PLT Test Blog

Memantine (Namenda/ Ebixa) is an Alzheimer’s drug that has been used off-label in autism for many years; but does it actually work? More than a thousand people with autism have completed clinical trials and yet more trials are in progress.  A few years ago, at the FDA’s request, the producer of the drug, Forest Laboratories, funded two clinical trials enrolling 903 children with autism.  The results were never fully published because the trials were deemed to have failed to find any positive effect and a note to reflect this is included in each pack of Namenda. A quick look at ClinicalTrials.gov website shows yet more autism trials in the pipeline. What is going on? When Dr Chez made a trial in 2007 he found Memantine to be effective; he has since moved on to stem cell therapy which he also finds to be effective. The latest study to be published includes Dr Hardan from Stanford, who published that study showing NAC to be effective in autism.  This time his study shows no...

    This time of year many parents in the northern hemisphere are looking up “autism and allergy” on Google and more than 20,000 have ended up at my post from 2013 on this subject. Not just for Stomach Health It is clear that many people have noticed that allergy makes autism worse, even if your family doctor might think you are imagining it. This year, thanks to our reader Alli from Switzerland, there is a new innovation in my therapy for Monty, now aged 13 with ASD.  Now we are firm believers in a specific probiotic bacteria to dampen the immune system (more IL-10, less IL-6 and likely more regulatory T cells) and minimize the development of pollen allergy and all its consequences. There is a wide range of H1 antihistamines, mast cell stabilizers and inhaled steroids available and many readers of this blog are using a combination of some or all of these to control allergy and mast cell activation. By using the Bio Gaia probiotic bacteria the magnitude of the allergic re...

Since there is now interest in the potential benefit of probiotic bacteria to treat some autism, I wanted to point out that there actually is a clinical trial underway in Italy.  It is funded the Italian Ministry of Health and by the Tuscany Region.  They use Vivomixx, an OTC probiotic from the Italian speaking region of Switzerland.     Vivomixx contains: Streptococcus thermophilus   DSM 24731,   bifidobacteria   ( B. breve   DSM 24732,   B. longum   DSM 24736,   B. infantis   DSM 24737)   lactobacilli   ( L. acidophilus   DSM 24735,   L. plantarum   DSM 24730,   L. paracasei DSM 24733,   L. delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus   DSM 24734). Before you start wondering, it is not cheap; the Swiss do not do cheap. There is a detailed explanation of the trial in the full version of the paper below.  It is due to be completed at the end of 2017.     Vivomixx is virtually identical t...

UPDATE: A significant minority of parents report negative reaction to Bio Gaia, this seems to relate to histamine; but more than 50% report very positive effects without any side effects; so best to try a very small dose initially to see if it is not well tolerated.  Histamine Reaction to Bio Gaia gastrus Alli, our reader from Switzerland, has established that a large daily dose (5 tablets a day, cycled 3 weeks on and 3 weeks off) of the Biogaia Gastrus probiotic has a positive effect on the inflammatory sub-type of her son’s autism and also in other people she has shared her therapy with.  There is plenty of science to support its use. In earlier posts I looked at a different probiotic bacteria ( Clostridium butyricum  Miyairi 588) that is widely used in animals to improve auto-immune health.  That bacteria is used in humans, but as is the case with BioGaia Gastrus, the focus is on stomach health not auto immunity.  Nobody has proposed an effective dose of Miya...