PLT Test Blog

There is no medical consensus about what to do with people who have subclinical epileptiform discharges (SEDs) on their EEG. That is people who do not have seizures but have an abnormal EEG. There is evidence to support the use of anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) in such people. About 5% of the general population have SEDs, but a far higher number of people with autism have SEDs. You are more likely to detect epileptiform activity depending on which test you use. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) detects the most abnormalities, followed by a sleep EEG and then an EEG with a subject wide awake. It had been thought that epileptiform activity (SEDs) was more common in regressive autism, but that is no longer thought to be the case. It even briefly had a name, Autistic Epileptiform Regression (AER). Subsequent studies indicate that regression is not relevant to subclinical epileptiform discharges (SEDs). Estimates of prevalence still vary dramatically from Dr Chez at 60% to others believing it is 2...

Epigenopathies were introduced in an earlier post Today’s post takes another dip into the genetics of autism and currently existing therapies that could be re-purposed for autism.  We also see that many secrets remain beyond the 3% of your DNA that usually gets all the research attention.  The remaining 97% is not junk after all. There was an earlier post on this blog that introduced Epigenetics.  It is not such a complicated subject, just think about it as little tags on your DNA that turn genes on/off usually when they should not be, but there remains the possibility to use epigenetics for good.  In people with under-expression of an important gene you could “tag it” and then increase its expression. The exome is the part of your DNA that encodes the various proteins needed to build your body.  The remaining 97% of your DNA was once thought to be just junk; we saw in recent post that one part contains enhancers and silencers that control expression of the gen...