Statistical Genetics

A new dimension to access content of this website

Chasing myelin — how an autism hypothesis about supply became one about timing

Myelin is the fatty insulation around axons, and the prefrontal cortex is the last part of the brain to get it. That makes a tempting hypothesis: if the machinery for making it is constitutionally weak, the last place to be insulated should be the first place to fail — which happens to be the region whose functions look most like the ones disrupted in autism. This is the log of testing that idea on public data, the two reframings the data forced, and the sharper question that came out the other side.

Bendy bodies, restless minds — an ordered connective-tissue lattice and a neural network, joined by a dashed link marked with a question mark, above the measured associations and the explanations ruled out

Bendy bodies, restless minds — a correlation we can measure but cannot yet explain

People with unusually flexible joints get migraines about twice as often as everyone else, and are diagnosed with ADHD around five times as often. The association is real, replicated, and partly genetic. This is the log of an attempt to find the mechanism behind it — the elegant explanation that turned out to be wrong, the things we could rule out, and the one thread still worth pulling.