In this episode, I list the myriad of linked comorbidities from a physical perspective caused by autism. Autism affects more than just the brain. Everything that affects the brain also affects the body. I absolutely encourage you to learn to become more aware of your body states - and gain an emotional awareness of self in doing so. There are a lot of internal physical things that doctors ignore and don't understand when it comes to autism - especially autism in women. A few of the most notable, besides sensory issues which I've spoken about in detail in previous podcasts: 1) Digestive Issues / IBS 2) Delayed reaction time, delayed emotional processing 3) Increased inflammatory biomarkers / joint pain 4) Sleep terrors / Sleep issues 5) Increased prostaglandins
In this episode, I list the myriad of linked comorbidities from a physical perspective caused by autism.
Autism affects more than just the brain. Everything that affects the brain also affects the body.
I absolutely encourage you to learn to become more aware of your body states - and gain an emotional awareness of self in doing so.
There are a lot of internal physical things that doctors ignore and don't understand when it comes to autism - especially autism in women.
A few of the most notable, besides sensory issues which I've spoken about in detail in previous podcasts:
1) Digestive Issues / IBS
2) Delayed reaction time, delayed emotional processing
3) Increased inflammatory biomarkers / joint pain
4) Sleep terrors / Sleep issues
5) Increased prostaglandins
So today I'm going to talk about the physical aspects of autism. There are a lot of internal physical differences in the autistic body compared to neurotypical people, and I would say that the majority of these differences are not visible on the outside, so someone could be struggling with it and you would never know.
So without further ado, I'm going to start listing them.
In autism, basically it's very common to have hyper-extensibility—that means each of your joints is extra flexible. Although it sounds like this would be a really cool, good thing to have, it actually kind of sucks, because that means that the joints end up getting air trapped in between them, and so then you have to release that air by moving it or shaking it. And I think that a lot of autistic stimming comes from that.
Having that hyper-extension of joints can be quite painful sometimes, like especially when you're working out and you're using the lat pull-down. Sometimes I'll be doing the lat pull-down and my elbows will literally lock up, and it's—it's pretty crazy. And I'm not even talking about an extension from—from this, like so there are some other autism-related issues, Ehlers-Danlos for example (EDS for short). This is kind of an extension of that; it's like joint problems, but a hundred times worse. But even for someone who's autistic who doesn't have EDS, they can still have slight hyperextension of the joints, and this can cause a lot of issues.
Some other physical attributes with autistic people—I'm not sure why this is, but it is very common in autism to have a quote "baby face" or to look younger than you actually are. There's not a whole lot of research over why this is, but I think it's pretty interesting. It's kind of funny: when I was growing up with my sister who's three years younger, people always assumed that she was the older sister, which means they were six years off!
Some other physical aspects of autism that are pretty rarely talked about are that there's a significant imbalance of gut flora in the autistic gut. It's really unfortunate. Basically, it means that my whole life I've had digestion problems, constipation problems, certain foods I couldn't eat, sensitivities, you name it. None of this was food-allergy related; if it had been, I probably would have figured it out sooner.
But autistic people really struggle a lot with digestion, and when you start looking at all the ways that digestion impacts your daily lifestyle, it's kind of insane. Every single thing is linked to digestion! Did you know the majority of serotonin is produced in the gut? And if your gut is out of whack, you're not going to be feeling good, you're not going to be sleeping well, and that impacts absolutely everything.
One of my recommended solutions for that that I've found—I'm going to be sharing all this info with you—is this probiotic called Seed. Basically, I did a bunch of research and I found 17 strains of gut flora that are deficient in autism, and I found a commercial product called Seed where there are 17 types of gut flora that I needed. And as soon as I started taking it, literally my sleep improved, I could suddenly eat tomatoes! It's something that just kept getting worse and worse—I used to never be able to eat tomatoes, or I'd be in the fetal position for a couple of hours. Now I can eat tomatoes with no issues.
But even that aside, other physical issues in autism: in the brain, there is a reduced blood-brain barrier, which means that the brain for autistic people is a lot more sensitive to its environment. This means if you're—if you live in a place where you are surrounded by heavy metals, you're going to get more of it in the brain, and it's going to have a lot of negative effects.
Specifically, I'd like to point out copper toxicity, which is one that is quite common from some of the research I found. It indicates that copper can often be much higher in autistic people than in neurotypicals, and one way I've been counteracting this is 50 milligrams of zinc every four days. It is absolutely amazing for balancing out dopamine, and reducing and preventing shutdowns, and really just keeping the brain and the body in check.
And then I think that's—that's another thing I'd like to mention: sometimes it's hard to talk about physical issues because they're so inherently linked to mental changes. The physical body affects the brain, and the brain affects the physical body; one can't be separated from the other. And so I think that it's really important when you're thinking about any physical symptoms you experience that you take the whole system into account. This is something that unfortunately Western modern medicine does not really do. If you're having a headache, they just tell you to take ibuprofen and that's that. But really, it's a kind of a Band-Aid for the actual problems. So much of Western medicine is revolving around getting people to come back to buy more of whatever medicine that they think is going to cure them because it makes money, and basically it's been forgotten that you need to treat the whole system—the system as a whole.
Other physical things in autistic people: vitamin D is extremely commonly deficient in people overall, autistic or not. Vitamin D deficiency is something like—I think 70% of people, at least in the US, are deficient in vitamin D in some way, shape, or form, because it's really hard. It's hard to get enough vitamin D from the sun; your skin can only synthesize like 10% of it. So even if you live in, like, Florida or some place where it's really sunny, you could still be deficient and not even realize it.
And this—I believe this has a lot of links to mood issues and mood imbalances in general, especially in autism though, because in autism vitamin D is even more important to be able to balance out other vitamins, which can be out of sync because of that blood-brain barrier difference.
And on top of that, there are certain other vitamins that significantly help improve the synthesis of vitamin D. That includes vitamin K2 and also magnesium. So I can't recommend magnesium enough in general, but especially for autistic people. Magnesium reduces muscle tension, helps improve sleep, helps improve digestion, helps improve the synthesis of critical vitamins like zinc, vitamin D, and other vitamins that are necessary in general, but especially for autistic people to thrive.
Some of the physical aspects of autism that often go completely overlooked besides gut issues and vitamin deficiencies are inflammatory disorders, specifically autoimmune inflammation diseases.
I have an eye disease in my left eye, and basically it was inflammation of the optic nerve. I started dealing with surgeries from the age of 13—probably had over 30 surgeries in my life—but I've been stable for about eight years. Basically, this is a recurring theme that I see in autistic people across the board: autistic people are very, very prone to autoimmune disorders and disease. And I believe that this is for several reasons.
I think number one is suppressed stimming. When you're not getting the right amount of stimulation and you're not allowing your body to do what it naturally needs to do to balance things out, that comes at a cost. I suppressed my stemming without even realizing that I was for 26 years. And if you look at my entire life, the course of my life, when did I suppress my stemming the most? Definitely in middle school, age 13. People were mean—people were terribly mean. I like, literally when I talk about middle schoolers, it's really hard for me not to refer to them as little demons, because that was my experience in middle school. But basically, people were so mean that if you're even slightly different from anyone at all, people pick up on it and bully you for it. I was severely bullied in elementary school, middle school, and partially in high school, but things got a lot better in high school.
But if you look at when did my eye disease flare up? It flared up—all of it started when I was 13 in middle school, the most stressed period of my entire life. And we know that stress has a direct correlation to autoimmune disorders. And if you look at what causes stress in autistic people: suppressed stimming. This is exactly why so many of these quote "autism therapies" are so harmful, because it forces the autistic person to stop doing anything that might make them appear different to other people, and most of the time that includes stimming. So then you take away the emotional regulation, you take away the physical regulation, and you're just left with someone who's anxious or angry, someone who is just prone to outbursts because there's no other way for their brain and body to handle this.
Or you have issues with sleep terrors. So I had sleep terrors pretty much from birth until I was about 7 years old, and then these sleep terrors went away, and my parents were like, "Great, I guess it's over." Nope! It came back when I was in college, age 18 through 22, almost all four years of my college experience. And I had roommates, by the way. About maybe every two months, I would wake up out of my bed, scream bloody murder, and basically jump out of bed, try to run away from whatever it was trying to get me. And it was traumatic—absolutely traumatic.
Like the height of emotional dysregulation: it is quite like having a seizure; you're not in control of your body when you're having a sleep terror. And in fact, the craziest part of it is that in the morning I wouldn't remember anything ever happened unless someone tried to intervene. So when I was a kid, my parents would rush in: "Are you okay? Are you okay?" you know? And then them doing that would freak me out even more, causing even more emotional dysregulation. In fact, if they just hadn't intervened at all—when this happened when I was an adult and my roommate was out of town, I didn't even remember it until I checked some sleep recordings in the morning and realized that I'd had another sleep terror. But having no memory of this at all was the strangest thing.
These sleep terrors were basically a manifestation of my body and brain trying to process all of this sensory trauma, and maybe a little bit of social trauma, but mostly sensory trauma, because I had no outlet for it because I suppressed stimming for 26 years. This is a huge problem.
And I believe that all of this links together with inflammation in the brain. For example, sometimes I'll notice if I'm feeling a particular way about someone from the past—you know, maybe a friend that wasn't really a good friend to me—and I just keep wondering, "You know, what if I could have done something else? What if I could have said something different?" Obviously, the rational part of me knows that that's not a good path to go down, and it doesn't really matter—I have a happy life with people that I care about and who care about me in return, and basically letting bygones be bygones.
But I noticed a pattern, right? Every night at the same time—maybe every three days, it wasn't every night, it was about every three days around the same time—I started feeling this intense feeling, and it was very uncomfortable. But I sat with the feeling because I wanted to understand it and I wanted to know what was going on, and started seeing a pattern: that this was always at the same time. Whenever it would happen, it was usually around like 10:30, 11:00 p.m. And I was like, "This is so weird, this person wasn't even like a significant part of my life, I didn't even know them that long," you know?
And so I started doing some research about it with the right anterior insula in the brain, and I realized, "I think I'm having a flare-up. I think that whenever I feel this way, this part of my brain, the right anterior insula, is actually flaring up, causing inflammation in the brain, causing me to feel this way."
So I started experimenting: whenever I felt that way, I would take two turmeric capsules—I think that was like, five—no, 1,000 milligrams of turmeric. And straight up, it worked! Within, say, 20, 30 minutes, depending on how much water I drank with it, around that amount of time, the feeling went away completely, and I was actually able to integrate what I was feeling and why I was feeling and understanding it. It was insane! It literally reduced the inflammation in my brain, and I felt the difference emotionally speaking.
And so if you're not autistic and you're listening to this, it might be a little bit confusing to hear that, because you're probably thinking, "Well, why would it be hard to know what you're feeling?"
Well, this is something that is unfortunately extremely prevalent in autism, and it's called alexithymia (or alexithymia—there's probably more than one way to pronounce it). Anyway, alexithymia basically means that I have a lot of trouble knowing and recognizing my own internal emotional states.
This is one of the more physical aspects of autism because it also applies to physical states like hunger, thirst, and stuff like that. So most people will eat when they're hungry, drink when they're thirsty, or whatever else, you know? But for me, I have to eat in prevention from a crash, because I know if I don't eat lunch I'm going to feel like crap, it's going to hit me at 4:00 p.m., and I'm going to have no energy and not feel good. That's why I eat lunch; I don't really feel that hunger feeling that most people experience. I mean, I've experienced it before, I know what it feels like, but it's not something that I experience every day, even. And so it can be really hard, because when you don't know what your internal states are mapping to and you don't know what your feelings are mapping to, your analytical brain is over here trying to understand what's going on.
To give an example of this: a couple of months ago, someone was texting me something, and I'm texting back, and I think we're having a calm, cool, collected conversation. And then all of a sudden I realize that my heart is racing, and I'm like, "Hm, that's weird. Why is my heart racing? It doesn't make sense. Did I eat something? Did I drink something?"—going through, you know, the 25 questions that I have to ask myself to try to figure out what is this connected to?
And turns out I was anxious! It was such a simple answer, but I didn't even know that I was anxious until 45 minutes after that interaction. There's such a huge delay emotionally speaking.
And this can translate to physical symptoms and physical issues. So like a lot of autistic people really struggle with, like, bladder issues and stuff like that, because if you don't know when you have to go pee, what are you going to do? Luckily, this is something I don't particularly struggle with, but it's a huge problem if you don't have interoception, which is the sense of understanding of your body's states and requirements. If you have low interoception, it makes life really hard. I have to set up little regular times where I drink water every day to remind myself to drink enough water, otherwise that feeling of thirst would only hit me after I'm severely dehydrated, and it—it just would be terrible.
Another hallmark of alexithymia: suppose I'm at the park with a friend, and the friend is neurotypical, and a cold wind blows by. The neurotypical person will be like, "Okay, I feel cold, so I'm going to put on a jacket." For me, to register that feeling of coldness and then to translate it into an actionable item has a delay of about 30 minutes! So by the time that I think, "Maybe I should put on a jacket," I'm freezing—I'm freezing, freezing cold after that, because that translation from bodily state to "I need to take this action, I need to resolve something" is so delayed. And this delay in processing can cause so many issues.
Autistic people also stereotypically have really bad reaction time. Obviously, there are certain things you can do to help with this, like sports, jumping on a trampoline—any kind of vertical jumping is really great for us—and sports in general can help rewire some of that, but it can make things really hard because, you know, clumsiness. A lot of people just think that they're clumsy.
So many people go through their entire life with all of these random, disconnected health issues, and you go to the doctor and the doctor's like, "Your blood work looks great! You're so healthy! All of this stuff is—is looking great, you don't have to change anything, keep doing what you're doing."
And you're over here like, "But I don't understand! I have sleep terrors once a month. I get sharp headaches that feel like I'm being shot in the head for two seconds before they resolve themselves. I don't know whether I'm hungry, thirsty, tired, or whatever else, and I can't tell you how I'm feeling in a particular moment. What do you mean I'm healthy?"
You know, it's just this—this dissonance. Like you try—you try so hard to tell medical professionals about what you're experiencing, and if you're a—if you're a woman, they just gaslight you, or they just tell you, "Oh, that's just XYZ, it's normal. Like, it's normal."
No, it's not normal to have nine-out-of-ten period pains every single month, to feel like you're dying from your internal organs being stabbed. That's not normal! In fact, that's a huge problem. And that's also tied to autism, because fun fact: in women, prostaglandins are elevated in autism.
So many things are all linked to this one thing. If you look at all of the physical health differences that come with autism, it's really challenging. People think autism is just a mental thing; it's really not. Everything that is mental affects the physical, and everything that is physical affects the mental. And so I've been trying to track all of this and try to figure out all of this, because to be honest, medical professionals aren't doing this. They aren't, either because they don't understand, or because they don't care, or because there's no money—because if you can figure out how to heal yourself, you no longer need to take medicine and you're no longer paying them more money.
Unfortunately, this means that I am literally single-handedly doing this research! I created a Reddit, it's called Autism Girls—if you're not a part of this Reddit already, feel free to join (even if you're not a girl, it is all centered around autism research and understanding, and I am always welcome to have all these ideas challenged). And so I'm trying to basically capture all of these—all of this neuroscience that I'm doing, all of this physical research, everything that I'm doing, I'm trying to capture it all in one place so that it can be challenged, so that I can present it if I ever need it.
Let me just scroll through this and tell you a few other physical things that are linked to autism:
Chronic pain: Can be linked to autism. In a study of 77 women between 19 and 37 years old, 34 (which is 44% of the women) were diagnosed with autism as a main diagnosis, 31 of these had ADHD as a second diagnosis, and chronic pain was reported in 76% of the women! 76% of the women reported chronic pain. Like, it just blows my mind. We have a suffering, vulnerable population of autistic people, especially autistic women, who just can't get care. It's not that they don't have care—you can have all the insurance you want, but if you don't have a doctor that understands your condition and is willing to treat the entire system, then you just don't have care. This is—this is exactly the problem.
CPTSD and Comorbidities: Other things linked to autism include CPTSD and different mental comorbid things like ADHD. ADHD is very common to be both autistic and ADHD; it is often linked.
Resting Face: That one probably is going to sound humorous to some of you, but it's really true: a lot of autistic people, it seems from the perspective of others, that their facial expressions do not match their internal state. And I think that's part of the challenge of why so many autistic people can struggle to understand the emotional states of other people, because if you don't know your own emotional state, how are you even going to begin to start identifying it in someone else unless you go through a specific set of algorithms—an exact analysis, if you will.
Cerebellar Inflammation & Clumsiness: I've already talked about inflammation in the brain, but that is a really big part that is linked to autism. Inflammation of any particular brain area can also have a physical effect: inflammation of the cerebellum, most notably. This is why autistic people have a tendency to run into things and be clumsy. It's not because we want to be clumsy; it's because the cerebellum is literally not functioning correctly, and so it causes a lot of changes with depth perception, to make us think that we're closer or further away from an object than we might think. It can really impact spatial awareness a lot, which can pose a lot of problems.
Hormonal and Receptor Differences: Autism can create 35% less of an estrogen receptor called ER—specifically how cells convert testosterone to estrogen. Aka, autism can increase testosterone and decrease estrogen. I'd say that checks out with a lot of my experiences, but once again, this is all very, very basic research that has mostly been unchallenged unfortunately, so take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt, please.
Cluster Headaches: Headaches, specifically cluster headaches: it feels like you've been shocked by lightning for about two seconds, it's the most painful headache I've ever felt probably, and then it goes away. For me, light—really bright lights—trigger this pretty bad. Luckily it's mostly only a problem for me when it's past 10:00 p.m., but this means that I have to be really careful with bright lights past 10:00 p.m. because it can trigger these horrible, horrible headaches. I talked to someone online who mentioned that they have the same issue, and she said that she had a neurologist who said that this is anxiety processing. I find that really interesting if true—I don't know if that's what it is, but very interesting for sure.
Brain Aging and Cortical Thinning: If you look at all the different brain regions that are impacted by autism, most of the time they have reduced gray matter, and this reduction in gray matter can increase folding, which can basically age the brain more quickly. Specifically, in autism, the basal ganglia—the back part of the brain, the skinny part that connects to the spine—this can thin a lot faster in autism over time from aging. However, there are things you can do to prevent that, like meditation, for example, yoga—all of these things will slow that thinning process down. It's called cortical thinning if you want to look it up. Cortical thinning is a pretty big issue and it can increase neural issues in adulthood in autistic people, but if you create the right habits in your life, you can reverse all these issues.
Another thing that has been incredibly helpful for me is the Wim Hof method. It activates the right anterior insula, which is often deficient or has a disconnect—not deficient like in terms of activity, but deficient in terms of connectivity to other areas. So the Wim Hof method can really balance out a lot of that; it's been extremely helpful for me in reducing inflammation and helping me integrate my emotions in a way that I never had, not to that extent as a kid.
Music, of course, is amazing—everyone knows that, but music in particular can trigger the mirror neuron system in autism based on some very basic underlying research that is not necessarily proven. I found that was really interesting.
Green tea can improve the Purkinje cells, which are missing in the cerebellum—like, our—so the autistic cerebellum has these cells, but we have less of it than neurotypical people. And the cerebellum having reduced activity is one of the hallmarks of autism spectrum disorder. Luckily, green tea can increase that a lot!
Propionic acid, which is commonly found in breads and cheeses and other processed foods: this acid can cause a lot of problems for autistic people. So if you want to reduce your autism symptoms—at least the ones that are debilitating for you—try to reduce glutamates and try to reduce processed food, and eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and more tea. Tea is really, really healthy for us, so you can't go wrong with drinking a ton of tea, especially if you replace coffee with it. Coffee is really not useful for us.
One thing I found really fascinating is that according to a couple of studies, 25% of autistic people have increased serotonin in their bloodstream. This absolutely checks out in my experience, although I do seem to kind of be an outlier in the autistic community simply because I'm very, very, very optimistic about life, which is not something I typically observe in other autistic people. But it might just be, you know, natural variation and stuff like that. It would be really interesting to get some more data on that 25% number—if one in four autistic people has more serotonin, that's pretty awesome!
Other notable things about some physical differences that autism can create: basically, autism can make people who are female more masculinized, and people who are male more feminine, because of the way that the superior frontal gyri are connected to other brain areas. For females, it's more similar to what males experience, and so what this means is that autistic women experience life in terms of sensory perceptions more closely to neurotypical males than neurotypical females. And the reverse is true for autistic men: autistic men tend to experience life more from a sensory perspective more similar to neurotypical women. Obviously it's not exactly the same, and I have a lot of questions about these studies because it's possible that only the outliers were actually diagnosed or recognized as being different, so the sample sizes we have are really not great, but I found that very interesting.
IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome): I've already mentioned a lot of digestion problems in autism, but that is the formal name for it. Wanted to mention that, and then IBS can also reduce GABA, because if you're not digesting things correctly that screws up neurotransmitters, and then if GABA is reduced that increases sensory issues. So it's kind of this—this toxic cycle.
One thing to mention that I forgot to mention about vitamin D: there's a lot of studies that show that vitamin D can regulate a lot of the inflammation biomarkers that are prevalent in autism. There are quite a few autism-related inflammatory biomarkers, and there are a lot of mixed reviews on different things affecting that, but so far the studies that I've read indicate that two of the most helpful things for autism are:
Vitamin D supplementation to reduce those inflammation biomarkers.
Psilocybin mushrooms, which interestingly enough decrease the exact same inflammatory biomarkers that are so prevalent in autism.
This is something of particular interest to me, because if you look at what is the nature of autism from a mental model perspective: reduced global communication. And if you look at what psilocybin does: increases overall global brain communication. I think it's—it's really promising, and I'm excited to see future research about mushrooms in this respect.
But these inflammation markers really, really take a negative toll. Combine that with processing delays, and it makes life tricky sometimes, because you want to—suppose someone says something mean to you, you want to respond to them, you want to stand up for yourself, you want to self-advocate, but you can't because of the delayed processing. You haven't processed the underlying feelings and emotions yet; all of that is left unprocessed, and then one hour later after whatever stressful event it is, suddenly all the perfect responses come into your mind!
It is—it is so hard to be able to deal with situations which inherently require a fast reaction time when you have an emotional processing disorder. It's really, really hard. Meditation can improve that to an extent, but I haven't found anything that 100% resolves this.
And while I wrap up this episode into a close—before I end it, I wanted to list a few other physical symptoms that are prevalent in autism:
Reduced or increased sensitivity to heat and cold
Sleep difficulties, epilepsy, sleep terrors, seizures
Increased cortisol
Repetitive behaviors
Increased theta wave to beta wave ratio in the brain
Heightened alpha waves (fun fact: autistic people are basically permanently in a state of alpha waves in the brain, which is what neurotypical people experience while they're listening to music! So if you're an autistic person and you can't get music to stop playing in your head, that's probably why)
Facial blindness, time blindness
Awareness of physical self disrupted (this is a big one)
Foreign accent syndrome (I don't have this, but it's—so interesting to me! A lot of autistic people will suddenly pick up the accent of whoever they're hanging out with, like not willingly—they can't not pick it up, they just instantly pick it up)
A tendency to walk on toes, which can totally screw up posture, and if you know how important posture is in life, that is more significant than it may seem
Impairments of intentional control, prone to addiction, developmental delays
Inability to tell fresh food from rotten (all of that is tied to the insula)
I would say probably in my life the worst physical symptoms of autism are:
The digestive issues that I dealt with for so long.
The inflammation issues, both in respect to my autoimmune eye disease, but also with respect to my joints (I don't really like hearing everything snap, crackle, and pop when I get out of bed—I'm only 26 years old, I really feel like it shouldn't make so many random clicking noises all the time, so I have to deal with that).
Short-term memory issues (though I've talked about that in some previous episodes, and that's more mental than physical).
My ability to understand my own physical body states and emotional body states, regardless of whether or not I want to. It would be really nice to know when I'm hungry versus when I'm thirsty versus when I'm tired versus if I'm happy or sad, anxious, excited—you know, the full spectrum of emotions. It would be really nice to be able to just feel that feeling without having to analyze everything, because if I didn't analyze everything, I wouldn't know what I'm feeling in a particular moment! It baffles me that neurotypical people can do this. Like, I can just ask you, "How are you?" and like, you'll be feeling a certain emotion at that exact moment that you can tell me if I asked. It's just crazy! I have to go through a 100-question process just to figure out if I'm hungry, let alone if I'm angry or anxious or excited, you know, all of these emotions.
And then, you know, add in the more complicated parts of life: grief. It's really hard for autistic people to process grief, because it looks like we've processed it great in the moment, and then 15 years later some small thing reminds you of that person, and you catch yourself crying again. And it's just really hard because there's such a delay of processing sometimes—this processing can happen 10 to 15 years later. It's a pretty significant delay.
So I would say those are the top four issues that I've dealt with in my autistic experience: digestion issues, inflammation issues, delayed emotional processing and reaction time, and all of the associated issues that come from that, like the sleep terrors and all that.
Thank you so much for listening! I hope you learned something in this episode. I know it's a lot of information—if it was a little overwhelming to hear all the information at once, I'm sorry about that, but feel free to reference this podcast whenever. If you ever are curious about research like this, feel free to join my Reddit called Autism Girls. I'd love to have you on there, I'd love for anyone who knows about neuroscience or is studying neuroscience or studying autism to go out there, challenge my ideas, and let's find the truth, let's figure this out together, and let's change society so that women won't just get ignored when they come to doctors with medical issues.
Thanks so much for listening!