PLT Test Blog

  Our reader Natasa brought to my attention various things recently; this included the fact that intranasal delivery of Suramin for autism is being developed and the repurposing of an old drug called Metyrosine for autism. I also noted a recent study that used a popular probiotic formerly called VSL#3, now called Visbiome/Viviomixx. This is interesting because it found that autistic people without GI dysfunction benefited.   The study had a high drop out rate and the improvement was not huge. Visbiome/Viviomixx is pricey for a probiotic, but not the price of two Ferraris like Metyrosine.   Suramin Nasal Spray -   PAX 102 Suramin is Dr Naviaux’s idea to treat autism and indeed several other conditions. Suramin is an existing drug approved outside the USA and made by Bayer.   Clearly Dr Naviaux’s new partner Paxmedica was not able to make a deal with Bayer, so they have to figure out themselves how to manufacture Suramin, which loses more time.   The good...

  I am giving a presentation in November at an online autism conference called Synchrony 2020. It is organized by a group of parents of children with autism.   You can read all about it here:    https://synchronysymposium.com/   If you want to attend this virtual conference there is a coupon code for readers of this blog: - EPIPHANY I am told the coupon code applies only to Early Bird and Regular Price, not to the Day Pass.   Our doctor reader Agnieszka gave a presentation at this event last year. This year Dr Ben-Ari is going to talk about Bumetanide and I am then talking about 8 years of using Bumetanide. The proceeds go towards the Brain Foundation’s funding of autism research.   The Brain Foundation Our mission is to support translational research that will lead to the development of FDA-approved treatments and an improved standard of care for co-morbidities in individuals with autism spectrum disorder.   I suppose my mission is to ...

Even I thought this post was rather a long slog, but I kept finding more and more evidence to support the basic premise, so I covered all the genes that came up for completeness. I have been going on about the relevance of calcium channels in autism for years. I have also pointed out that while you can have severe autism for a single mutated gene, you can also “just” have a miss-expression of that same gene, without any error in the code in your DNA. You can have a little bit of that severe autism phenotype.  You can even have the opposite dysfunction, which would usually be over-expression of that gene.  Once you have miss-expression of a gene it will cause a cascade of other effects. This means that while you may not be able to correct the initial genetic dysfunction, you may well be able to treat what comes further down the cascade. I like to look for associations, so I skip quickly through the research papers, but take note when I see links to things like:-   · ...