PLT Test Blog

Rather like negotiating with North Korea, today’s post does rather meander. It does in the end up with some interesting options for some people.   Korea - the centre of Ginseng research This post was prompted by research highlighted by our reader Ling, which suggested that bumetanide responders (i.e. people with high intracellular chloride) might benefit from a GABA B ant agonist.  There has been quite a lot of coverage in this blog about agonists of GABA B receptors, like Baclofen and Arbaclofen. Some people with an autism diagnosis do indeed seem to benefit, ranging from some with Fragile-X to others with Asperger’s. Russian-developed GABA B agonists like Phenibut and Pantogam are widely used by adults self-treating their behavioural/emotional disturbances. Some Aspies have commented in this blog that far from helping, Baclofen made them feel worse; perhaps the opposite therapy might help? (the Goldilocks scenario, from the previous post)  The paper below shows how a G...

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...