PLT Test Blog

Monty, aged 14 with ASD, has finished his year-end assessments in his first year at high school.   Monty has classic autism, which we can also call a type of Strictly Defined Autism (SDA), or what autism used to be under DSM3, before the diagnosis was extended in 1994 to include Asperger’s at the clever end and PDD-NOS in the middle.   From that point onwards, autism means entirely different things to different people. For the last 6 years Monty has moved up each year with his neurotypical peers, who are two years his junior.   During those years I used to go to the parent teacher meetings at school and explain that if Monty could not keep up, it would be just fine to hold him back another year, for example if he came at the bottom of the class in most subjects. We held him back two academic years, 6 years ago, in the “big reset” and I assumed this would likely need to be repeated, since people with SDA cannot acquire skills as fast as typical people. This blog is really ...

This blog has shown that great things are possible just by fine-tuning a full-sized autistic brain, during childhood. In the case of our reader Roger, we are reminded that in adulthood the correct intervention can have profound results. It is never too late. Nonetheless, it is clear that the sooner you intervene with biology, the better the end result should be. There is a concept of Critical Periods (also called sensitive periods) where it seems the maturation of a young brain is particularly vulnerable to both environmental and genetic insults. During these periods if you intervene pharmacologically you might make permanent life-changing modifications to the brain.   The recurring theme in Critical Periods in autism is a disturbed excitatory-inhibitory (E/I) balance. This is the same E/I imbalance discussed in depth in this blog.  Some conditions that may lead to autism are detected before birth, such as Down Syndrome (DS) and many others could be. Surprisingly, there is now...

There are certain Critical Periods in the development of the human brain and these are the most vulnerable times to any genetic or environmental insult.   Critical Periods (CPs) will be the subject of post appearing shortly. Another power outage waiting to happen   Have you wondered why autism secondary to mitochondrial disease (regressive autism) almost always seem to occur before five years of age, and usually much earlier?   Why does it not happen later? Why is it's onset often preceded by a viral infection? I think you can consider much of this in terms of the brain running out of energy. Humans have evolved to require a huge amount of energy to power their developing brains, a massive 40% of the body’s energy is required by the brain in early childhood.   If your overload a power grid it will end in a blackout. We know many people with autism have a tendency towards mitochondrial dysfunction, they lack some key enzyme complexes. This means that the process of OX...