I guess because they overlap with some syptoms. I think that autism used to be called childhood schizophrenia. I don't like the association either but not sure why. Are they not both neurological disorders? They said that the MICE showed signs of both. More is known, I suppose, about schizophrenia.
I wish they had mentioned the flu shot and how this figured into all this. Whether getting the flu shot at a certain time could prevent this or if the flu shot could cause the same problem with the immune response.
As if thing were not confusing enough. The immune reaction to the flu linked to schizophrenia? You can trigger an immune reaction with the shot as well. What to do?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071016090135.ht m
It disturbed me how they mentioned schizophrenia and autism in the same sentence without explaining why. I read it quickly, so maybe I missed it - but why did they mention autism at all? It seems they mentioned it only one time. I noticed that they talked about how it was difficult to classify mice as schizophrenic but that they noticed antisocial tendencies and a few other things that could be associated with autism.
I'm sorry - it is just a pet peeve of mine for people to confuse disorders - and these are people who should know better! It's like when people wear a t-shirt that says "I'm schizophrenic and so am I" implying the person has more than one personality - which is NOT schizophrenia. Having multiple personalities USED to be called Multiple Personality Disorder and now is called Dissociative Identity Disorder. It would help if the people making up these names would stop changing them, I understand. But schizophrenia is different from DID and from autism as well. I wish they would have gone into more detail why they included autism ONE TIME (again I could have missed it) and then didn't mention it again.