PLT Test Blog

I am getting a little behind in writing up the findings of my research; I have several posts in preparation.  Here today is a link for those scientists among you:- Autism - A Neurodevelopmental Journey from Genes to Behaviour This is a free e-book with 24 scientific papers.  You can download the entire book or just individual chapters.  The book is from 2011, so it is quite up to date. In the meantime I am looking at ion channels and transporters; and a new term to me " sensory gating ".  This is all connected to an earlier observation I have noted about the effect of potassium (K+) on behaviour and a paper I found about the use of spironolactone (a potassium-sparing diuretic) as a therapy in autism.  The paper claims the benefits are do to a secondary anti-inflammatory effect of the drug; I am not so sure they got their science right.  This all goes back to the role of the neurotransmitter GABA, its role in how the brain develops as it...

Anyone familiar with autism will know that it seems to go in waves of good and not so good.   Generally this gets accepted as just the way it has to be. I chanced upon an unusual paper recently, it was all about comorbidities in autism.   As you may know, comorbidities are other diseases that seem to frequently occur alongside autism.   The main point of the paper and the charity behind it, is that comorbidities should be diagnosed and treated, rather than ignored, just because the person has ASD. The paper was produced by Treating Autism , a UK charity that follows a biomedical approach similar to the American DAN organisation.   They have a link to a very comprehensive summary of what DAN actually recommends. The DAN paper is by a Dr Jepson . The idea of treating the comorbidities as they crop up, seems entirely logical to me; but it seems to miss the bigger issue of what the comorbidity might help tell us about the autism itself. Their list of comorbidities to k...

In my previous posts on histamine, you would have read that I found that Claritin appeared to reduce autistic behaviours.   Once I had got to the bottom of what was going on, I found out that histamine has a long record of stimulating challenging behaviour in all children.   It also became clear that typical anti-histamines (H1 antagonists) are all slightly different and one may be effective in one person and ineffective in another.   Each one tends to have additional secondary effects. It now appears that the secondary effect of certain H1 antagonists may actually be more important than the primary intended effect of reducing itchy eyes and runny noses. There are three generations of H1 drugs.   The fastest working and most potent is still the first generation, the second generation are non-drowsy derivatives of the first generation.   The third generation are the active metabolite of the second generation.   As you will see in today’s central paper, the t...

Having recently discovered that an anti-histamine drug like Claritin can markedly reduce autistic behaviours, I have been looking into exactly why this might be and to see if there could be any other related interventions.   Here are t he results and they pull together all sorts of related comorbidities and in the end I seem to have found a better solution for managing summertime autism flare-ups. Allergies have long been linked to aggressive behaviours It seems to be well known among allergists, that children with allergies may exhibit challenging behaviours.   It goes beyond the simple fact that the child with an allergy will be irritable and therefore behave badly; the allergy itself is affecting the behaviour.   Allergies tend to worsen behaviour and the science can explain exactly why this happens.    This applied to pollen type allergies, food allergies and even asthma. In the case of asthma, I found several studies, one is called:   Prevale...

Today’s post is about a little experiment I carried out. If you have been following my blog, you will know that I have been looking into certain related diseases to autism (comorbidities).  One of the subjects that come up in asthma research is the role of a special kind of cell, called the mast cell.  One autism researcher in particular, Dr Theoharides, is also of the opinion that the mast cell plays a key role in autism. For today, I am not going to give you the full detail on mast cells, just to tell you that play a key role in inflammatory responses and that they can get over-activated and cause problems in various parts of your body. It is well established that you can calm down your overactive mast cells with histamine antagonists.  There are H1 antagonists like Claritin/Loratadine and H2 antagonists like Tagamet.  H1 antagonists are commonly used to control allergies, and H2 antagonists are commonly used for stomach ulcers and GERD. Claritin is off patent,...