Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. Joseph Buxbaum was initially unconvinced. When early hints of a connection between autism and Alzheimer’s began to appear in the medical literature a few years ago, they struck him as implausible – one a condition of early brain development, the other driving decline in old age.But the signals kept accumulating, and over time, his skepticism gave way to a new line of inquiry that could transform scientists’ understanding of the two diseases.AdvertisementAdvertisement“I came to this kicking and screaming. I didn’t want to believe it,” Buxbaum, a professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, and genetics/genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said.Autism has long been treated almost exclusively as a childhood condition, with little attention paid to how it evolves with age. First formally recognized as a distinct diagnosis in 1980, it went largely unidentified in older generations. Only recently – as awareness grew and the first large diagnosed cohort reaches middle age – have researchers begun to study autistic adults in later life.The data remains sparse: An analysis published last year found that just a tiny fraction of the more than 40,000 autism papers published between 1980 and 2021 included people over 50. But the number of studies about aging with autism is growing rapidly. Advances in brain imaging, DNA sequencing and molecular biology are revealing remarkable overlaps between autism and Alzheimer’s, scientists say – in genes, in neural circuitry, even in patterns of disease.The idea that two conditions at opposite ends of life might be biologically linked is beginning to upend long-standing assumptions in brain science, blurring a divide that has shaped the field for decades. Now, some researchers have begun to see the two as intertwined: that understanding Alzheimer’s may require looking back to how the brain develops, and that insights into autism might, in turn, reshape how we understand Alzheimer’s itself.AdvertisementAdvertisementMuch of the research is still early, and in some cases conflicting and speculative, and it does not yet show that autism and Alzheimer’s are part of a single biological continuum. But the implications are profound: both conditions remain mysterious and difficult to treat, and studying them together may open new paths for intervention.“There are strong indications that somethi …
