Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

The way I look at it sometimes is, think about the fever

of the 19th century in medicine, right?

So you see this very often in movies, right?

They will say, oh, he has a fever, high fever.

He's going to die from high fever.

Well, that fever could have been a viral infection, a bacterial infection, could have been cancer, metastatic cancer, right?

Could have been an autoimmune disease.

The treatments are very different.

But in that time, that's all we knew.

We were observing that behavior, in which case raising of the temperature, but we didn't know the biology.

Today, we will use very different treatments for those conditions.

And some of them, of course, we don't even treat, right?

We just observe.

So I think...

In autism research, as it is the case for many psychiatric conditions, they are defined behaviorally, but there's a disconnect with the biology.

Very often, we don't have biological markers by definition.

And so that disconnect, I think, creates a lot of confusion.

The ratio varies also based on severity, but generally it's been 1 to 4.

So more males than females.

Well, there are a lot of discussions, of course, like what causes this difference.