Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an early childhood neurodevelopmental disorder with a global prevalence of 1%-2.6%. Causes of this disease stay unclear, biochemical diagnosis is still lacking and so far there has been no specific medicine for ASD treatment. Strong evidences have shown that oxidative stress may contribute majorly to autistic-like behaviors among ASD individuals. Nitric oxide (NO) plays a vital role in human neurological system, which is usually quantitated in the format of nitrite (NO2-) and nitrate (NO3-). Previous studies had only reported the sum (NOx) of blood nitrite and nitrate concentrations in the ASD population. In this study, we first optimized the pre-treatment methods for saliva, urine and serum before NO detection, which was followed by precise quantitation of NO2- and NO3- separately. Analysis showed that nitrite levels in autistic saliva (5.760±0.4575 μM), urine (0.8708±0.1121 μM) and serum (0.3052±0.0254) were significantly higher than these among normally developing children (ND children), with 2.827±0.2074 μM (p &lt; 0.0001), 0.5938±0.07276 μM (p = 0.0420), and 0.2003±0.0131 (p = 0.0004), respectively. In addition, positive correlation between saliva, urine and serum nitrite was observed, which was missing in ND children. Furthermore, we investigated whether NO differentiated parents of autistic children from other adults. It turned out that urine and serum nitrite of these parents were significantly lower than that in healthy adults in the same age range, who didn’t have any autistic descendants. Additionally, serum nitrite of mothers (0.2713 ± 0.23100 μM) was much lower than that in healthy women (0.8060 ± 0.2310 μM, p &lt; 0.0001), with less measurable difference between fathers (0.3026 ± 0.2320 μM) and healthy men (0.4559 ± 0.2975 μM, p = 0.0368). These results indicated that NO in non-invasive biological fluids, saliva and urine, might serve as an oxidative stress biomarker for ASD children, while autistic parents might experience chronic stress that led to decreased NO in urine and serum. Future investigations are needed to uncover the etiology of high NO in ASD children and low NO among their parents.

NO : a potential biomarker for autism spectrum disorder children and their parents

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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