PLT Test Blog

In today’s post we look at maternal stress induced autism and how to prevent it using a bacteria from cows.   It may sound crazy, but it seems to work. The first described strain of  M. vaccae  was isolated from cow dung In the next post we will look at p-cresol autism and reversing it by a microbiota transplant. P-cresol is a chemical derived from phenol that is produced by the bacteria living in your gut. P-cresol is elevated in some young children with autism and it may explain some of those who appear to grow out of their autism.  As the level of P-cresol falls from about 7 years of age, autism symptoms fade away. In both posts the conclusion is similar.   You are dependent on the bacteria in your environment and what the bacteria in your gut makes of you. I did write a long time ago in this blog about the Holobiont, which is a neat idea that I think does partially explain the rise of autoimmune diseases and what is nowadays called the “autism epidemic”. T...

Biologists clearly like "–omes". A full understanding of all the –omes would lead to an understanding of pretty much all disease, including autism.   Science is still a long way from such an understanding. More questions than answers Even a partial understanding of the "-omes does help to see how things fit together and also it helps understand where the research is going and why. It also makes you realize how little we currently know, and that includes all those clever scientists. This is why we keep coming back to stumbled-upon and trial error as valid discovery methods. You can also see why researchers and those who fund them, like Mr Simons, easily get lost in the detail. Behind the 5% of the detail they fully understand is another 95% that will take a hundred years to fully understand.   Microbiome & Hologenome/Holobiont The intestinal microbiome is currently very fashionable. The intestinal microbiome describes the microorganisms that reside in your intestines...

Today’s post is a standalone introduction to genetics, as relevant for lay people interested in autism. The scientists among you will likely know all this and more, but many more people are talking about genes and genetic testing these days. Genetics is the domain of some very clever scientists and to fully understand this field would require a great deal of effort.   Often the cleverest people are the least able to explain things to the rest of us. Some equally clever researchers think that there will be so many possible autism genes that it is better to focus on the much smaller number of shared affected pathways.  I stand with the latter group. Confused? He should be. As is often the case, even a basic understanding of the principles does allow you to draw meaningful practical conclusions from the ever-expanding pool of research. In most cases of idiopathic autism there is over/under expression of a very large number of genes.   Most of these genes do their job an...