picky eaters although sensory things are also playing a role there um but obviously enough you learn very well whether you're autistic or not what foods agree with you what ones don't and so chances are this is a huge part of why the autistic kind of picky eaters you learn what is easy easier for your atypical gastrointestinal tract to still digest what isn't going to get you constipated as much so tying these to autism in particular i had had for a little bit but it's delve much more into that the vision in particular something a lot of people not non-autistic people have commented about uh autistic people and how the eyes sort of are in conversation is it's like we're not paying attention to the individual um we are i had a girlfriend regularly they tried to imply that i wasn't paying attention to her and i can recite word for word um what she just said to me after a few times that i just kind of sunk in that like yeah i am actually paying attention to you i i'm listening attentively um she had some insecurities about that too there were confounding factors but um and paying attention but but it's like we're constantly scanning the background which is why it seems like we're not interested uh this often gets described as being like oh easily distracted and maybe the child also has adhd which is possible adhd is legitimately seen more often with autism but what i want to propose husbands by some research but um as an alternative explanation for that that probably explains more cases than adhd does is what i was just saying about how these hormones have a role in the fight or flight versus rest digest states if you are more vigilant if you are more on guard if you are you know less relaxed you're going to be paying attention to what's going on around you more vigilant not necessarily hyper vigilant but you are more vigilant you're going to be scanning around for threats not because you're necessarily in fear all the time that fear response isn't necessarily being triggered but you are in that more fight or flight um this is almost certainly why these specific visual patterns are scanning the background behind the person being talked to and not just staring off at random things that happen to me moving around that sounds more adhd like scanning the background or the other thing i've seen is sometimes scanning entryways or exits a lot more like vigilance lastly the social bonding and facial analysis we've sort of talked about this from different perspectives in previous videos but think about what i had said about oxytocin in particular in how it affects social bonding higher levels of oxytocin cause you to bind stronger to your specific partner child or just in general you're in group lower levels cause you to be more egalitarian towards everybody not tightly fitting into your group but being more okay with all groups similarly the low levels of oxytocin that cause you to be more tightly bound to your group also cause higher levels of distrust for other groups this is going to make it seem like autistic individuals are less devoted to the in-group and there is some validity to that but that's not the same thing as being a threat to the ingroup however because of the higher levels of distrust towards people in the outgroup what winds up happening is because you are not devoted to the group even though you are not opposed to it you are going to be more likely to be labeled by that group as an outsider and therefore something to be afraid of what i am describing is the hormones responsible for the moral tribes phenomenon and the double empathy problem see those aren't just supported in social psychology they actually wind up spanning multiple different fields findings in endocrinology and pharmacodynamics have actually supported those social psychology phenomena as well this also explains numerous not diagnostically relevant uh attributes about the autism about the autistic but still very widely reported that the autistic tend to be less judgmental towards others differences and that makes sense with what i described about oxytocin because you're less group bound and more people overall but another i lost my train of thought i hate when this happens i'm probably gonna forget to edit this out of the video um i will just skip straight to the facial analysis part of that then uh oxytocin in particular and uh it seems like vasopressin doesn't have this role does alter how you do facial analysis and particularly causes you to scan the background less and focus more on the sort of key triangle the between the eyes and mouth higher levels of oxytocin cause you to pay more attention lower levels like you see with the autistic you tend to scan everything relatively because paying attention to the background you're being vigilant obviously not as good for making it look like you're paying attention to people not over prioritize i feel like it's over prioritizing but who heavily prioritized key triangle it's very possible between the effects low levels of oxytocin has on trust of others in general so low levels of oxytocin has a higher level of trust for people not in your in group so causes you to trust people in general more we talked about that last time but also further evidence that the trustworthiness is definitely something assessed in the face and further backs up why this is being missed in the autistic as you can tell especially after this video a lot of this stuff is not behavioral a lot of this stuff has neurological or endocrinological hormones or things that act like hormones roots this has obviously been a more medical heavy discussion so if you need anything explained better or in different ways please ask down in the comments but i hopefully did a good job explaining this um next video what i plan on doing is talking about the fear response in particular um because it's a great segue into explaining how emotions present differently in the autistic and unfortunate consequences of that because a lot of the time we get told we're faking even though it can be proven that we're not that causes a hell of a lot of problems but until then have a good one guys