PLT Test Blog

On 5 th February 1958, Manchester United played away to Red Star in Belgrade.   What is remembered is not the match, but the flight home; having stopped to refuel in Munich, the plane crashed on take-off with 23 fatalities and 21 survivors. Matt Busby, the Manager, survived the accident and ten years later he led a new team of Busby Babes to win the European Cup.   Bobby Charlton and Bill Foulkes survived the crash and played against Benfica in that final. Why am I telling you about this?   The reason is the air crash investigation that followed.   It was convenient to blame the pilot, Captain James Thain.  The German enquiry blamed him for not deicing the wings and claimed that this ice prevented the plane from taking off, as it reached the end of the runway. For ten years Thain tried to clear his name and insisted there had been no ice on the wings and that a deep layer of water and slush on the runway caused the accident.   Finally, Harold Wilson, the t...

At the time of writing this post Angelina Jolie’s aunt has succumbed to the same cancer that killed Angelina’s mother and she announced that she also carried the same defective gene.   She opted to take pre-emptive action and, in effect, cheat a nasty early death from breast or ovarian cancer. I have read so much research into autism, that it is pretty clear to me, that you could calculate an Autism Risk Factor (ARF) for prospective parents, if you really wanted to.   Would you really want to?   I expect those with direct experience of autism might be in favour, the others probably would not even bother to answer the question.  Since few truly autistic people have children, it is really more of a question for their siblings; do they want Destiny’s Child? It may sound depressing, or something to do with eugenics, but actually it does not have to be.   I am not suggesting the sort of genetic and chromosome testing that is already routinely done for conditions like...

Ted, (aged 12, and supposedly “normal”) and his brother Monty (aged 9, and now steadily becoming more “normal”, as this blog progresses) go to the same school as a Swedish family.   In Ted’s class is a Swedish girl, Charlotte, and her younger brother is in the Primary school along with Monty.   I have been both surprised and impressed, by how nice the kids in Primary are to kids with any kind of special need.   However, once they make the big leap to Secondary, they stop being so nice; it becomes cool to be critical and even cruel. Ted’s Swedish friend, Charlotte, was explaining to their class that her younger brother had something called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, but it was OK, because he only had 10% ADHD .   Ted of course then replied “and you have got the other 90%”.   Some of the other things they get up to are far, far worse; one reason why I put Monty down a couple of years in Primary. But, the Swedish Disease is not ADHD. During my resea...

I have recently started learning the workings of the human immune system, while 12 year old Ted (“normal” except for a Star Wars obsession) has been discovering Star Trek.   Last weekend we went to the cinema with Adrian “Mole” to see the latest release.   Mr Spock made one interesting observation, regarding what can happen when the interests of the many outweigh the interests of the few; this will be the tittle of a forthcoming post about the fate of Dr Wakefield and his vaccine theory. Cytokines Cytokines really do exist, even though they sound like something from science fiction.   They are signalling molecules associated with inflammation.  Several inflammatory cytokines are induced by oxidative stress.   The fact that cytokines themselves trigger the release of other cytokines and also lead to increased oxidant stress, makes them important in chronic inflammation.   In extreme cases, there is a downward spiral of inflammation making it worse and wors...

Peter Hypothesis Regarding the Cause of Autism,   The Predisposition of some Children towards it and Implications for Treatment Autism is a spectrum of behaviours and disorders that result from damage and subsequent malformation of the developing cerebellum.   The damage in classic autism occurs in utero, whereas in the case of regressive autism, there is a second oxidative shock that occurs around a key point in brain development, triggering the onset of autism.   The cause of the cerebral damage is an oxidative shock from one or more of a variety of possibilities, not limited to, maternal stress and infection during pregnancy and toxins such as mercury crossing the blood brain barrier (BBB).   Individuals with autism, and many of their close relatives, have a predisposition to the condition, due to an inherited over-reactive immune system. The immune system may have become over-reactive to infection partly due to a lack of the on-going attacks, for which it ha...