Study Linking Autism to 'Male Brain' Retracted, Replaced

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The authors of a study that claimed to find a link between typical male brain anatomy and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have retracted it and replaced it with a dramatically changed version after finding an error in their methodology.



The article, published in April 2017 in JAMA Psychiatry and reported by Medscape Medical News at that time, contained "serious errors," writes lead author Christine Ecker, PhD, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in a letter published in the journal today.

The study authors "found that the vast majority (79.6%) of women with ASD were allocated to the category of phenotypic male individuals."


https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/910982

It was Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University who originally proposed the Extreme Male Brain hypothesis, and not the researchers listed here. If it's wrong, I'm glad to see it discarded, but I wouldn't want to see it discarded for political correctness reasons.

And in November of last year we got this:

Extreme male brain theory of autism confirmed

Go with the most recent study, but only if (1) it was performed by real scientists trained in that particular field of research, (2) it was independently confirmed by real scientists trained in that particular field of research, and (3) published in a well-established peer-review journal dedicated to that particular field of research.

I object to the word "confirmed." A better one is "corroborated." "Confirm" sounds too close to "proved," which I think would be overstating the case.

Has the 'male brain' theory been disproved , or is this just a retraction due to a technical error ? I do wonder how the theory gels with the supposedly higher rates of gender dysphoria among those with ASD.

"The second misinterpretation is that autistic people are hyper-male. Again, this is not the case. While our latest study shows that autistic people, on average, have a shift towards a masculinised profile of scores on empathy and systemising tests, they are not extreme males in terms of other typical sex differences. For example, they are not extremely aggressive, but tend to be gentle individuals.

So autistic people are not hyper-male in general."
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/extr ... -confirmed

"extreme male" in the study means they score higher in systemising tests

The Systemising Quotient (SQ). Systemizing is the drive to analyse systems or construct systems.
https://www.aspietests.org/sq/index.php
Maybe it is just a way of compensating for the inability to read social situations.

According to https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/EQSQ.php my EQ is 24 and SQ is 4. I'm not sure the SQ is a good measure of systemising .