PLT Test Blog

Click this link  http://sfari.org/sfari-community/community-blog/webinar-series/2015/webinar-william-catterall-examines-anxiety-drugs-for-autism/ This post will be mainly of interest to the small number of people using low-dose clonazepam for autism and those considering doing so. This therapy modifies the excitatory/inhibitory (im)balance between the GABA and Glutamate neurotransmitters.  The big advantage is that it should be very safe, is extremely inexpensive and, unlike Bumetanide, does not cause diuresis.   The disadvantage is that the effective dose is only in a narrow window, and you have to find it by trial and error. Does it work? It certainly does work in some children with autism. It also appears to have an additional effect over Bumetanide alone, at least my son. Questions remain: ·         Does it work with everyone who responds to bumetanide? ·         Does it only work in people wit...

Today’s post answers a question left un-answered in earlier posts about the best way to treat the imbalance (excitatory vs inhibitory or just E/I) that exists in the function of the key neurotransmitter GABA in many types of autism. I first started this blog after the pleasant shock of seeing the positive behavioral and cognitive effect caused by Bumetanide. This was just copying a recent French clinical trial on humans. Later on in this blog we came across Professor Catterall who made two experiments in mice to show that the same E/I imbalance could be treated using tiny doses of a drug called Clonazepam.  At doses a hundred time higher, Clonazepam is used to treat seizures and anxiety, but at those doses it dose have side effects. The mechanism is different to Bumetanide, by the effect was claimed to be the same. Since Bumetanide has actually been shown effective in a human trial, most readers of this blog have this as their first choice. I commented that in Monty, aged 11 with A...

This post will get complicated, since it will look at many aspects of the GABA A receptor, rather than just a small fraction that usually appear in the individual pieces of the scientific literature.   It was prompted by comments I have received from regular readers, regarding Bumetanide, Clonazepam, epilepsy and whether there might be alternatives with the same effect.   So it is really intended to answer some complex issues.   There are some new interesting facts/observations that may be of wider interest, just skip the parts that too involved. Regarding today’s picture, most readers of this blog are female and by the way, while the US is the most common location by far,  a surprisingly high number of page views come from France, Hong Kong, South Africa and Poland. GABA We have seen that GABA is one of the brain's most important neurotransmitters and we know that various forms of GABA dysfunction are associated with autism, epilepsy and indeed schizophrenia. One re...