An article in the Detroit Free Press, "High lead poisoning linked to lower test scores in DPS" by Keith Matheny from 2/25/13, reports on research that matches blood test results for lead in 21,000 Detroit Public School students with those students' elementary and middle school standardized test scores:
"Children with lead at 2 to 5 micrograms per deciliter in their blood -- equal to or below stricter levels of concern set by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year -- had a 33% higher likelihood of poor academic performance, said Harolyn Baker, a coauthor of the study and director of epidemiology at the nonprofit Michigan Healthcare Quality Improvement Organization.
"Students with blood lead levels greater than 5 micrograms per deciliter have a 50% chance of doing poorly on MEAP [Michigan Educational Assessment Program] tests, the study found."
Researchers factored out other possible causes of poor test performance related to maternal education, socioeconomic status, race, and gender to make sure that what researchers were seeing was related to lead levels in the blood. "The study updates research highlighted in-depth in the Free Press in 2010. That report found that of 39,199 DPS students tested as young children, only 23 had no lead in their bodies."
Here is a link to The DD News Blog post from May 2010 on the earlier study.
An article by Shaun Heasley at Disability Scoop, "Disability Caregiving Can Be Health Hazard, Study Finds", 12/17/12, summarizes a recent study that concludes that "parents of children with developmental disabilities are experiencing health consequences stemming from their caregiving responsibilities…" I could have told you this from personal experience, but it is important that health problems in caregivers are taken seriously and studied scientifically.
The study by Stephen Gallagher and Jenny Whiteley was published in Research in Developmental Disabilities, November-December 2012. The abstract describes the study: "…Thirty-five parents of children with developmental disability and thirty controls completed standard measures of perceived stress, child challenging behaviours and social support and wore an ambulatory blood pressure (BP) monitor throughout the day, for one day." Most of the children with disabilities had autism or Down's syndrome.
I would have guessed that the higher blood pressure was due to added stress and "child challenging behaviours", but the researchers found that the increase was mostly associated with the parents of disabled children having fewer social supports.
It is amazing to me that this is the first study to compare blood pressure between these two groups of parents.
The many comments from caregivers left on the Disability Scoop Web site about this article are well worth reading.
In an opinion piece in The New York Times, 8/25/12, called "An Immune Disorder at the Root of Autism", the author Moises Beasquez-Manoff discusses research that shows that perhaps one-third of cases of autism are caused by immune dysregulation related to the mother's response to inflammation during pregnancy. Results of a study in Denmark, for instance, indicate that viral infections in the mother during pregnancy increases the chances of having an autistic child by 30% and bacterial infections by 40%.
Infection is unlikely to have caused the increased incidence in cases of autism directly, because we are "more infection free than any other time in history". Instead, the increase parallels other epidemics like asthma and other autoimmune diseases. Autism seems linked to the autoimmune diseases of the mother:
"…One large Danish study, which included nearly 700,000 births over a decade, found that a mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease of the joints, elevated a child’s risk of autism by 80 percent. Her celiac disease, an inflammatory disease prompted by proteins in wheat and other grains, increased it 350 percent. Genetic studies tell a similar tale. Gene variants associated with autoimmune disease — genes of the immune system — also increase the risk of autism, especially when they occur in the mother."
Theories to explain the increase in autoimmune diseases include the hygiene hypothesis — that we suffer from "microbial deprivation" and that in cultures with more exposure to microbes and parasites there are fewer autoimmune diseases. Animal studies also support some of the theories proposed in this article.
These studies provide a "therapeutic target" for treatment of autism and further research.
By the time Danny was five years old, it was pretty clear to my husband and I that we were going to be in the disabilities game for a long time. In the early years, I read and heard about many purported cures and treatments that promised to make our boy "snap out of it" and get on with his life as a normal person. There were always caveats, however. If the treatments and therapies did not have the desired effect, it was probably because the parents weren't doing it right or they weren't sufficiently committed to the idea to make it work. Because Danny's care was so exhausting, it was a relief to me when the latest fad proved to be without merit before I had a chance or inclination to try it out. After a while, the fads that I might have fallen for earlier began to seem absolutely bonkers.
At a United Cerebral Palsy conference, I sat through a presentation about how you can improve your child's emotional health and behavior by painting his room the correct color to match his condition. "The spinal cord is a rainbow!" said the man who was presumably paid to present this drivel. As I recall, he had charts and diagrams showing how the color of the room somehow worked its way through the eyes and brain to the spinal cord with miraculous effect. I later referred to this method as Cure by Interior Decoration.
Then there was patterning that promised that after a mere 8 or 9 hours per day of taking Danny through rigorous movement exercises, new pathways would be forged in his damaged brain, allowing him to progress. Swimming with dolphins, said Parade Magazine, improved the speech of Down Syndrome children by 20% (20% of what, it did not say). Behavior modification could produce improvement of inappropriate or sometimes just annoying behaviors through positive and negative reinforcement to encourage the child to behave. In case that didn't work, aversive behavior interventions were available to threaten, intimidate, and physically force the child to do what you wanted.
In an odd twist, advocates of Neurodiversity oppose spending money on research to find cures for autism and related disabilities. They believe that people with these conditions represent diversity on the broad spectrum of human behavior and thought. Since there is nothing wrong with them, they don't need to be cured. They especially oppose research on genetic causes of autism that might lead to their eugenic elimination. I wonder how many people with these "differences" take medication to reduce symptoms such as anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder? Are they being true to their beliefs when they refuse to accept "differences" that can be conveniently treated with medication? Is it cheating for a person with seizures to take anti-seizure medication or a diabetic to take insulin? The Neurodiversity idea raises more questions that it answers.
Once in a while a really kooky idea comes along that actually works. The Ketogenic Diet, for instance, is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that reduces or eliminates seizures in some kids. Recommending the diet doesn't take a lot of high-pressure salesmanship on the part of doctors who are willing to monitor kids on this diet, because the results speak for themselves. That this is a difficult diet to maintain and hard on families is acknowledged upfront and the parents ultimately decide whether it is worth a try to stop intractable seizures in their children.
Recently, the New York Times published an article, Promise Seen in Drug for Retardation Syndrome, 4/29/2010, that describes hope for a medical treatment for some symptoms of Fragile X Syndrome. Fragile X is "the most common cause of inherited mental impairment. This impairment can range from learning disabilities to more severe cognitive or intellectual disabilities. ... FXS is the most common known cause of autism or 'autistic-like' behaviors. Symptoms also can include characteristic physical and behavioral features and delays in speech and language development". (This is according to the National Fragile X Foundation Web site.)
Research on Fragile X is done by real scientists (rather than interior decorators and dolphin trainers) who work to improve understanding of the genetic causes of the syndrome in hopes of finding a way to lessen its symptoms and perhaps point the way to treating other related conditions. Here are the fascinating details from the article on how Fragile X Syndrome works, in case you're interested:
"Fragile X is caused by a genetic stutter in which a portion of the gene gets repeated like a scratched album. With each subsequent generation, the number of repeats tends to rise. So if a mother has 10 repeats, her child might have 11 or 12. For reasons that are not well understood, however, this process of repeat amplification can suddenly go haywire. So mothers who have 55 or more repeats tend to have children with hundreds.
"In anyone with 200 or more repeats, the body shuts off the gene. Since genes are used to make proteins, this genetic silencing means the encoded protein is never made. The absence of this protein in cells causes the wide-ranging effects of fragile X syndrome. Those with 55 to 200 repeats are considered carriers, and recent research shows they can have severe neurological declines late in life that mimic Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s."
Getting back to the new discovery that the article features, scientists have found that fragile X patients have an "overload of unchecked synaptic noise" (the synapses are the junctions between brain neurons). The new drug produced by the drug company Novartis appears to reduce the noise by replacing at least one missing protein so that "memory formation and high-level thinking can take place allowing children to develop normally."
Wow! The president of the Fraxa Research Foundation that finances fragile X research says "this may be the key to solving the mystery of autism and other developmental disorders." A spokesperson from Autism Speaks says pretty much the same thing. A former researcher at another big drug company Merck says this is "the most promising therapeutic discovery ever for a gene-based behavioral disease." The best news is that if you are a mouse, a fish, or a fruit fly that has been genetically engineered to have fragile X, you will be rendered practically normal if you take a compound including the missing fragile X protein.
Is this too good to be true? Probably. If you read the article carefully you find out that the trial for the drug involved only a few dozen patients with fragile X and only some of those benefited. The study was too brief to measure effects on basic intelligence. Improvement was seen in an "undisclosed biological trait". A total of two parents were euphoric with the results of the trial. The Novartis results were not published or peer reviewed (this means they were not refereed by other experts in the field, including competitors, for publication). For commercial reasons, many details were not divulged. The drug is years from being available if it even survives more rigorous trials and further study.
The article includes many fascinating details of fragile X syndrome and how research has progressed over the years, but the drug companies and the groups that raise money for fragile X and autism research will probably benefit the most from the publicity. Parents are prone to euphoria when they hear of a solution to a difficult and sometimes desperate situation with their child, and who can blame them. Hope is never a bad thing, but exploitation of that hope for publicity and fundraising makes me queasy.
Buyer beware! You might want to investigate Web sites like Quackwatch before investing money, time, and energy in alluring cures and treatments that aren't all they pretend to be.
Two new studies show that pregnant women who are given flu shots during their pregnancy can reduce the risk of having children born prematurely or with low birth rate. [The studies did not include women vaccinated for the H1N1 (swine flu) virus.]
An article in Science News, November 21, 2009, entitled Flu shots for moms-to-be benefit babies, reports on research conducted in Georgia and Bangladesh.
Saad Omer of Emory University in Atlanta identified over 4,000 pregnant women of whom 15% had received a flu shot. Those who received the flu shot were overall 40% less likely to have a baby born prematurely and 70% less likely to have a premature baby if the mother received a flu shot during peak flu season.
The second study was conducted by Mark Steinhoff at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and a Bangladeshi team. They found that babies born to flu-vaccinated women in Bangladesh were less likely to get the flu in their first year of life. On average, women who didn’t get flu shots gave birth to babies weighing about a half-pound less than those born to women getting the shot.
The article goes on to say that flu vaccination rates in the United States are "dismal". Only 15 -21% of pregnant women receive flu shots during flu season.
According to a report on NPR's Morning Edition, April 8, 2009, Cyber Scout Puts Autism Studies On Faster Track, the Interactive Autism Network, IAN, is helping to recruit people with autism and their families for research. The Web site was created by the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore.
The inability to recruit people for autism studies has, in the past, held up research projects for months and years. IAN makes recruiting easier and allows large studies to proceed without delay. One such study was successful in linking high rates of depression in mothers with an increase in the likelihood of having a child born with autism.
Information needed to enroll in the database is given on the IAN Web site. It includes information on the eligible diagnoses considered for research.
Time Magazine, in its April 7, 2009 edition, features a story called Why Fever Helps Autism: A New Theory.
Parents of children with autism have been reporting for many years that their children's symptoms recede when they have a fever. Finally, the phenomenon was confirmed in a 2007 paper in the journal Pediatrics. Then two researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine tied the phenomenon to the locus coeruleus, a small knot of neurons located deep in the brain stem.
The locus coeruleus governs the release of the neurotransmitter noradrenaline which triggers the fight-or-flight response (alarm and arousal). It plays a role in the ability to pay attention to environmental cues, an ability that people with autism lack. It also regulates fever.
A malfunctioning locus coeruleus may be caused by genes damaged by environmental toxins and stress. A 2008 study showed that mothers who lived through a hurricane during pregnancy, had a greater likelihood of giving birth to an autistic child. Under extreme stress, the stress hormone cortisol from the mother may blast its way through the placenta and cause damage to this part of the brain. Yet another study shows a link between cortisol imbalance and Asperger's Syndrome.
As one step leads to another, the possibility of using medication to target noradrenalin receptors as a treatment for autism enters the realm of speculation.
See, it does pay to listen to parents.
An article published in Science News, January 12, 2008, p. 19, reports on recent studies attempting to unravel the possible genetic causes of autism.
Geneticist Mark J. Daly of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has found a small stretch of chromosome 16 that promotes autism when it is in an altered form. It is found in about 1% of children with the disorder. The study looked at 751 families with two or more children with autism or a related disorder, for a total of 1,441 affected children. The researchers found additional evidence of both DNA deletion and extra copies of genes within the chromosome 16 area in children diagnosed with autism. In most of the cases, the altered genes arose spontaneously, but some were inherited from parents.
Another study, led by geneticist Aravinda Chakravati of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, identified a small area of chromosome 7 that showed a link to autism. A specific gene on chromosome 7 makes a protein essential for neural communications.
In another study reported in Science News, September 29, 2007, p. 197, researchers found no association between Mercury in vaccines and climbing autism rates. The study was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and enrolled 1,047 children from 7 - 10 years old. The researchers compared the amount of Themerosol, a Mercury based preservative used in vaccines, that children received through the first 7 months of life and the results of a battery of tests for language, memory, motor coordination, attention, and intelligence. They found no correlation between the amount of Mercury the children received and performance on the tests.
In another study by the California Department of Public Health, researcher Robert Schechter found that the prevalence of autism in children aged 3 - 12 years old has increased gradually from 1995 to 2007, even though Themerosol was removed from vaccines from 1999 - 2001.
Science News is available on-line only by subscription.
An AP article from 1/31/08 describes a study presented to the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in Dallas which shows that Epsom Salts, or magnesium sulphate, given to women who go into premature labor, can reduce the risk of cerebral palsy in their infants.
In the government-funded study, researchers gave an infusion of magnesium sulfate to women about to give birth to a premature baby to see if it would reduce the risk of cerebral palsy. Enrolled in the study were 2,241 women who were 24 to 31 weeks pregnant... They were given either the compound or a fake solution. The infants were examined for signs of cerebral palsy at birth and over the next two years.
Of the babies who survived, moderate or severe cerebral palsy occurred in about 2 percent of those in the treatment group compared to about 4 percent of those whose mothers didn't get the compound.
The number of infants who died was about the same in both groups.
Two of the researchers mentioned in the article were Dr. John Thorp of the University of North Carolina and Dr. Dwight Rouse from the University of Alabama.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA can be a serious and even fatal infection. Many people with severe developmental disabilities are at risk for acquiring the infection.
MRSA was first identified as an infection spread in hospitals, but it began showing up in the 1990's in the wider community. People who are at risk for MRSA are those who have recently been hospitalized, residents of long-term care facilities, people with weakened immune systems, and those who use invasive devices such as catheters or feeding tubes.
One of the first signs of the infection are small red bumps on the skin that resemble small pimples or spider bites. There are treaments for MRSA, including the anti-biotic Vancomycin, and much that can be done in hospitals and other facilities to prevent its spread. But according to the June 9th, 2007 issue of Science News, ("Sticky treatment for staph infections"), honey made by bees pollinating a New Zealand bush offers a potential new therapy. Rose Cooper of the University of Wales Institute at Cardiff found that the staph cells that became stuck in the manuka honey stop dividing.
Sterile manuka honey has been available by prescription in the United Kingdom since 2004 to treat MRSA. A new study is underway with the hope that the honey will play a key role in controlling the infection.
For more information on MRSA, check out the Mayo Clinic website. Especially important for families of people with deveopmental disabilities are the recommendations for preventing the spread of MRSA in hospitals and other facilities.
