SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnoses have been rising over the past decades, with one in 36 children identified with the condition in 2020 compared to one in 150 back in 2000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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It’s a broad diagnosis that covers patients who don’t perceive themselves as having a disability to people who require around-the-clock care, according to Dr. Matthew State, a child psychiatrist and president of the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute at UCSF Health. He joined KCBS Radio’s Alice Wertz on “As Prescribed” along with Dr. Nevan Krogan, director of the Quantitative Biosciences Institute (QBI) at UCSF to discuss research they are doing to better understand the biology of ASD.
“It encompasses individuals who have symptoms in two major domains,” said State. “One is in their social communication… their communication interaction in the social world. And then a second set of symptoms that revolve around highly restricted interests or repetitive stereotyped behaviors.”
State explained this research is primarily focused on a subset of patients who fall more on the severe end of the ASD spectrum.
“We’re leveraging the set of genes that Matt and his colleagues had identified several years ago, and we’re actually studying the proteins,” said Krogan.
While studying the genetics of autism spectrum disorders is important, Krogan and State said that focusing on proteins could have new practical implications for clinical care.
“This is important, as I said, not just because the proteins are the functional units of the cell, but most drugs that are developed actually target proteins,” Krogan explained. “So, a deeper understanding of the underlying biology at the protein level of... diseases or disorders, is crucial for ultimately developing novel therapies. In my opinion, that's what we’ve done here in this study.”
There’s much more to study when it comes to ASD, Krogan and State said. In the future, they hope this research into the proteins linked to ASD may also be able to help patients with other conditions, such as schizophrenia, OCD, anxiety disorder and more.
“The sky’s the limit now, using this pipeline,” said Krogan. “And we are going to be applying it across many different disease areas and hopefully giving a lot of different therapeutic input for future studies.”
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Listen to this week’s “As Prescribed” to learn more. You can also listen to last week’s episode to learn about a new treatment for scoliosis here.