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...

The Hungarian flag, for clever Laszlo Prokai     Lupron – partially right, but for the wrong reason?   In the US there undoubtedly are some quack therapies for autism, however on occasion we have seen that you can stumble upon an effective therapy for entirely the wrong reason. In the history of medicine there are drugs that were stumbled upon, or created by accident. In the case of the “Lupron protocol” which was promoted by a father and son (Geier and Geier), an extremely expensive therapy was apparently applied to hundreds of children, before being shut down by the medical regulators. Without going into all the details, Geier’s therapy combined chelation (antioxidants) and a drug called Lupron that causes a dramatic reduction in testosterone levels.   In the jargon, it causes h ypogonadism - diminished functional activity of the gonads ( the testes in males or the ovaries in females). Lupron is another of those drugs that costs ten times more in the US than in...