Treatment of Autism with low-dose Phenytoin, yet another AED
I do like coincidences and I do like not struggling to find a picture for my posts. Phenytoin ( Dilantin ) is a drug that appeared in the novel and film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , but then it was not used in low-doses. Today’s post follows from a comment I received about using very low doses of anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) in autism. First of all a quick recap. Clonazepam was discovered by Professor Catterall, over in Seattle, to have the effect of modifying the action of the neurotransmitter GABA to make it inhibitory, at tiny doses that would be considered to be sub-clinical (i.e. ineffective). Valproate , another AED, was discovered by one of this blog’s readers also to have an “anti-autism” effect in tiny doses of 1 mg/kg. A psychiatrist from Australia, Dr Bird, specialized in adults with ADHD has just published a paper about the benefit of low-dose phenytoin in adult autism. The same psychiatrist has also earlier encountered the effect of low dose valproate in ...