PLT Test Blog

  Struggle to make friends? Consider Oxytocin Today’s post was going to be about FMT super-donors, but instead we have a post about new insights into using oxytocin to treat autism.   From personal experience I can say that you really can target oxytocin receptors to affect mood/behavior; I have no personal experience of FMT (fecal microbiota transplants), but thousands of people use it for many conditions.   The FMT post will be next. Oxytocin and vasopressin are two hormones, made in the hypothalamus, that are established targets for autism treatment . They are released into the bloodstream where they carry out their best-known functions, but they are also released from the hypothalamus directly into the brain where these hormones have entirely different functions. Both oxytocin and vasopressin can be given as nasal sprays to enter the central nervous system (CNS) rather than just the blood stream.   This means you get the brain effects of the hormone, also known ...

There has been little mention in this blog about fetal medicine, but it is an area that does hold great promise.   At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, they have been surgically treating babies with spina bifida prior to their birth for nearly twenty years. Early surgical intervention to the spine even allows for malformation of the brain to be self-repaired and this is visible on MRI scans. Such prenatal treatment can be 100% successful, resulting in there being no physical disability in adulthood.  The more you read about neuroscience the more you realize how little we really know and so encouraging the brain to self-repair may indeed be the best strategy.  This is an avenue of research and not just with stem cells.  A similar approach is proving successful in treating skin cancer, you do not attack the cancer with drugs, you modify the immune system with a drug so it "wakes up" and does its job and kills the cancer cells.          S...

It is not quite that easy! Initials:                        LT Age:                           14 years old Year of Birth:              2003 Sex:                            Male Date:                           24 May 2018 Diagnosis       LT was diagnosed with autism in January 2007, at a multi-disciplinary assessment in London, at the age of 3 years 6 months.   At that time, LT was non-verbal but had some emerging vocalization. No tics, no seizures, no unusual physical features, no self-injury, no sleep disorder, no feeding disorder. Toilet trained. Very limited attention span. No imaginative play. Liked to jump. IQ not t...