PLT Test Blog

Today’s post was prompted by Tyler highlighting a very recent paper from MIT and Harvard, with some interesting research on GABA in autism.  It also provides the occasion to include an interesting epilepsy therapy, which I encountered a while back.  This fits with my suggestion that the onset of much epilepsy in autism could be prevented. In the MIT/Harvard study, they were looking into the excitatory/ inhibitory (E/I) imbalance found in ASD and schizophrenia. They used a non-invasive optical method to measure E/I imbalance and this did get some media coverage.  However, I am not sure this could be a diagnostic tool in very young children with classic autism, as was suggested; most such children would not cooperate.  It is not just a problem of being non-verbal, as was suggested in the media. Indeed, due to the nature of the experiment, the researchers involved older subjects, with milder autism and none had MR/ID (IQ<70).  Being a trial done in the US, of th...

      A small number of readers of this blog have followed Professor Catterall’s ideas and trialed low dose clonazepam for autism.   This post summarizes my findings from using it long-term; it would be a good place to collect the findings of other people. The science part of this blog is courtesy of a reader who highlighted the full-text version of a paper I mentioned.  Perhaps it was the author? For information on Catterall’s clonazepam research, go to the “Index by Subject” tab and click on Clonazepam. Before getting to that, I do get asked how I know, for sure, these therapies really do work for Monty, aged 12, with classic autism.  As I told Ben-Ari, the Bumetanide researcher, the best way to convince the doubting public will be to measure IQ, not autism.  If you can add 30 to 50 points to your IQ result, even the sceptics would pay attention. I am not measuring IQ directly, but I do note things like spelling tests, math tests and handwrit...

Vancouver is one of the most attractive cities I have visited.  It is home to BC Children’s Hospital   and Dr Sylvia Stöckler-Ipsiroglu and Dr Clara van Karnebeek . Together they have produced a remarkably thorough website called Treatable-ID , which sets out information on 82 treatable forms of Intellectual Disability (ID), formerly known as Mental Retardation (MR).     This excellent resource was recently brought to my attention by a reader of this blog from Down Under, another place well worth visiting.  Thanks,  Alexandria . ID/MR and Autism ID/MR is defined as having an IQ less than 70; this means the cognitively weakest 2.2% of the population. Classic Autism, Autistic Disorder or what we might now also call Strict Definition Autism affects about 0.3% of the population.  It is likely that about half of this group would score <70 in an IQ test.  I do not suggest they take one. It is clear that an overlap might exist between the causes of...

Some occasional visitors of this blog ask why if one drug helps their case of autism, another can be ineffective. Perhaps it would be much more helpful right at the start to diagnose people with “one of thousands autism”, then people might better understand their situation,  and plan their way forward. Autism is not a biological diagnosis, it is just an observational diagnosis. Some readers have suggested “sorry, we don’t know” would be the honest diagnosis. Several hundred autism genes and still counting Some of these 740 genes linked to autism are shown here:- Human Gene Module There are existing mouse models covering 192 individual genes that can cause “autism”. There are 18 known individual chemicals that can induce ‘autism” in mice Animal Model Induced You may wonder how come there is a thimerosal-induced mouse model, but it exists. Thimerosal There are dozens of rescue models, where scientists can make a mouse have “autism” and then reverse it. Animal Rescue Models Autism a...