PLT Test Blog

Japan, home to today’s complicated research Today’s post hopes to give a more complete picture of the various processes involved in shifting the immature neurons often found in autism towards the mature neurons, found in most people.   This stalled process is complex and may only apply to around half of all autism. The post assumes prior knowledge from previous posts about the GABA switch and the KCC2 and NKCC1 chloride cotransporters. The best graphic I found is below and includes almost everything. The paper itself is very thorough and I recommend the scientists among you read the paper rather than my post. What we want to understand is why neurons did not switch from immature to mature, in the process I am calling the “GABA switch”.   We know a great deal about what happens before and after the switch and many processes that can be   involved, but the exact switch itself remains undefined. In a previous post I highlighted that neuroligin 2 (NL2)/RORa may be the GABA sw...

It is not always easy to decide which subjects to study, never mind if you have autism. For Monty, aged 12 with autism, it has been me choosing what he studies.  At the beginning it was rather overwhelming for his 1:1 assistant, because there was so much to learn and never enough time.  It takes years to learn very simple things that typical kids just pick up naturally. One big change after three and half years of Polypill use, is that Monty follows the standard academic curriculum, albeit for kids two years his junior. An excellent but not very user friendly curriculum/skill list is in a book called ABLLS ( assessment of basic language and learning skills).  It is both a curriculum and an assessment tool.  It covers all the very basic skills that kids need as a foundation for future learning. We were working from this list of simple skills for four years, until the age of eight.  These are skills most kids effortlessly pick up in the first three or four years...