PLT Test Blog

      Leukemia/Leukaemia   is cancer   that begins in the   bone marrow   and result in high numbers of abnormal   white blood cells . I  received a comment on this blog a long time ago from a parent whose child had initially responded well to some of the autism therapies suggested on this blog. Later on all the therapies stopped working.   That child also has leukemia. We now know this is a common event when you start treating autism, some comorbidity arises that blocks the effects of those therapies.  In my son’s case it is a simple pollen allergy, but it can be all kinds of inflammatory conditions such as colitis, IBS, IBD, GERD, celiac disease, juvenile arthritis, mastocytosis etc.  This list goes on, but now I know why it includes leukemia. I do not consider epilepsy, or indeed cognitive dysfunction, as comorbidities.  Epilepsy is periodic extreme neuronal hyper-excitability, whereas in much autism there is chronic n...

Nearly all parents like to see their children performing on stage.   This week I attended two very different performances. The first was a play organized by my son Monty’s piano teacher; we came along to show support.  She organizes numerous events for children with special needs, she includes people with Asperger’s and all kinds of autism; some have an assistant on stage to support them and some do not.  One was in a wheelchair. She also includes some typical kids in the more demanding roles.   As expected there were big smiles all around, happy performers and happy friends and family in the audience.  They have several repeat performances. A couple of days later was another performance, this time Monty’s big brother was performing at the school poetry night.  Here again, the students were performing in front of the assembled parents.  As usual it was poems in a wide variety of languages, from Russian to Indonesian to Swedish.  Some students...

Today’s post is about another supposedly rare cause of autism called Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum (ACC) . As regular readers of this blog will have noted, extremely rare causes of autism, taken as a group are not so rare after all.  In fact it seems that autism is just a very large collection of somewhat rare biological conditions.   Of the very few "Autism Dads" I have had a face to face conversation with, one has a child with ACC and another has a son with the even rarer Sotos syndrome. Sotos syndrome is characterized by gigantism, mild ID/MR and often autism. Mutations in the NSD1 gene cause Sotos syndrome ACC is physical malformation of the brain that shows up clearly on MRI scans and potentially shows up on the mother’s regular ultrasound scans.  The corpus callosum   is a wide, flat bundle of fibers about 10 cm long that connects the left and right   sides of the brain.   It facilitates communication between the two sides of the brain. Agenes...

Today’s post is another one filling in some gaps in this blog. I think it is common sense to say that preventing a problem from developing is much wiser than trying to solve it later on.  This is a recurring issue in both life and medicine. In the research we now see preventative measures developed to reduce the risk of cancer, we also see how some interventions are only effective when started very early. In the case of autism we have seen than often it is caused by a myriad of factors that by themselves might have been harmless but when taken together are the multiples hits that caused the brain to develop differently. Much research looks individually at these factors that increase the risk of autism.  In the wider media much disdain is directed to these findings as if each factor is THE cause of autism and how can so many things cause autism.  But by understanding these factors you can then set about countering them. I did create my simplified schematic to explain class...

In this blog I make a point of not promoting non-generic products, except when they have some special features.  This was the case with sustained release NAC, which does seem to be a much better product than the gelatin capsules. In the case of broccoli powder and Sulforaphane, there was some testing done that showed most products sold in the US do not actually produce any Sulforaphane.  Small doses of broccoli powder do indeed seem to have a positive effect in some people’s autism and even on insulin sensitivity in people with diabetes .  We assume this is down to sulforaphane, but even that is not certain, there are other interesting substances in broccoli In the Johns Hopkins research on sulforaphane they use a deep frozen product made in the lab that is not commercially available.  The research was initially in cancer, but does now extend to autism. We saw in earlier posts that that some broccoli powders have retained the necessary enzymes needed to produce Sulfo...

    In the next 30 to 50 years I think many common diseases will be, in part, treated by bacteria.  There is already a great deal of research to show that gut bacteria play a key role in both some diseases and the effectiveness of some therapies. I was surprised to read that the effectiveness of some common existing cancer drugs appears to depend on the presence, or not, of specific gut bacteria. Many gut bacteria have very specific, but different, effects on the immune system.  There may be no one-size-fits-all options and it is not a case of good bacteria and bad bacteria.  Too much of some “good” bacteria and they becomes “bad” bacteria. Taking a pragmatic approach you can look at the effects of widely available probiotic bacteria and see if any might have a beneficial effect on a specific person’s autism. We already saw in the trials that people made following Alli from Switzerland’s revelation about the two L.reuteri bacteria found in Biogaia Gastrus, that ...