PLT Test Blog

Italy has many attractions, one being Lake Como (Villa Clooney).  It is also the only western country still using Cardiazol, where it is used in a cough medicine Varanasi and the Ganges, not a place you could forget, particularly the smell. India is the only other country using Cardiazo l Today’s post draws on clever things going on in Down Syndrome research to improve cognitive function, but puts them in the perspective of the faulty GABA switch.  In the United States it is estimated that 250,000 families are affected by Down Syndrome.  It is caused by a third copy of chromosome 21, resulting in up-regulation of around 300 genes.  A key feature is low IQ, this is partly caused by a physically smaller cerebellum and it appears partly by the GABA switch.   Research has shown that the cerebellum growth could be normalized, but this post is all about the GABA switch.  In an earlier very science heavy post we saw how a faulty GABA switch would degrade cogniti...

In today’s post I intended to dig a little deeper into the GABA switch, which appears to underlie much autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy, even Down Syndrome and, not to forget, many mood disorders.   Once you start digging, it is rather hard to stop. There is literature on the subject, but very little (almost none, really) looks at the big picture of what is going on.  It is the big picture that matters. The GABA switch(es); but how many are there? The post starts out relatively simple, but then it does get complicated, because I discovered a lot interesting avenues exist, that seem to have been completed ignored by autism research.  It seems Down Syndrome researchers are better informed.   So if you make it to the end of this post, you will have done well. It seems that there are tens, if not hundreds, of possible ways to repair the faulty GABA switches.  It would very much become a case for personalized medicine, correcting the precise dysfunctions, withou...