PLT Test Blog

I am shortly going to introduce a complicated sounding substance called DAAO ( D-amino acid oxidase ) to this blog.  DAAO seems to be important in some types of autism, most schizophrenia and bipolar.  This will take us back to Cinnamon and Sodium Benzoate that were discussed in earlier posts. The connection to UCLA will come at the end of the post.  UCLA is home to t he Lovaas Model of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), but this post is all about biochemistry.  Before the internet existed,  I used to use one of their libraries for some research. Prior to DAAO, I just want to make the case again for the medical effects of Cinnamon in typical people. Accepted medical wisdom is that there is currently no proof of any benefit from Cinnamon.  Cinnamon does have known and quantifiable anti-oxidant properties in vitro, but research has shown that what happens in vivo can be quite different.  The whole idea of the ORAC scale, which measures the relative powe...

Perugia is an ancient university city in Central Italy.  If you live in North America you may recall it in connection with a high profile murder trial.  You probably would not expect it to produce clever insights into autism. In fact, Italy is a rare country outside the US that has leading autism researchers. Today’s post is to draw your attention to very insightful paper about some of the ion channel dysfunctions in autism.  This paper is about those concerning potassium. The nice touch was their suggestion that we could classify some people with ASD, some with epilepsy and some people with both, by their ion channel dysfunction. So if like some people, you have a dysfunction of the L-type calcium channel Ca v 1.2, you would become:- Ca v 1.2 - channelASD Somebody with Dravet Syndrome (epilepsy) with ASD, would become:- Na v 1.1channelASD-channelepsy The underlying assumption by the authors is that a type of single ion channel dysfunction, generally triggered by the unde...

This blog is mainly about clever pills and potions that may improve some people’s autism, but I do like to remind people of the power of behavioral interventions. Monty, aged 11 with ASD, has had three behavioral consultants since we began his home ABA program when he was aged about four.  Since there are no ABA consultants in our part of the world, we have to fly them in.  We have our local therapists/assistants, who then work with some support from the foreign consultant.  The net result is a mixture of approaches, which admittedly becomes more “ABA” when the consultant comes to visit.  We now have a vast collection of ABA books, manuals and training materials. Last week our excellent American-Greek behavioral consultant came for a two day visit and so it was a good opportunity to look at progress. Monty went to the airport to wait for her and then we went home for some discussions and Monty showed off his piano playing.  Later everyone went out to a pizza res...

I do like coincidences and I do like not struggling to find a picture for my posts.  Phenytoin ( Dilantin ) is a drug that appeared in the novel and film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , but then it was not used in low-doses. Today’s post follows from a comment I received about using very low doses of anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) in autism. First of all a quick recap. Clonazepam was discovered by Professor Catterall, over in Seattle, to have the effect of modifying the action of the neurotransmitter GABA to make it inhibitory, at tiny doses that would be considered to be sub-clinical (i.e. ineffective). Valproate , another AED, was discovered by one of this blog’s readers also to have an “anti-autism” effect in tiny doses of 1 mg/kg. A psychiatrist from Australia, Dr Bird, specialized in adults with ADHD has just published a paper about the benefit of low-dose phenytoin in adult autism.  The same psychiatrist has also earlier encountered the effect of low dose valproate in ...