PLT Test Blog

One day last week Monty, aged 12 with ASD, was watching an old Tom and Jerry DVD.   These DVDs, along with the other action-packed ones, once got hidden away because they drove Monty wild; now they do not. This is what I was doing while Tom was chasing                                                                         Jerry. I received another interesting comment from a reader who found a small dose of an antidepressant had a very positive effect on his 9 year old daughter:- “My daughter (9, ASD) recently started on a very small dose of Remeron, in an effort to increase weight and as a bonus, hopefully improve sleep. It has done both. It also had an immediate unexpected but delightful side effect of improved social skills, more fluent speech and increased amount of conversation. The first day she tri...

Last summer, I wrote a lot about autism getting much worse in that time of the year and how I found that common “24 hour” anti-histamine drugs seemed to have a magical effect; but one that lasted only 2-3 hours. There were only visible signs of a mild allergy, which could indeed easily be overlooked. I did later receive a message from a reader who noticed his child’s ASD behaviours were greatly improved by Zrtec and his doctor agreed to prescribe this H1 antihistamine all year round. Recently, I stumbled upon a blog, rich with many comments of parents of kids with severer types of autism.  Here I noted some parents referring to “summertime raging”, and I thought to myself, I know what they mean.  Fortunately, I found out how to make it go away. Ant-histamine drugs The two most common antihistamine drugs are Claritin (Loratadine), its active derivative Aerius ( Desloratadine) and Zrtec (Ceterizine) and its active derivative Xyzal ( levocetirizine). The main action of an antihis...

In my previous posts on histamine, you would have read that I found that Claritin appeared to reduce autistic behaviours.   Once I had got to the bottom of what was going on, I found out that histamine has a long record of stimulating challenging behaviour in all children.   It also became clear that typical anti-histamines (H1 antagonists) are all slightly different and one may be effective in one person and ineffective in another.   Each one tends to have additional secondary effects. It now appears that the secondary effect of certain H1 antagonists may actually be more important than the primary intended effect of reducing itchy eyes and runny noses. There are three generations of H1 drugs.   The fastest working and most potent is still the first generation, the second generation are non-drowsy derivatives of the first generation.   The third generation are the active metabolite of the second generation.   As you will see in today’s central paper, the t...

Having recently discovered that an anti-histamine drug like Claritin can markedly reduce autistic behaviours, I have been looking into exactly why this might be and to see if there could be any other related interventions.   Here are t he results and they pull together all sorts of related comorbidities and in the end I seem to have found a better solution for managing summertime autism flare-ups. Allergies have long been linked to aggressive behaviours It seems to be well known among allergists, that children with allergies may exhibit challenging behaviours.   It goes beyond the simple fact that the child with an allergy will be irritable and therefore behave badly; the allergy itself is affecting the behaviour.   Allergies tend to worsen behaviour and the science can explain exactly why this happens.    This applied to pollen type allergies, food allergies and even asthma. In the case of asthma, I found several studies, one is called:   Prevale...