Excess of Immune Cells Found in Brains of People with Autism

Good news! This could be a breakthrough!

"The [T] cells were somehow getting through the blood-brain barrier ... T-cell swarms, called lymphocytic cuffs, in a few other postmortem brains of people who had been diagnosed with autism. ... started to detect another oddity in the brain tissue—tiny bubbles, or blebs ... whether the neurological features he was observing were specific to autism  ...  While the lymphocytic cuffs only sporadically turned up in the brains of neurotypical individuals, the cuffs were abundant in a majority of the brains from individuals who had had ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorder]. Those same samples also had blebs that appeared in the same spots as the cuffs. Staining the brain tissue revealed that the cuffs were filled with an array of different types of T cells, while the blebs contained fragments of astrocytes ... in the brain samples from individuals with ASD, the blebs visually resembled blebs created in response to tumors."

Excess of Immune Cells Found in Brains of People with Autism | The Scientist Magazine®: An accumulation of T cells and astrocytes in postmortem brain tissue hints at possible autoimmune origins for many cases of autism.