Rhonda Patrick on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1054
“are five times more likely to have antibodies floating around in their blood against fetal brain proteins”
What the evidence says
Research led by the Van de Water lab at UC Davis has repeatedly found that a subset of mothers of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) carry IgG autoantibodies reactive against specific fetal brain proteins, a phenomenon now called maternal autoantibody-related (MAR) autism. Studies report this reactivity in roughly 10-23% of mothers of autistic children versus 0-2% of mothers of typically developing children, depending on the specific antibody combination tested, corresponding to odds ratios ranging from around 5-fold up to more than 20-fold for particular protein pairs, so a "five times" figure sits within the range reported for some comparisons but understates the higher odds ratios found for other combinations and overstates the finding's reach across autism mothers generally, since MAR-specific reactivity has been identified in only a minority (roughly one in five to one in ten) of ASD cases studied, not most or all mothers of autistic children. Animal studies injecting these maternal antibodies into pregnant rodents and primates have produced autism-relevant behavioral changes in offspring, supporting a plausible biological mechanism, but no study has established that these antibodies cause autism in the general population; MAR autism is treated as one biomarker-defined subtype among several candidate contributing factors, not an explanation for autism broadly. The underlying research program is active and has not been retracted, with validation studies continuing into 2026, and is generally regarded in the field as a legitimate but still preliminary biomarker line of research.