PLT Test Blog

There is no medical consensus about what to do with people who have subclinical epileptiform discharges (SEDs) on their EEG. That is people who do not have seizures but have an abnormal EEG. There is evidence to support the use of anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) in such people. About 5% of the general population have SEDs, but a far higher number of people with autism have SEDs. You are more likely to detect epileptiform activity depending on which test you use. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) detects the most abnormalities, followed by a sleep EEG and then an EEG with a subject wide awake. It had been thought that epileptiform activity (SEDs) was more common in regressive autism, but that is no longer thought to be the case. It even briefly had a name, Autistic Epileptiform Regression (AER). Subsequent studies indicate that regression is not relevant to subclinical epileptiform discharges (SEDs). Estimates of prevalence still vary dramatically from Dr Chez at 60% to others believing it is 2...

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 ...