Autism, Power Outages and the Starving Brain?
There are certain Critical Periods in the development of the human brain and these are the most vulnerable times to any genetic or environmental insult. Critical Periods (CPs) will be the subject of post appearing shortly. Another power outage waiting to happen Have you wondered why autism secondary to mitochondrial disease (regressive autism) almost always seem to occur before five years of age, and usually much earlier? Why does it not happen later? Why is it's onset often preceded by a viral infection? I think you can consider much of this in terms of the brain running out of energy. Humans have evolved to require a huge amount of energy to power their developing brains, a massive 40% of the body’s energy is required by the brain in early childhood. If your overload a power grid it will end in a blackout. We know many people with autism have a tendency towards mitochondrial dysfunction, they lack some key enzyme complexes. This means that the process of OX...