Researchers have reversed autism symptoms in mice

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Read also the links below at the bottom of the article...

Some things I learned from that article (thank you so much for posting, Loborojo):

-Some drugs can now turn on/off genes (uhhh what?)
-Taking Tamoxifen can treat breast cancer, gynecomastia, bipolar disorder, autism in 1 percent of people, and a lot of other things
-1 percent of autistic people are missing something called SHANK3, which is a protein used to make brain cells and synapses. Not having this protein does not necessarily cause any problems at all. Your body would just make do without it. The researchers are suppressing SHANK3 in these mice and then giving them Tamoxifen to see if their "autism" improves. Apparently it does.

My opinion as a sociologist- you can't assume that the mice are "autistic" because we can't put the same social values on mice that we do on humans. They could be experiencing the same physical sensitivities that humans do when they are on the autism spectrum, but, again, we can't ask them so who knows. It's difficult to compare mice to humans. You would really have to test this ON humans to know anything.

I think we should all keep an eye on this Tamoxifen thing.

I agree with your sociologists instinct. And from a medical perspective too. No symptom described was in any way unique to autism, so why single out autism for the headline? Being told that 1% of autistic people lack the gene is hardly a huge re-assurance either - what is the incidence of this gene omission in the general population? With what margin for error? If you round to the nearest per-cent, 1% could be pretty much any non-zero number!

I also stopped when I got to the phrase "neuro-degenerative disorders like autism". There's is nothing degenerative about autism - if there were, we would get worse as we aged, which is predominantly not the case. If they mean to imply that the treatment might also be suitable for patients with, say, Alzheimer's disease, that should be more explicit. As it stands, it gives the impression of a factual error about autism. If that's just an assumption made by a PR person of some kind who handles the scientists media presence, we have to ask why such people allowed to hold such a position, when they are apparently not even checking their own facts.