PLT Test Blog

Breakfast overlooking the river Thames The more typical English Breakfast If you happen to stay at a very nice hotel in London, the best meal to have is breakfast and after that comes tea.   The other meals are unlikely to feature much memorable English food. Whether it is the five-star Savoy, overlooking the river Thames, or the Travelodge by the station, mushrooms will be on the menu.   The movers and shakers actually get up early and have their power meetings over breakfast at the Savoy. This is not so expensive and a good way to experience British cuisine, served in a much more spacious environment than most restaurants.   Scotland contributes its porridge and black pudding, kippers might be on offer, but there will be mushrooms, a regular part of even the humblest hotel’s English breakfast. Mushrooms may 'reduce the risk of mild brain decline'   Eating mushrooms more than twice a week could prevent memory and language problems occurring in the over-60s, researc...

Today’s post was triggered by an intriguing comment left on this blog. As we have seen in previous posts, the single gene causes of “autism” like fragile X and Rett syndrome are themselves on a spectrum, with some people worse affected than others.  Boys almost always being more severely affected than girls. It also appears possible that a partial dysfunction of this same gene/protein may lead to a much milder version of these same syndromes. Rett syndrome is well studied and as we saw in the earlier post about growth factors in autism, one key feature is an almost complete lack of Nerve Growth Factor (NGF).  Reduced levels of NGF are associated with several diseases and also the aging process.  In many cases of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), as seen in dementia in older people, reduced NGF can be the root problem. Rett Syndrome Rett syndrome usually gets grouped as part of autism. Almost all people with Rett syndrome are female; here is why.   Rett syndrome ...

       This post is another one of those long complicated ones, but should be worth reading. We will look at Human Growth Factors, of which several have been identified by science and quite possibly more remain to be discovered.   Much of the science is well understood and overlaps with areas of interest to autism and another condition called Retts syndrome. As often seems to be the case, elements of the science has been used by the anti-aging, athletic and body-building fraternities. A surprise to me is that the science leads back to mast cells and that there some interesting therapeutic avenues already in existence. We will even involve the seemingly obscure subject of amyloids that I introduced in a recent post.   In that post we discovered that in autism there were strange things going on with Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) .   I will postulate that perhaps amyloid-induced neuroinflammation might be a factor in the neuroinflammation found in autism. ...