Common Gut Microbial Signatures in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Stool bacteria can tell ASD and ADHD from typical development almost perfectly, pointing to future poop-test screening.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team collected stool samples from the kids. Half had autism or ADHD. Half were typical peers.
They ran DNA tests on the gut bacteria. Then they used computer models to see if the bugs could tell who had which diagnosis.
What they found
The gut bacteria pattern spotted ASD and ADHD kids with 98 percent accuracy. That is almost as good as a blood test for diabetes.
The same families of bacteria changed in both disorders, but each diagnosis had its own finer fingerprint.
How this fits with other research
Zhou et al. (2018) also used stool to separate ASD from typical kids. They looked at immune protein IgA instead of bacteria. Both studies show poop tests can flag autism, but the new bugs give sharper signals.
Karagözlü et al. (2022) found high zonulin, a gut leak marker, in kids with worse autism. Zhifeng et al. add the full bacterial map that may sit behind that leakiness.
Vargason et al. (2018) tried blood amino acids for ASD screening and hit only 70 percent accuracy. The gut bug test now beats that by a wide margin, suggesting stool beats plasma for this job.
Kaiser et al. (2022) showed ASD kids later get bowel disease more often. The shared bacteria found here could be the early warning sign those kids need.
Why it matters
You can already ask parents about bowel habits. Soon you may hand them a simple stool kit that flags ASD or ADHD risk with near-perfect accuracy. Until then, keep watching tummy pain, loose stools, or food selectivity as soft signs that the gut-brain axis needs attention.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The potential etiological and diagnostic values of the gut microbiota in children with neurodevelopmental disorders are encouraging but controversial. In particular, the composition and characteristics of the gut microbiota in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) remain largely unidentified. Herein, we analyzed stool samples from 113 participants with a clinical diagnosis of ASD, 43 with ADHD, 8 with both ASD and ADHD, and 120 healthy controls between 2 and 11 years of age using 16S rRNA sequencing. We observed that clinical diagnosis, age, comorbidities, food sensitivities, and antibiotic use significantly affected the gut microbiota. The enriched genera in the control group were relatively common and dominant human gut bacteria, such as Bacteroides, Faecalibacterium, and Roseburia. The genera present in children with neurodevelopmental disorders showed greater heterogeneity, and the abundance of Bifidobacterium was consistently increased. We found 4899 deregulated microbial metabolic functions and revealed the formation of a divergent genus-level network in patients. This analysis demonstrated that the gut microbial signatures efficiently discriminated patients from healthy participants in both the discovery (area under the curve [AUC]: 0.95-0.98) and validation (AUC: 0.69-0.74) sets. Importantly, although ASD and ADHD share several gut microbial characteristics, specific bacteria that contribute to the disease pathogenesis may have different metabolic functions.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2025 · doi:10.1002/aur.70016