B-Lymphocytes from a Population of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Unaffected Siblings Exhibit Hypersensitivity to Thimerosal
Figure 2
(a) shows the thimerosal concentration that induced a 50% growth inhibition at day 5, measured by the LDH method (LDH-G50). In (a) the color-coded cells are ranked in terms of sensitivity to thimerosal. Four family groups are shown whose autistic B-cell LDH-G50’s fall greater than 2 standard deviations below the mean: A, B, C, and D. Underlined letters denote those cells believed to have a heightened sensitivity to thimerosal (i.e., those falling outside two standard deviations of the control population). The distribution of the control population is indicated by the green lines showing mean + SD, mean, mean – SD, and mean − 2SD. Distribution of Cells Types. In the upper insert, (b) we show the distribution of the four cells types: ASD, unaffected Twin, unaffected Sibling, and external age/sex matched control, in the four quartiles of the ranked distribution. It is noteworthy that the ASD derived cells are more clustered in the left hand side of the distribution and the external controls are distributed to the right hand side. Test for Systemic Errors. In the second insert, (c) we show that there is no systemic correlation between low LDH-G50’s in cells drawn from families from an ASD background and their respective controls. The graph in (c) shows the average and standard deviation of the difference between the appropriate age/sex matched control and each of the ASD familial LDH-G50. The positive values indicate that cells from the affected families are more sensitive than the external controls. The values indicate the results from a one-tailed t-test, , with, (*) indicating <0.05, and (***) indicating <0.005.
