PLT Test Blog

Reader’s of this blog will be aware that serotonin plays a major role in autism, and also in many other mental health conditions, like depression. Vitamin D also regularly raises its head in discussions about autism.   You may recall the Somali autism clusters in Sweden and Minneapolis; researchers suggested that the Somali immigrants were not getting enough sun and therefore lacked vitamin D and so produced children with autism.   I did point out that another large Somali autism cluster exists in sun-drenched San Diego. Even Martha Herbert talks about vitamin D deficiency and autism. A while back we had a guest blogger, Seth Bittker, present his opposing view, that too much vitamin D added to food in the American diet may be contributing to the rise in autism there. In same week that Seth has published his paper on this subject, yet another paper has appeared with the opposing view.   So who is right? The case for (even) more Vitamin D The first paper is:-   Vit...

One of the features I have in this blog is that I get to see what search terms people use to find this site.  Sometimes these search terms tell you some very interesting things. Here is one such interesting search, somebody used today:-     mastocytosis mistaken for aspergers Even though I expect 90+% visitors to this blog are interested in more severe types of ASD than Asperger's, much here is likely to be applicable to some people with Asperger's. There are several posts in this blog about the role of mast cells and how allergies cause them to degranulate.  In some people mast cell degranulation actually leads to pain.  Some people have an over-expression of mast cells, this is called Mastocytosis . I made by own theory about seasonal autism flare-ups and mast cells, which I called Seasonal Autistic Mastocytosis . Now we know that at least one person thinks their mastocytosis was mistaken for Asperger's.   

       This post is another one of those long complicated ones, but should be worth reading. We will look at Human Growth Factors, of which several have been identified by science and quite possibly more remain to be discovered.   Much of the science is well understood and overlaps with areas of interest to autism and another condition called Retts syndrome. As often seems to be the case, elements of the science has been used by the anti-aging, athletic and body-building fraternities. A surprise to me is that the science leads back to mast cells and that there some interesting therapeutic avenues already in existence. We will even involve the seemingly obscure subject of amyloids that I introduced in a recent post.   In that post we discovered that in autism there were strange things going on with Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) .   I will postulate that perhaps amyloid-induced neuroinflammation might be a factor in the neuroinflammation found in autism. ...