with less interpretation of social cues and a greater ability to focus.

"ability to focus" is more accurately described as "tendency to focus". "ability to focus" connotes control over focus, which... from lived experience and what I've read, just isn't generally true. Autistic inertia – the inability to defocus and then focus on a new context – is very real. Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder not just because of an ignorance of social cues but because of how rigid, inflexible patterns of behavior often interfere with daily life.

This seems similar to the phenomenon where antidepressants are only effective for about 15% of patients. The benefit is large for those who benefit. For the rest, they're no better than placebo, suggesting the drugs treat one of several causes for the syndrome known as depression.

And here is just the full open access paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09542-6

Scientists from Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry found that children diagnosed as autistic earlier in life (typically before six years old) were more likely to show behavioural difficulties from early childhood, such as problems with social interaction.

However, those diagnosed with autism later on in life (in late childhood or beyond) were more likely to experience social and behavioural difficulties during adolescence.

I assume that the paper itself frames this a little differently, because what this is saying is trust there’s a correlation between when traits become noticeable and when people get a diagnosis. Which is what you’d expect. You don’t tend to diagnose people who don’t exhibit the traits required for diagnosis.

IMO, as a 'high-functioning autist':

Yes.

The field of psychology is constantly redefining things based on ever shifting subjective analysis of behavioral patterns, and uh, being someone who very much prefers concrete, consistent, definable rules and categories, logically followable mechanistic processes...

Fucking yes, please, be more accurate and precise in a more objective way, based on far superior methodology, fucking please.

When they're understood well enough to have individual names, yes.

They do for many, but sometimes I think they don’t know exactly what or it could be multiple things which is why it’s the Autism Spectrum and it’s easier to say they are “on the spectrum” or “autistic” if you can’t pinpoint exactly what.

The DSM hasn't even been updated with the differences in how women present ASD.

Or we can take the process-based approach, where we stop caring about defining boxes perfectly and we start caring about patterns of thoughts and behaviors. This may sound woowoo or without empirical basis, but some of the most successful programs for verbal autism are based on these ideas, the AIM and PEAK programs.

That's not true. RFK Jr recently said it was from circumcisions.

You're allowed to say assholes on the Internet

Early circumcision, too. See? Multiple causes!

Its more than a tautology, you are oversimplifying.

Or, well, as always with writings on or about science aimed at a general audience... the writers are oversimplifying, always read the paper.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09542-6

What they are describing is that those diagnosed early have a different behavioral psychological profile, different set of observed behaviors, than those diagnosed later.

They are saying that ASD has roughly two different sets of distinguishable behavioral profiles, and one of those sets is so obvious it tends to get diagnosed early, and another set is less obvious such that it tends to get diagnosed later.

While they seem hesitant to use the terminology of saying 'there may be two fairly distinct subtypes of autism', likely because they want to emphasize that more research needs to be done, they do not want to lead to people making rash and non nuanced conclusions... that basically is what they are saying, that there appear to be distinct genetic profiles that produce observably different 'kinds' of autism.

They ran a battery of statstical meta analysis on different genomes and behavioral profiles of Autists, and this chart I think summarizes it best:

(Those bars are 95% confidence intervals)

Two, fairly distinct behavioral/neurodevelopmental/phenotypical profiles, that also go along with two, fairly distinct underlying genomic profiles.

Sometimes it's worth having new studies that add confirmation and detail to conclusions people have already reached. This article does seem to be reporting on new research.

It says no single thing, so you need to do multiple things, yeah? Get circumcized. 🤷‍♂️

the people that like trains and struggle with social cues and are sensitive to sound

Well there goes the last shred of doubt I had that I'm high masking AuDHD.

It's not new information, and it's simple stereotypical stuff, but something about the way you phrased it made it hit different.

My kid is exactly like me, so learning how to deal with my issues is doubly valuable.

If autism isn't a single condition, why do we lump everyone who's autistic into the same bucket?

Why do we talk about the autism spectrum like it's a disease (or a bunch of diseases)? The only problem with autistic people is that they live in a society that is made for non-autistic people and it actively punishes them for being different. Kind of like with LGBT people, though I'd say a lot worse in this case. There's nothing stopping people in the spectrum from functioning similarly or better than 'regular' people, other than the aforementioned society.

A spectrum suggests varying degrees of a single condition, and would be compatible with both the hypothesis that all occurrences of this condition share a cause and the hypothesis of multiple causes. So to claim there are multiple causes is different from saying that cases fall on a spectrum. It tells you that multiple conditions can appear the same way, so they get diagnostically grouped together based on symptoms even though the underlying causes, and so the appropriate treatments, can be quite different.

The 'spectrum' terminology comes about from the field of peychology only being able to attempt to analyze ... basically, 'symptoms', behavioral profiles, phenotypes, and also the field of psychology constantly changing how it does those analyses as well as categorize observable behaviors into conditions/disorders.

What this new understsnding is pointing toward is that there is an actual, identifiable, genomic variance of mutation clusters that actually explains how differences in that spectrum of 'symptoms' actually work, what actually causes which ones.