I would be careful reading too much into one study. If you read their Methods section, you can see that they only picked adults with "high-functioning autism" which is so loosely defined as to be meaningless. Is it supposed to represent Vineland scores, or ADOS scores, or IQ, or "doesn't live in Mom's basement", or what?
But if you see that they also cut anyone from the study that has a family history of autism (even though autism is highly heritable), cut anyone with developmental delays (and almost all people with autism have or had delays in some realm, from speech to fine motor), cut anyone with anxiety disorder (extremely common in autistic people), then really you're left with probably a bunch of almost-entirely-guys with what used to be called Asperger's and is today (well, as of DSM-5) lumped back in with autism the broader category, for better or for worse.
Point being, be careful not to think this is a representative sample of a big, big category.
All that being said, I would love to see how these results stack up against another recent project based in San Francisco at UCSF that is doing fMRI scans of kids (not adults) with sensory processing disorder (SPD) but who do NOT have autism.
The project's lead, Dr. Elsya Marco at UCSF, is studying something similar: biological evidence of SPD and how it can be distinguished on scans from autism. The two disorders often go together, but she's trying to tease apart why some people are hypersensitive to sensory stimuli and yet DON'T have autism.
But if you see that they also cut anyone from the study that has a family history of autism (even though autism is highly heritable), cut anyone with developmental delays (and almost all people with autism have or had delays in some realm, from speech to fine motor), cut anyone with anxiety disorder (extremely common in autistic people), then really you're left with probably a bunch of almost-entirely-guys with what used to be called Asperger's and is today (well, as of DSM-5) lumped back in with autism the broader category, for better or for worse.
Point being, be careful not to think this is a representative sample of a big, big category.
All that being said, I would love to see how these results stack up against another recent project based in San Francisco at UCSF that is doing fMRI scans of kids (not adults) with sensory processing disorder (SPD) but who do NOT have autism.
The project's lead, Dr. Elsya Marco at UCSF, is studying something similar: biological evidence of SPD and how it can be distinguished on scans from autism. The two disorders often go together, but she's trying to tease apart why some people are hypersensitive to sensory stimuli and yet DON'T have autism.
Study info: http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2013/07/107316/breakthrough-study-r...
And they're crowdfunding right now to raise money to do a bigger sample size for the fMRI scans: https://crowdfund.ucsf.edu/project/53f230b014bdf718b0b2608d
(Each brain scan they do costs $550.)