PLT Test Blog

If you are looking for personalized medicine, you or your doctor need to be a good detective. Not to mention you need some clues. If you are treating a condition like autism and certain things cause a marked change in the severity of the condition, these are pretty good places to start. In the case of our reader in Delhi, it is Beta-lactam antibiotics (penicillin, amoxicillin etc), that consistently seem to improve her son’s autism. Improvement during treatment with antibiotics is reported quite often in autism, but with all kinds of different antibiotic.   Nothing is simple. For non-medical readers, there are several categories of antibiotics; common types including:- ·         Beta-lactams (e.g. Penicillins) ·         Macrolides (e.g. Erythromycin , Azithromycin ) ·         Fluoroquinolones (e.g. Ciprofloxacin )   ·         Tetracyclines...

Magical Poland Today’s post is about yet another reason why some people with autism might have a positive behavioral response while on antibiotics. Today it is the turn of macrolide-type antibiotics, which have proven immunomodulatory effects. To get the immunomodulatory benefits, without worsening antibiotic resistance, a neat solution called CSY0073 is coming. Nystatin is another possibility. One of the best papers happens to come from a pair of researchers from Lodz ( Łódź, pronounced “Wudge”) in Poland. This blog has many Polish readers .   I was recently helping my son, Monty aged 14 with ASD, with his geography presentation on Poland.   I used to travel quite a lot to Poland and I am familiar with its turbulent history. So today’s picture above is actually from Monty’s PowerPoint presentation on Poland. As musical backing, we added one of Chopin’s Polonaises, since Monty is the piano man and Chopin was born in Poland. Polonaise (Polonez) is the name of a type of Polish...

There is much written in the complex scientific literature about the Excitatory/Inhibitory (E/I) imbalance between neurotransmitters in autism.   Many clinical trials have already been carried out, particularly in Fragile-X.   These trials were generally ruled as failures, in spite of a significant minority who responded quite well in some of these trials. As we saw in the recent post on the stage II trial of bumetanide in severe autism, there is so much “background noise” in the results from these trials and it is easy to ignore a small group who are responders.   I think if you have less than 40%, or so, of positive responders they likely will get lost in the data.   You inevitably get a significant minority who appear to respond to the placebo, because people with autism usually have good and bad days and testing is very subjective. There are numerous positive anecdotes from people who participated in these “failed” trials.   If you have a child who only ever...