Here’s a completely novel way to suppress brain inflammation is autistics! Deliberate infections with parasitic worms!
Last year a case was published in The Scientist (Feb 2011) of a father’s search for a cure for his autistic son, Lawrence, which led him to the “helminth therapy”, or the deliberate infection of the patient with worms; in this case Trichuris suis, the pig whipworm.

No question the patient, Lawrence Johnson, was in a bad way. By his teenage years, he had veered into the dangerous realm of self abuse. He smashed his head against the wall dozens of times a day. He bit himself until he bled. He gouged at his eyes and tore at his face. A normal school experience was virtually impossible. He couldn’t walk a single block from the family’s Brooklyn brownstone without kicking and screaming when a traffic light changed at the wrong moment or streets were crossed in an unacceptable order.

Over the years, the Johnsons tried several treatments to curb Lawrence’s violent and disruptive outbreaks, including every pharmaceutical that could potentially treat his problems—antiseizure medications, serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, atypical antipsychotics, lithium, and others in various combinations.

At best these heavy medications offered momentary reprieves from what the Johnsons called Lawrence’s “freak outs.” But any improvements in the boy’s behavior were usually short-lived.

[http://the-scientist.com/2011/02/01/opening-a-can-of-worms/ accessed 1/22/2012 2.38 pm PST]

By 2005 the Johnson family was at its breaking point. The parents had coped with their almost unmanageable son for over a decade. Something had to be done, or Lawrence would need to be in managed care.

The father trawled PubMed and Medline sites for scientific studies that may help his son’s condition. He wasn’t looking for a “cure” so much as something just to make family life bearable. What he found was data that pointed to a link between some autism symptoms and inflated levels of proinflammatory cytokines, an apparent result of the immune system attacking glial cells in patients’ brains. [D.L. Vargas et al., “Neuroglial activation and neuroinflammation in the brain of patients with autism,” Annal Neurol, 57:67-81, 2005]

Finally, Stewart Johnson stumbled across the work of an Iowa research group on helminth therapy and how it reduced inflammation, especially the auto-immune type, where the immune cells inappropriately attacked cells of the patient’s own body. It was reasonable to hope this might calm his son’s outrageous behavior.

Stewart enlisted the help of Lawrence’s doctor, Eric Hollander, then the head of Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Seaver Autism Center in New York City. Hollander was impressed with Stewart’s research and agreed to help him obtain sterile, treatment-grade T. suis eggs that were being grown and tested in Europe by the German company OvaMed.

There was great difficulty in convincing the authorities of the safety aspect. But finally, common sense won. T. suis has evolved to infect the guts of pigs, and could only colonize humans in a very limited fashion. Like most internal parasites, T. suis cannot complete its entire life cycle in only one host, and in the environment the ova require a 3- to 6-week incubation in moist soil to mature, making inadvertent spread of the parasites to the rest of the family unlikely.

They had Lawrence drink a solution containing 1,000 of the roundworm eggs every two weeks for 5 months beginning in early 2006. But the results were very disappointing. Lawrence’s aggressive and agitated behaviors abated for just four days during the entire 20-week treatment period.

But OvaMed’s president Detlev Goj suggested the dose was too small and recommended Lawrence receive 2,500 eggs every two weeks for a period and see what happened.

This time, the results were astounding. Within 10 weeks of the higher-dose treatment, the autistic boy stopped smashing his head against walls. He stopped gouging at his eyes. The paralysis and frustration that held him and his family prisoners in their own home lifted. The freak outs ceased.

There was no gradual improvement; all the distressing behaviors just disappeared abruptly.

To learn more about good and bad in parasites, read my own report: The Parasites Handbook

You will remember I recently did a post on the astonishing mental prowess of a couple of youngsters who were disadvantaged by autism and brain damage. Well, for them it wasn’t merely damage: they seemed to have amazingly augmented powers of mind that leave us ordinary mortal gasping with admiration. savants

Laurent Mottron, MD, PhD, from the University of Montreal’s Centre for Excellence in Pervasive Development Disorders, says the definition of autism itself is biased, being characterized by “a suite of negative characteristics,” focusing on deficits that include problems with language and social interactions. However, in certain settings, such as scientific research, people with autism exhibit cognitive strength.

He walks his talk and Dr Mottron has 8 individuals with autism in his own  research group including 4 assistants, 3 students, and 1 researcher, Michelle Dawson, whom he met almost 10 years ago during a television documentary about autism.

Though lacking a formal doctorate, Ms Dawson has since coauthored 13 papers and several book chapters.

According to the Nature article, “We think that the kind of strengths and cognitive profile that we find in autistics are much more specific than scientists usually acknowledge,” said Dr. Mottron.

“Unfortunately, there is no gold standard for the diagnosis of autism. Clinical diagnoses are reliable among scientists, but it is just a consensus…everybody may fail.”

He noted that as a result of a diagnosis, many individuals with autism end up working at repetitive, menial jobs despite their potential to make more significant contributions to society.

“After 18 years of age they’re not kids anymore, and they’re forgotten,” he said. “People have a cliché, that if he’s autistic you can do nothing with him. That’s not true. The fact that you have some terrible autistic life is not representative of autism in general.”

These are inspiring words, which I hope will be shared around. Certainly some of the autistic kids I have worked with over the years have had some fantastic plus points that make them companionable in a roundabout way, even if their direct interactions leave a little to be desired. Besides, it was very unusual to not be able to improve their mental and social skills dramatically with the regimes I was using in the 1980s and 90s.

Mottron’s unusual idea—and I think he’s a first—is that autism is part of the human spectrum, not just some disorder spectrum or a defect to be suppressed and “treated”. He’s convinced that, more than anything, people with autism “need opportunities, [and] frequently support, but rarely treatment.”

Radical stuff, I’ll say!

There is no question, of course, that autistics are different but that’s a better word than abnormal. Autistics rely less on verbal centers and demonstrating stimulation in regions that process both visual information and language.

Advantages may include spotting a pattern in a distracting environment, auditory tasks such as discriminating sound pitches, detecting visual structures, and mentally manipulating complex 3-dimensional shapes.

Individuals with autism also perform Raven’s Matrices (a trusted, nonverbal assessment of intelligence) at an average of 40% faster than nonautistics, using their analytical skills to complete an ongoing visual pattern.

Other benefits of autism include the ability to simultaneously process large amounts of perceptual information as data sets and the presence of instantaneous and correct recall.

That fits very well with the description of the two amazing young men I blogged about a month ago.

The important thing is there is a big degree of correctability with autism. I got severely disordered youngsters back to normal schooling, so I know that with personal certainty.

If we reach these individuals at a young age, when their brains are malleable, we can cognitively redirect the transmission of information via the corpus callosum to the speech areas in the left hemisphere of the brain and oftentimes speech and language will kick in.

Until then, intelligence in autistics should be measured only with non-verbal tests.

According to the article in Nature, autism is 3.5 times more prevalent than common statistics suggest.

I might add that there has even a suggestion that autism may come about because children lack normal interactions at the crucial period of growth and integration and that this in turn has been blamed on Moms going out to work, instead of being as mother.

A challenging and not PC idea. But it would explain why autism is

1. recent
2. on the rise
3. far more common in the USA than the rest of the world.

One of Dr. Mottron’s most important points is that the performance of individuals with autism on normal tests may be poor but that with visual intelligence tests the true intelligence of people with autism is higher than is usually supposed.

Of course, there are detractors; mainly, I notice, people who make their money from autism “support”, rather than solving the problem!

But I applaud Mottron’s fresh stance. I think what Dr. Mottron is getting us to is the idea that autism is a different way of being, not necessary a disordered way of being, and the difference can give us strengths and abilities that other people may not have.

There is a plus side to autism!

[Source: Nature. Published online November 2, 2011]

What are we to make of this? Scientists have genetically engineered mice whose symptoms closely mimic autism in humans.

Autism is characterized by problems with social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and restricted interests and behaviors. The “autistic mice” showed similar traits.

Unlike ordinary mice, the genetically engineered versions showed little interest in interacting with other mice. While regular mice vocalize when they’re together — especially in response to receiving something highly rewarding such as sugar — the autistic mice stayed quiet. The autistic mice also excessively groomed themselves, suggesting a repetitive behavior.

So is autism genetic? It’s widely accepted that a single gene isn’t to blame for autism, but that a variety of genes and environmental influences play a role. There are inherited traits, it is true. But only about 3% of autism cases are linked to any one gene abnormality.

One thing researchers didn’t find when they engineered their autistic mice were alterations in brain structure that have been associated with autism in humans, such as a temporary increase in brain volume seen in infants and toddlers who go on to receive an autism diagnosis.

Of course, one cannot accept a mouse model as fully representative of the human condition. Mice cannot talk and autism is essentially a breakdown in communication and social interactivity.

The study is published in the Oct. 5, 2011, issue of Science Translational Medicine.