PLT Test Blog

The idea behind personalized medicine is the realization that humans are all slightly different and that some of the diseases they suffer, like autism, are also all slightly different.   In order to treat them optimally, you would need to use drugs and dosages customized to each person. Here below are three slides used to illustrate Personalized Medicine in cancer care.  Instead of treating “cancer”, four sub-types are identified and then treated using four different drugs.  Each person only receiving the effective drug. Source: http://scitechconnect.elsevier.com/personalized-cancer-medicine-will-time-now / Autism is not cancer, but understanding cancer gives you a much better concept of what can underlie a highly complex disease like autism.  You need to consider multiple hits as in cancer, which is very similar to Russian Roulette. The thing that does not seem to exist in cancer is the "double tap", when in a minority of cases, a moderate case sudden changes to a s...

In today’s post I intended to dig a little deeper into the GABA switch, which appears to underlie much autism, schizophrenia, epilepsy, even Down Syndrome and, not to forget, many mood disorders.   Once you start digging, it is rather hard to stop. There is literature on the subject, but very little (almost none, really) looks at the big picture of what is going on.  It is the big picture that matters. The GABA switch(es); but how many are there? The post starts out relatively simple, but then it does get complicated, because I discovered a lot interesting avenues exist, that seem to have been completed ignored by autism research.  It seems Down Syndrome researchers are better informed.   So if you make it to the end of this post, you will have done well. It seems that there are tens, if not hundreds, of possible ways to repair the faulty GABA switches.  It would very much become a case for personalized medicine, correcting the precise dysfunctions, withou...