PLT Test Blog

  Adult-sized people with autism can cause property damage and much worse. I am told that summertime raging is a common problem encountered by neurologists, but it remains poorly understood and usually remains untreated. The most common worry for parents of toddlers diagnosed with severe autism is their lack of speech. By the time these children reach adulthood, the biggest worry for parents is often aggression and self-injury. Often it is the mother who faces the worst episodes of aggression, which is a really cruel turn of events. Aggression is usually not present in young children with autism, in some people it never develops, but in others it later becomes established as a learned behavior and then you are stuck with how to deal with it. One of my own therapy targets has long been to improve cognitive function; this can indeed be achieved and then you can improve important daily living skills (adaptive function). Some steps that you can take to improve cognition, and indee...

    Today’s post is about some drugs/supplements that have already been discussed in earlier posts.   Rifaximin, used in cycles, is an effective part of our reader Maja’s therapy, while Sodium Butyrate was highlighted long ago by our reader in Switzerland, Alli. I had a consultation with a gastroenterologist last week and came away with a prescription for Rifaximin, microencapsulated  Sodium Butyrate and Lactobacillus Plantarum 299v. Where we live, these are all inexpensive. Rifaximin is an antibiotic with extra benefits and costs about 7 euros (9 dollars).   A course of Rifaximin can cost $2,000 in the United States. I was pleased to read that the private equity owners of a pharmaceutical company that raised the price of a common thyroid drug by 6000% have just been fined $140 million in the UK. Advanz Pharma and former private equity owners were fined £100m by markets watchdog Perhaps some of our US readers should query the crazy price of drugs in the US...

  Many readers have been receiving new posts automatically by email. This was a free service provided by Feedburner, part of Google.   This service is about to be discontinued by Google. I have added a new service provided by a company called Follow.it, which should provide the follow by email service. In theory, the people who subscribed to the Google service should be migrated over to the new service.   If it does not work, you can just subscribe again in the top right corner of the Web version of the blog.  The smart phone version of the blog may not display this feature, because of the small screen size.    

    For leaky ATP, Popeye might want to try Dexpramipexole and Suramin, or even the already approved Mirapex If you are old enough to be a parent, you will have encountered problems with some kind of leak.  A leaky roof, a leaky pipe, a leaky washing machine, an air-conditioning unit... The list goes on, the older you get. I have been preoccupied by fixing a leak recently.   We have a large roof terrace and, in the winter, water started leaking from the ceiling in the floor below.   I improvised a system to catch all the water, but still I had to find the source of the leak. I did finally find the source of the problem and most importantly without digging up 95% of the terrace.   Now I have to put the 5% back together again. Leaks are often extremely difficult to locate, because water always finds the easiest path and the dripping you see might have originated from a leak far away.   Nobody wants to fix leaks, because it can be a pretty thankle...

Betaine (also known as TMG, or trimethylglycine)  is a methyl derivative of glycine, first isolated from sugar beet and hence its name. Today’s post was prompted by our reader, and Covid home-school instructor, AJ.  He raised the question of whether betaine can be used like Bumetanide to normalize chloride levels in neurons. I am combing this idea with news from Genoa in Italy, where they have developed gene therapy as an alternative to Bumetanide and in their words :- “This sets the stage for the development of a gene therapy approach to overcome the shortcomings of bumetanide treatment.” The interesting thing is that neither of these ideas come from autism research.  The idea to use Betaine was stumbled upon and was then written up in a Norwegian case study about Creatine transporter deficiency.  The Italians are trying to improve cognition in brain disorders and their model of choice was Down syndrome.   As we have seen time and again, elevated chloride...