Thank you to all of you who facebooked me about this program, especially because I am not much of a TV watcher and as such I would totally have missed it! Any of you who did miss it can still catch it if you go to the CBC home page, select TV and then The Nature of Things. It will lead you to the link for the Autism special and you can watch it online.
I sat quietly at my desk watching it Friday after work with my partner Clair behind me who also has an autistic son. In my office, there are three of us including one of my Assistants. That alone is kind of stunning. In the entire population, out of 21 of us, three have autistic children. We both were totally engrosed in the statistics. One in 90 children now. One in 90.
There was a fascinating correlation between the incidence of antibiotic use ( we suffered through a long period of ear infections with my youngest) and our north american diet which correlates with everything I have experienced with my own children and their intestinal issues.
The most stunning discussion for me was around the four year old boy who regressed after multiple courses of antibiotics and when his mother started to try to research without any medical background at all, what could have been the cause ( doesn't this sound familiar to all of us? ) when all of the medical establishment is saying "it just happens". This is a testiment to the courage of parents who have children with this issue. Thank God we don't just give up and accept the status quo.
The link between changes in their intestinal flora, which correlates with the all of the research that I have done over the years and in fact the discussion about Clostridium spores. The interesting thing is that in dentistry we learn about this in a whole different arena around use of an antibiotic called Clindamycin. Clindamycin use, can in some patients result in such a change in the intestinal flora of a patient that they end up with an infection of Clostridium Difficile which is exceedingly hard to kill. The four year old boy they treated got remarkably better when treated with Vancomycin, but the issue was that Clostridium persists in spore form and spores are almost impossible to kill. It is why we use them to test the efficiency of our dental sterilizers. It takes the intense steam and heat from the sterilizer to kill them. But how, can you kill them inside a small boy? When they discontinued the use of the vancomycin, the remaining spores germinated and he regressed again. It was heartbreaking to watch, and yet it made so much sense.
Everything I have read about neural development talks about the importance of timing. That in fact we are born with millions too many connections in our brains, and that growth and development are in fact a process of pruning, not adding connections. We shape and reduce them to create meaningful pathways. If we miss the timing on those things they are gone forever. I remember a discussion at the Autism conference last year about handwriting teaching in schools. There has been a myriad of research that proves handwriting is governed by a section of the brain that develops around 5 years old. With preschools now pushing printing at three and four, what happens is that a non- specialized area of the brain tries to take over handwriting but isn't equiped to do so, and when the right part of the brain develops ready to do it, the lesser part of the brain is already attached to that. So the part of the brain that is designed to do that function properly never does. And the acquisition of handwriting will always be less perfect than it could have been. This applies across the board and yet we ignore the experts and keep pushing our kids when they are not ready to acquire these skills. When this young boy was treated with the Vancomycin he was young enough that he was able to acquire some skills and when he regressed he did maintain them. They caught a small window in his neural development.
There are no perfect answers about Autism. No cure alls. We need to keep asking the questions. Keep the dialogue open and not be so quick to dismiss ideas when they come up. This is quickly becoming a cultural epidemic and we will suffer the consequences of ignoring this issue as an entire society. These children need our help and as parents we must keep looking, keep searching for answers to reach them. For what I know from my learning with my own son, there is an amazing human being in there. Someone who has travelled a different path from my own and has many lessons to share with me. He counts on me to keep fighting this battle for him. To keep the discussion open and find answers to the many unanswered questions.
We speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. Thank you to CBC for running this program.
It is one view and hopefully through increased discussion and research we will find answers to help these children. I am confident that this is such a complex multifactoral issue that there will not be one bandaid for all. We are complex biochemical beings. There are no easy answers.
In love and light,
Kathryn
I sat quietly at my desk watching it Friday after work with my partner Clair behind me who also has an autistic son. In my office, there are three of us including one of my Assistants. That alone is kind of stunning. In the entire population, out of 21 of us, three have autistic children. We both were totally engrosed in the statistics. One in 90 children now. One in 90.
There was a fascinating correlation between the incidence of antibiotic use ( we suffered through a long period of ear infections with my youngest) and our north american diet which correlates with everything I have experienced with my own children and their intestinal issues.
The most stunning discussion for me was around the four year old boy who regressed after multiple courses of antibiotics and when his mother started to try to research without any medical background at all, what could have been the cause ( doesn't this sound familiar to all of us? ) when all of the medical establishment is saying "it just happens". This is a testiment to the courage of parents who have children with this issue. Thank God we don't just give up and accept the status quo.
The link between changes in their intestinal flora, which correlates with the all of the research that I have done over the years and in fact the discussion about Clostridium spores. The interesting thing is that in dentistry we learn about this in a whole different arena around use of an antibiotic called Clindamycin. Clindamycin use, can in some patients result in such a change in the intestinal flora of a patient that they end up with an infection of Clostridium Difficile which is exceedingly hard to kill. The four year old boy they treated got remarkably better when treated with Vancomycin, but the issue was that Clostridium persists in spore form and spores are almost impossible to kill. It is why we use them to test the efficiency of our dental sterilizers. It takes the intense steam and heat from the sterilizer to kill them. But how, can you kill them inside a small boy? When they discontinued the use of the vancomycin, the remaining spores germinated and he regressed again. It was heartbreaking to watch, and yet it made so much sense.
Everything I have read about neural development talks about the importance of timing. That in fact we are born with millions too many connections in our brains, and that growth and development are in fact a process of pruning, not adding connections. We shape and reduce them to create meaningful pathways. If we miss the timing on those things they are gone forever. I remember a discussion at the Autism conference last year about handwriting teaching in schools. There has been a myriad of research that proves handwriting is governed by a section of the brain that develops around 5 years old. With preschools now pushing printing at three and four, what happens is that a non- specialized area of the brain tries to take over handwriting but isn't equiped to do so, and when the right part of the brain develops ready to do it, the lesser part of the brain is already attached to that. So the part of the brain that is designed to do that function properly never does. And the acquisition of handwriting will always be less perfect than it could have been. This applies across the board and yet we ignore the experts and keep pushing our kids when they are not ready to acquire these skills. When this young boy was treated with the Vancomycin he was young enough that he was able to acquire some skills and when he regressed he did maintain them. They caught a small window in his neural development.
There are no perfect answers about Autism. No cure alls. We need to keep asking the questions. Keep the dialogue open and not be so quick to dismiss ideas when they come up. This is quickly becoming a cultural epidemic and we will suffer the consequences of ignoring this issue as an entire society. These children need our help and as parents we must keep looking, keep searching for answers to reach them. For what I know from my learning with my own son, there is an amazing human being in there. Someone who has travelled a different path from my own and has many lessons to share with me. He counts on me to keep fighting this battle for him. To keep the discussion open and find answers to the many unanswered questions.
We speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. Thank you to CBC for running this program.
It is one view and hopefully through increased discussion and research we will find answers to help these children. I am confident that this is such a complex multifactoral issue that there will not be one bandaid for all. We are complex biochemical beings. There are no easy answers.
In love and light,
Kathryn
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