PLT Test Blog

  Adult-sized people with autism can cause property damage and much worse. I am told that summertime raging is a common problem encountered by neurologists, but it remains poorly understood and usually remains untreated. The most common worry for parents of toddlers diagnosed with severe autism is their lack of speech. By the time these children reach adulthood, the biggest worry for parents is often aggression and self-injury. Often it is the mother who faces the worst episodes of aggression, which is a really cruel turn of events. Aggression is usually not present in young children with autism, in some people it never develops, but in others it later becomes established as a learned behavior and then you are stuck with how to deal with it. One of my own therapy targets has long been to improve cognitive function; this can indeed be achieved and then you can improve important daily living skills (adaptive function). Some steps that you can take to improve cognition, and indee...

Need a wizard, or your local doctor? I was intrigued to come across a recent paper on immune modulatory treatments for autism by a couple of doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital for Children.   The lead author has interests in: ·       Autism spectrum disorders ·       Psychopharmacology ·       Developmental Disabilities ·       Williams syndrome ·       Angelman syndrome ·       Down syndrome Apparently, he is an internationally-recognized expert in the neurobiology and neuropsychopharmacology of childhood-onset neuropsychiatric disorders including autistic disorder.  Sounds promising, hopefully we will learn something new. The paper is actually a review of existing drugs, with immunomodulatory properties, that have already been suggested to be repurposed for autism. The abstract was not very insightful, so I have highl...

By far the most read post in this blog is one about histamine and allergies, which means many people are searching on Google for “histamine, allergy and autism”. Our reader Kei recently commented that his daughter, without allergy, was again showing signs of summertime raging and that his neurologist confirmed that summertime raging does indeed happen and nobody knows why. I did figure out how to deal with our version of “summertime raging” and the post-bumetanide “dumber in the summer” phenomena.   There were several posts on this subject.   The lasting solution was to treat the raging as if it was caused by inflammation driven by pollen allergy and to note that inflammation will further worsen the KCC2/NKCC1 imbalance in Bumetanide-responsive autism, making those people appear “dumber in the summer”.   This also accounts for the “Bumetanide has stopped working” phenomenon, reported by some parents.   You need to minimize inflammation from allergy and increase Bumet...

Today’s post should be of interest to those concerned about mitochondrial disease and mTOR. mTOR is a very important signaling cascade that often dysfunctional in autism. Many aspects of autism and its comorbidities can be traced back to mTOR. The going is easier with a PPAR pan-agonist   mTOR integrates the input from upstream pathways, including insulin, growth, and amino acids.    mTOR also senses cellular nutrient, oxygen, and energy levels. The mTOR pathway is a central regulator of metabolism and physiology, with important roles in the function of tissues including liver, muscle, adipose tissue, and the brain.   It is dysregulated in human diseases, such as diabetes, obesity, certain cancers and indeed autism. One important process affected by mTOR is the creation of new mitochondria in your cells.   Each cell has many mitochondria, but in some people there are not enough and/or they may not work properly.    Mitochondrial Disease and Autism I...