[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

So: no neurological opioid connection, no need for GFCF.

How certain are you about this pain theory?

Jesus Christ on a cracker, UT. How many different ways can I explain that there are multiple pieces of internal dysfunction, multiple sets of symptoms, and multiple treatments that do not all work for every child? The chart that I attached awhile back didn't specifically mention "pain," because that's not a measurable symptom--instead it mentioned things like "inflammation," which any moron can realize leads to pain.

I haven't been discussing treatment of symptoms because you haven't been discussing it; you've been hammering alternately on vaccines and thimerosal. Pages and pages ago, in fact, the thread did take a little tangent off into treatments, with reference to the idea that if these treatments are working, it is de facto additional evidence that the disorder is autoimmune and the cause is environmental.

But since you're suddenly interested in the treatment of existing cases of autism, I'll give you a basic rundown of the biomedical model.

There are three major components, which all lead to a display of neurological symptoms in their own way: gastrointestinal, immunological, and toxicological. Every autistic child I have met has dysfunction in at least two, if not all three categories, with varying severity. But again, every kid is different.

My son, for example, is highly gastrointestinal and to a lesser degree immunological. The GFCF diet improved his symptoms, but it wasn't a cure. Removing all the foods he was allergic to made him even better, but it still wasn't a cure. A temporary stint on the liquid diet--which serves two purposes, incidentally, both to remove 100% of potential food allergens from his system, as well as to allow digestive damage to heal--is showing even more improvement, but it still is not a cure. (What's more, it does have the negative side effect of promoting intestinal infections, as the formula is the perfect food for bacteria as well. So it generally needs to be tempered with antibiotics so that you don't substitute one digestive problem for another.) But, while he did develop all these food allergies, and didn't get a single illness--not a cold, not a fever, nothing--for almost 2 years, he doesn't seem to have a significant myelin auto-immune component (which is what about half of those autoimmune cites I gave you are talking about--the fact that a huge number of autistic children show de-myelinization in the brain due to the immune system incorrectly targeting the myelin cells, just like it incorrectly targets small intestine cells in a person with celiac disease.) The treatment for de-myelinization is methylated B12 shots, which is what the body uses to repair and create new myelin. My son has not shown significant improvement with these shots, thus we are deducing no significant de-myelinization. We'll be doing the lab tests in another few weeks to find out if he has toxicological problems, but my personal instinct is that I think he probably will not.

On the other hand, my daughter is only very mildly gastrointestinal. Her primary symptom was constipation, rather than diarrhea. Foods did not seem to affect her behavior much, even when the food was causing obvious gastrointestinal problems, such as bright green stools with whole pieces of food completely undigested. And likewise, the liquid diet has shown some small improvements for her, but nothing like what my son has shown. She also had a few allergies, but nowhere near as many as he did, and she gets sick on a normal basis. But, she does seem to have a strong de-myelinization component, as she's been showing very significant improvements in just the last few days, after starting the B12 shots. She's not ready to do the toxicological labs yet, but my personal instinct is that I think she will have a significant toxicological problem, because her blood work has already shown she has an extremely low concentration of glutathione, which is the body's natural substance for removing toxins from the bloodstream. My son, on the other hand, had normal levels of glutathione.

I personally suspect that in 30 years, when these treatments have become more mainstream and had a chance to get real funding to be studied on a large scale, they will determine that there are several identifiable disorders at play here. One disorder that leads to an autoimmune attack on the myelin sheath, another disorder that leads to lesions in the digestive tract, another that breaks the metabolic cycle that removes toxins from the body... the overriding theme being varying levels of chaos in the immune system. Aside from the components that are not well understood yet, many kids with autism have other identifiable immune dysfunction, including celiac disease, Crohn's disease, severe food allergies, environmental allergies... and they've also confirmed that autism runs more strongly in families where the parents have various autoimmune disorders of their own. A mother with celiac disease, for example, is three times more likely to have an autistic child. What this ostensibly shows is a genetic predisposition for immune dysfunction. At which point the question becomes, what environmental factor has changed in the last thirty years, that is causing all of these disorders to be triggered in ever-growing numbers?

Of course you know my opinion on it: a specific type of insult to the immune system, leading to a variety of forms of immune dysfunction, accounting for the rise in not just autism, but also asthma, allergies, celiac disease, Type 1 diabetes, Crohn's, rheumatoid arthritis, etc. But just like the treatments for these autoimmune diseases are completely different, there are a variety of treatments that alleviate the multiple components of autism.