Tobias Bast
Associate Professor, School of Psychology, University of Nottingham (UK)
One comment on the press release: I would refrain from referring to ‘autistic mice’. Autism is a human condition, whereas the mouse models used in this study show selected genetic features and selected behavioural features relevant to autism, but clearly not the full spectrum of the condition. Researchers and journalists should be careful not to overstate the similarity between animal models and human conditions.
The evidence that the trio of nutritional supplements improves behavioural impairments in the mouse models is limited due to problems with the statistical analyses and with the design of the experiments. First, convincing statistical support for the claim that the behavioural impairments in the mice with genetic features linked to autism compared to control mice are smaller following treatment with the trio of supplements than following other treatments (individual supplements or water, which was used as control treatment) would require the demonstration of a significant statistical interaction between treatments and mouse genotype. However, except for the treatment effects on one test of social behaviour in one of the mouse models, this important statistical interaction was not demonstrated. This is an example of falsely claiming ‘differences between differences’ (i.e., different behavioural differences/impairments in different treatment groups) without the appropriate statistical support for such differences ―a relatively common error in neuroscience studies―.
Second, several of the experiments compared the impact of different treatments by testing social behaviour repeatedly within the same mice but following different treatments. The problem is that the control treatment (water) was always tested first, whereas the trio of supplement was tested last. So, any improvement observed with the trio of supplements could have reflected repeated testing, rather than the beneficial action of the trio of supplement.