PLT Test Blog

  Organs of the Immune System   Today’s post will combine some first class science from MGH ( Massachusetts General Hospital) with some feedback that I have been receiving. I have been receiving comments from parents who have tried some of the various new scientifically-based drug therapies for autism.   For some parents, none of them work.   This is not a surprise, since we have established that “autism” is just a general term for a collection of behavioral symptoms.   These symptoms can be caused by a remarkable variety of different factors and so a therapy can only be successful, if it is matched to the appropriate subject.   The lack of biomarkers currently makes it a case of trial and error. What really draws my attention is when a successful therapy appears to “stop working”.   This has already happened to my son and it just happened to a reader of this blog; “NAC has stopped working”. So I applied myself to figuring this out.   In fact, it ...

  I introduced Fibromyalgia in my last post ; it is an neurological condition that can cause some very strange symptoms, in addition to pain and fatigue.   I imagine that there are various different underlying causes and so, like autism, it is really a family of disorders with overlapping symptoms. Surprisingly, at least one type of Fibromyalgia would appear to have similar causes to classic autism, but its onset is after the brain has fully developed.   As with autism, the approved medical treatments are all for the symptoms, rather than the underlying condition.   The underlying condition seems to be a neuro-endocrine inflammatory disorder, sometimes with channelopathies. One very interesting finding is that exercise consistently helps with the symptoms of Fibromyalgia.   I was reading a paper just last week that showed that exercise (jogging) reduced autistic behaviors.   It has already been well established that exercise is almost as effective as drugs ...

This post is about a condition about Fibromyalgia , a condition that affects 2-4% of the population. It affects women eight times more often than men, but it does, bizarrely, appear to be related to autism and is seen by some as a comorbidity.   I would go further and suggest that perhaps I have stumbled upon the missing females with autism.   When you look at all the proposed drugs and supplements, there is a 90% overlap between the two conditions, even things like low dose naltrexone and flavonoids, like quercetin, crop up. As we have seen earlier in this blog, autism is a disease related to the auto-immune system and inflammatory pathways.   There are many other diseases with similar origins, one example being arthritis.   Fibromyalgia tends to get lumped together with arthritis.   Families with autism present tend to have higher levels of arthritis and there are even some overlapping therapies, such as vagus nerve stimulation. Fibromyalgia caught my attentio...

I have long heard about kids with autism having sleeping problems; these range from difficulty falling asleep, waking frequently during the night and waking up very early in the morning.   The same problems apparently occur in ADHD. I think some of the sleep related problems are behavioral in nature; some children with ASD live actually with less structure than typical kids.   Some kids with ASD do not get much physical exercise to tire them out by bed time.    Having said all that, there does seem to be something else going on. Long ago people found out that Melatonin, a hormone available cheaply without prescription in many countries, had a very positive effect on sleeping patterns. What is also interesting, is the other properties of Melatonin and the other types of people who can benefit from it.   This does take us some way from our core theme of autism, towards treating cancer and other illnesses of older age.   I expect most my readers are parents of...