PLT Test Blog

Caution:- Ponstan (Mefenamic Acid) contains a warning:- Caution should be exercised when treating patients suffering from epilepsy. At lower doses Ponstan is antiepileptic, but at high doses it can have the opposite effect.  This effect depends on the biological origin of the seizures. In an earlier post I wrote about a paper by Knut Wittkowski who applied statistics to interpret the existing genetic data on autism.   “Autism treatments proposed by clinical studies and human genetics are complementary” & the NSAID Ponstan as a Novel AutismTherapy His analysis suggested the early use of Fenamate drugs could potentially reduce the neurological anomalies that develop in autism as the brain develops.  The natural question arose in the comments was to whether it is too late to use Fenamates in later life. Knut was particularly looking at a handful of commonly affected genes ( ANO 2/4/7 & KCNMA1) where defects should partially be remedied by use of fenamates. I rec...

Today’s post was not my idea at all, it was the author of one of the papers who has drawn my attention to the subject. Genetic studies are complicated and are not the sort of thing I would have chosen to read, let alone write about, before starting this blog.  The optimal time to initiate pharmacological  intervention in Autism? However, much of the complex subject matter has now already been covered, step by step, in earlier posts. Regular readers should not feel put off. It is perhaps easier to think about ion channel dysfunctions, or channelopathies.  Some of the key genetic dysfunctions produce these channelopathies.  There are many posts in this blog about channelopathies, partly because many therapies already exist to treat them. Then we have the complex signaling pathways which are often the subject of cancer research, but we have seen that certain ones like RAS and PTEN are key to conditions like some autism and some MR/ID. So it is not a big leap therefore t...