Wow. Absolutely incredible.

Immune Dysregulation

A Mouse Model for the Immune Dysregulation Subtype of Autism « Lisa Ackerman – Real Help Now.

I can’t really tell you how much I wish this were more well-known. I know that I can’t make anyone else really feel the same way, either. Not in the meaningful way I’d like, at least. I don’t think anyone can feel it properly unless they’ve been there.

The medical community might think it’s not worth exploring but try asking the mom that had a miscarriage two months before getting pregnant with her ASD son. The one whose miscarried pregnancy was completely not right in every way from the very start. The pregnancy that was likely miscarried for some sort of immune dysfunction.

The bad pregnancy that probably affected the pregnancy immediately following it two months later.

Whatever happened to my immune system happened to him. He was born with those immune problems and spent the first three years of his like always sick. Vaccines (especially the Hep B) played such a large role in keeping him sick and making him sicker. Each shot make him slip further away.

I find myself having many of the same issues but I’m older, I’m not developing and learning and becoming a person. I already know how to behave appropriately so when these issues arise in me, I already know how to handle them, or at least control them. I already know it’s not normal.

He was an infant with no prior knowledge. He was a brand new being and all these things were imprinting in his brain as being normal.

And now his immune system is shot and his viral titers are crazy. He will not likely ever be able to stop taking antivirals and antifungals. It’s just an unfortunate reality. His recovery is completely reliant upon them. Without them, his ASD symptoms return. It’s been proven over and over in him. Take antivirals and symptoms disappear. Remove antivirals and symptoms return. We’ve replicated this scenario every year.

I’m not sure how much more proof anyone could need. You don’t even have to believe that he has immune dysfunction. All you need to do is believe that antivirals clearly improve his ASD status. He goes from mostly recovered while on it to not at all recovered when off. We can do this over and over and over and over. There’s obviously some kind of correlation that should give any doctor pause.

And yet I can’t get many western medical professionals to “get it” and understand autism is more than a set of psychological symptoms. We’re fortunate that we’ve got a wonderful ped and a wonderful DAN doctor. But it took us a long time to find a doctor that looked at the results instead of towing the party line.

Medicine should be progressive. We should be open to learning, not pressured by organizations and companies with an agenda.

These are the types of studies we need more doctors to read. We need more doctors that will employ critical thinking skills instead of looking up the same tired answers in a medical book or rehashing the same biased information from what has been proven many times over to be biased journals.

Maternal (possibly even paternal) immune dysregulation should matter. Immune dysregulation as a subtype of ASD should matter.

Be angry.

Yes. I said it. Be angry. Be outraged.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfkscHt96R0&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Benefits of Antidepressants in Autism Overstated?

Benefits of Antidepressants in Autism Overstated?.

It’s not often I post something from WebMD. But here it is, ya’ll! Publication bias. Something us ASD families have been talking about for a very long time.

It’s funny because this is a big part of our argument and we get told over and over that it’s simply not true. There is no bias and that if a study is done well, it should be accepted by journal gatekeepers and will find a home in journal. We’re told that the studies we cite were simply poorly done and not up to proper standards.

Yet here it is – they even have a word for it: publication bias.

Having gone the route of SSRIs in our early days, I know this is true. I know that the benefits of antidepressants are severely overstated and the overprescription of such drugs to 3 and 4 year olds is flat out dangerous.

Trust your doctor at your own risk. Healthy living isn’t rocket science. It’s not hard to read the material and learn and decide for yourself if something makes sense to you. There are risks with any medicine and we all take them. We know that some cause liver failure and some cause strokes and so on. But we also know that we take that risk ourselves as adults.

These are our children. They deserve more than lip service. They deserve every parent’s full knowledge of the risks and weighing of the evidence. Decide for yourself if the results are worse than the possible cures.

They turned my son into a psychopath. That was not worth the risk and it took a full 2 months to get him out of that mess and another month to get him back to normal. There is a black box label on these things for a reason.

Is your child so bad off that you need to try? For some, the answer to that question is an emphatic yes. And they’d probably find help there. At least, I hope so.

But for most, the answer is probably no. There are much safer options out there with a better track record.

Whatever you do, DO YOUR RESEARCH.

Do not be a parent that doesn’t have the answers to your own questions. Find them. You don’t need to be a doctor to find out what the pros and cons are of a medication. You don’t need to be a doctor to go to PubMed, to read the research  or even read the insert. Ask questions. Find the answers. Discuss with your doctor, don’t let your doctor simply tell you what to do. Have a real conversation with real questions, real answers and don’t be afraid to tell your doctor no or ask for time to think about it. Understand that doctors are people and they don’t actually know everything. Some doctors prescribe a medication simply because that’s what you’re supposed to do and they really don’t know anything about it. I had one doctor argue with me when I told her I was on oral hydrocortisone simply because she’d never heard of it. She was adamant that no such thing existed. Clearly I’m too stupid to 1.) know my own medication that I’d been taking for a year and 2.) read the damn label.

Don’t be bullied into choices you aren’t ready to make.

1 in 88 diagnosed with #autism

CDC: U.S. kids with autism up 78% in past decade – CNN.com.

But don’t worry! Those numbers will drop down to nothing next year. Problem solved!

I also love how they always mention how early detection and early behavioral therapy are the keys to success. They always fail to mention biomed and when they do, it comes with a caveat or three.

Yes, early detection is good. Yes, behavioral therapy is good. But that’s not all that we have available to us and I’m tired of parents coming to me without a clue because no professional will nut up and tell them.

Have some balls, medical community. Fear of the truth doesn’t help find the truth. Grow a set so we can actually try to figure out which kids would benefit from which specific biomed treatments and we could recover more kids faster.

People with autism possess greater ability to process information, study suggests

People with autism possess greater ability to process information, study suggests.

I thought this was interesting. Some quotes:

Professor Nilli Lavie, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, hypothesises that this combination of the ability to focus and a susceptibility to distraction might be caused by a higher than normal information processing capacity.

and:

Professor Lavie says: “Our study confirms our hypothesis that people with autism have higher perceptual capacity compared to the typical population. This can only be seen once the task becomes more demanding, with more information to process. In the more challenging task conditions, people with autism are able to perceive significantly more information than the typical adult.”

I wonder, then, how this would also affect those with ADD/HD and if maybe any subtypes would be more akin to autism than not. Distractibility and autism kind of go hand and hand along with hyperfocusing, both of which are also a part of ADD/HD.

As it is, I already believe that the two are too similar to be separate conditions. This just adds to that growing list of reasons why they probably should fall under the same diagnosis, as far as I’m concerned.

But as the article reads, it seems to me that we can extrapolate that ASD children have difficulty processing information because as children, they simply don’t have the higher functioning capabilities (i.e. maturity, age appropriate cognitive skills being too young) as the adults to properly organize that information they receive. Or we could extrapolate that they aren’t being given enough information. I tend to think the latter is probably not correct simply because developmentally, they couldn’t do much with more information anyway but I do think that the prior could be a very real issue. The article does state that while not all ASD children are savants, they are likely to have the same processing ability.

So maybe the processing issues we know ASD children have, stem from a lack of maturity and those processing issues correct as they get older and develop their non-typical skills that help them to process that information the way they do.

Certainly an interesting assertion. Maybe all us parents that are desperately worried about our kids’ processing for no reason (well, no reason might be stretching it but you know what I’m saying).  One thing we do know is that MR is not a symptom of ASD so processing disorders are always on the minds of parents of ASD children.

What do you think this could mean?

Kansas to Pregnant Women: “A Little Lie from Your Doctor Won’t Hurt You”

Kansas to Pregnant Women: “A Little Lie from Your Doctor Won’t Hurt You”.

How much longer are we going to pretend the medical community doesn’t have an agenda?

I don’t trust doctors. Some would call me paranoid. Some would say I’m overreacting. I wonder how much longer they’ll be able to hold on to that theory.

Legislators, supposed christians and state leaders, have sent a message. They don’t give a shit what you think. They don’t give a shit about the AMA. They don’t give a shit about ethics. And they sure as hell don’t give a shit if you trust your doctor.

It’s perfectly okay and encouraged to lie to patients.

Do you really believe it stops there?

This touches on many topics. I won’t even touch the religion in politics or the abortion issue as this is an autism blog but understand the entirety of my opinions for all three results in no one ever cares until it happens to them.

Pro-lifers believe abortion should be illegal but would they be okay when it gets to the point of arranged marriages? Not all pro-lifers believe that they shouldn’t be able to use birth control. Not every religious person will be okay with a doctor lying to them or others. Not every religious person will be okay with their bosses asking about their sex life.

How irrational are we now? No one cares until it happens to them. No one cares about our concerns or our children. No one wants to believe that this type of thing could actually happen in this country. The medical community couldn’t really be in the pockets of big pharma or the CDC. Politicians and money can’t really be what’s going on here. We can’t seriously be more concerned with reputations and appearance than the actual health of our children. There couldn’t possibly be an agenda.

Do you care yet?

It’s hard to believe I can still get angry even when I’m not surprised at all.

 

MMR II and Autism: Microcompetition the Missing Link?

MMR II and Autism: Microcompetition the Missing Link?.

Fascinating story. I hope there’s more to come on this front.

Sunnyvale mom kills autistic son, self, police say

Sunnyvale mom kills autistic son, self, police say.

So terribly sad. With funding getting cut, I don’t see how this is going to get any better.

BBC News – MMR doctor wins High Court appeal

BBC News – MMR doctor wins High Court appeal.

Chief executive Niall Dickson added: “Today’s ruling does not however reopen the debate about the MMR vaccine and autism.

“As Mr Justice Mitting observed in his judgement, ‘There is now no respectable body of opinion which supports (Dr Wakefield’s) hypothesis, that MMR vaccine and autism/enterocolitis are causally linked’.

Interesting comment considering that by virtue of the ruling just said you’re all a bunch of frakking idiots for revoking his license for something you were never able to prove in the first place.

Good luck with that.

Time to let it go. The poster case against vaccines being ONE possible cause of autism is unraveling pretty damn fast. But it certainly has shown the GMC’s ass to everyone.

Yeah, clearly there’s no agenda here and everyone is just sooooo worried about the dangers of not vaccinating. *rolls eyes* I sincerely hope this makes people wake up and question just what the medical community is trying to hide.

Congratulations, John Walker-Smith. Your career was stained and ruined by a bunch of power-hungry nimrods but at least someone finally listened, even if it did have to be so many years later.

For more information, AoA has some of the details here from JABS.