From neurology to oncology: what have in common autism and cancer? the role of oncogenes, immune system and microbiota

Comparison between the criteria for autism and cancer diagnosis evidences that autism is defined by a set of non-objective symptoms, whereas cancer is defined by a number of objective criteria ranging from histology to molecular biology. In addition, if the criteria for the diagnosis of cancer are relatively straightforward and there is national and international consensus on the assessment of severity and progression of the disease through staging and grading, the diagnosis of autism is still subjected to periodical revisions and, in the United States, there is not even uniformity in the criteria for diagnosis between the different States of the Union.3 Also, the interest for the two diseases appears to be very different and such a difference is present both in the general public and specialized researchers. Thus, the search engine Google Trends evidences that the interest over time for searches for “autism” is, on average, 8, whereas the interest for cancer is 72, and this trend appears to be rather constant since the inception of the system in the year 2004 (according to Google, “the numbers for ‘interest over time’ represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. Likewise, a score of zero means the term was less than 1% as popular as the peak”). In the area of peer-reviewed papers retrievable from the database PubMed, such a difference is even more evident. A search for “autism” performed at the end of 2017 yielded about 40,000 papers with an exponential rise in the past 17 years. A search for “cancer” performed the same day, yielded about 3.5 million papers with a steady growth for the past 40 years. These simple observation may be interpreted in a number of ways that are not necessarily mutually exclusive.