Can we improve autistic people’s health by changing the medicines we prescribe?

Autistic people often have more health problems and a shorter life expectancy than non-autistic people. Healthcare differences may be a reason for this.

For example, medicines that alter mood and brain function are often prescribed to autistic adults and side effects from these could be contributing to health problems, such as high cholesterol.

On the other hand, once autistic adults have a health condition like high cholesterol, appropriate medication might not be prescribed quickly enough or be at the optimal dose.

As well as healthcare, there may be genetic reasons autistic people are more susceptible to diseases like heart disease and stroke. Some autistic people may also have genetic differences that mean certain types of medicine need to be prescribed at higher or lower doses for them.

Understanding these genetic differences could help healthcare professionals provide better care for autistic people, and reduce the number of health problems they have.

Project aims

The aim of our project is to find out if over-prescribing or under-prescribing some types of medicine, or genetic variations, cause health problems for people with autism.

We plan to:

• Compare how often healthcare professionals prescribe medicines that alter mood, and medicines that lower the risk of heart attack and stroke, to autistic adults compared with non-autistic adults
• Find out whether autistic adults are more likely to have side effects from these medicines than non-autistic adults
• Look at whether many autistic people have genetic variations that mean these drugs need to be prescribed at higher or lower doses than average
• Look for genetic reasons that autism and conditions like heart disease and stroke could be linked

Aws Sadik is performing this research for his PhD.

What we hope to achieve

We hope our project will give us information that can be used in future studies to better understand how we can improve the health of people with autism.