PLT Test Blog

A subtype of people with classic autism have uric acid excretion which is elevated (>2 Standard Deviations above the normal mean).  According to the research these hyperuricosuric autistic individuals may comprise approximately 20% of the autistic population. There is nothing new in these findings and the research goes back 15 years.  At that time nobody looked too deeply as why uric acid was elevated and the role of the purine metabolism in behaviour. Dr Naviaux at the University of California is the researcher who is developing antipurinergic therapy.  I suspect his research is really at the root of what is going on and that high uric acid is just a consequence of an upstream metabolic dysfunction. In the meantime, is there any benefit of treating people with autism and hyperuricemia ? It does seem that in some people doing just that does produce tangible benefits and not just in autism; there was even a study in bipolar disorder.  In bipolar, verapamil can also...

Monty, aged 12 with ASD, has been taking Atorvastatin for two years, with a clear cognitive improvement from day one.    This improvement is lost when this therapy is interrupted. There are several posts in this blog giving the scientific basis why statins might be beneficial in some autism, these included the genes/proteins RAS, PTEN and BCL2.  In addition, statins possess potent anti-inflammatory properties. Following a flood of visits to this blog to read about statins and autism, I did a quick check and in recent weeks at least three papers have been published suggesting the potential for statins to improve some autism. I include the word “some” because with 800 currently identified autism genes, and I expect eventually it will be thousands, what works for one person’s “autism” may not help the next person’s “autism” and might even make it worse. The first paper is the one getting the media coverage, it is from the University of Edinburgh, plus Mark Bear et al from MI...

Having noted in the previous post something as simple, and measurable, as reduced blood flow in the brain exists in autism, I decided to dig a little deeper. Not only can you measure blood flow in specific regions of the brain, but using Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy you can measure the temperature of the brain. Intense heat production is an essential feature of normal brain energetics; most of the energy used for brain functioning is eventually released as heat.  In the brain, heat is produced mostly by mitochondrial oxidative chemical reactions. Most of the energy required for brain activity is generated from the net chemical reaction of oxygen and glucose; some of this energy (33 % ) is immediately dissipated into heat, and the rest (67 % ) is used to synthesize ATP. The final ATP hydrolysis releases part of the energy back to the system as heat. Note that your core temperature is not the same as your brain temperature. Brain temperature T br should be near constant Increas...