Safe Drug Touted As Able To Cure �"Rain Man"-like Mice

[Moontanman]

Safe drug touted as able to cure “Rain Man”-like mice

 

Re­search­ers have an­nounced a pos­si­bly ma­jor ad­vance in treat­ing au­tism spec­trum dis­or­ders, whose vic­tims face an of­ten crip­pling in­abil­ity to in­ter­act so­cially, some­times ac­com­pa­nied by un­usu­al tal­ents.

 

A strain of mice with an au­tism-like con­di­tion showed a re­ver­sal of the symp­toms thanks to a drug al­ready shown to be safe in hu­mans, sci­en­tists say.

 

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/101209_autism

[Qfwfq]

I never knew there's such a thing as Rain Mice...:lol:

[CraigD]

It seems a bit strange to me that Deutsch and team identify te BALB/c strain of mice as “a valid animal model of the limited sociability seen in persons with Autism”, and claim “In the presence of another mouse, BALB/c mice move as far away as possible and do not interact as normal mice do, they say in much the same way people with autism often avoid making social contact with other people.” BALB/c mice are common lab mice. AFAIK, most albino mice are BALB/c. I’ve handled and watched this strain, and never noticed them behaving much unlike other mice, though being albinos, they are odd looking.

 

According to their wikipedia article, BALB/c mice have been an identified strain for over 200 generations, since at latest the 1930s. The only behavioral anomaly I read of on a couple of pages about them is that males are unusually aggressive.

 

Perhaps the mice in Deutsch’s experiment are a substrain?