Every time I read a story about a kid with developmental disabilities and gut/gluten issues, I'm dying to know if they've ever tried MB12 and L5MTHF injections. God knows it changed my kid's (and my) life.
I'd love pointers to peer-reviewed studies in favour of this stuff, as I'd love to believe there's a simple solution like this... I just fear there isn't.
Again, not questioning that you feel your child has benefited - just asking what tipped the balance for you in trying this out and do you have any scientific studies you can point one to in order to research this more?
So, no action we took was on the basis of a comprehensive and wide-ranging scientific study of studies... rather finding a D.A.N. doctor who knew just what to do.
What tipped the balance was that this is one of the least interventive things possible. Really THE least. Everything he takes can be had over the counter. We did it blind at the time because I had no clue about 677T and only found about it later.
To honestly answer your question, as I mentioned below, I'm getting the feeling (again, armchair, lay person only, but been living in communities real and online for a few years now) that autism is an overly or perhaps entirely umbrella term that's really capturing a number of diseases with similar pathologies. One of which would be 677T/1298C mutation, specifically homozygous or compound hetero. The good news is that it seems easy to treat.
I know not every autistic kid out there has the same root cause, but being the parent of one, and going to his (old) school, and seeing so many poor beautiful kids impacted that it just crushes my heart to pieces, and their poor parents trying so hard to fight through it all and get them help... I really have no choice but to be an advocate for getting your kid screened. It's a simple blood draw, find out their 677 and 1298 status. And if they're anything, even heterozygous, immediately get them on MB12/L5MTHF.
I fear for other parents, esp. those of vax injured kids, the road could be much harder, with chelation possibly being necessary etc (which is obiously fairly interventive and HIGHLY controversial). But if there's any chance that part of the solution could be such a low hanging fruit, I have to get the word out as much as I can.
Alas, the B12 shots seemed to have rather small effects on our daughter. That said, I think the diet and vitamin regime that we were on 2 years ago (diet is hard to enforce at school) worked better than the drugs that the neurologist has been trying.
If this cure is so incredibly quick and awesome, it would be amazingly irresponsible for its proponents to not run a double-blind test.
Otherwise we just get into dueling anecdotes, like http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-autism-therapy-l...
My post is more about how something with a very specific root cause, e.g. methylation problems, was diagnosing as autism (across multiple doctors, naturopaths, pediatricians, etc), and how it may be the case that some subset of autistic kids could be in a similar boat. From that study itself "However, detailed data analysis suggests that methyl B12 may alleviate symptoms of autism in a subgroup of children, possibly by reducing oxidative stress."
What I'm a proponent of is genetic screening (a simple blood draw + lab work) for an autistic child to look for 677T/1298C mutation. That's a known problem with a known treatment and I don't think there's anything irresponsible in advocating for that.
Autism is such a wide-net term that I would have a hard time inferring any meaning from a study that simply categorizes the subject(s) in a binary autistic/not autistic manner. e.g. which ones were vax injured, which ones have gut issues, heavy metals, yeast overgrowth, genetic conditions, etc. Many children imaginably require a multi-pronged approach so to try just one particular approach against an unqualified set of subjects seems bound to disappoint.
> However, detailed data analysis suggests that methyl B12 may alleviate symptoms of autism in a subgroup of children, possibly by reducing oxidative stress. An increase in glutathione redox status (GSH/GSSG) may provide a biomarker for treatment response to methyl B12. Additional research is needed to delineate a subgroup of potential responders and ascertain a biomarker for response to methyl B12.
For myself, I lived a long time with low-grade but chronic anxiety and depression and after all this went down finally had some testing done on myself and found out I am homozygous for the C677T mutation, which means my body can't make methyl-B12 or methyl-folate. (Homozygous is 60-70% reduced efficiency in the reaction). I started supplementing with the same (though I get my MB12/L5MTHF orally, not injected), and for the first time feel like a cloud has been lifted. It's been amazing.
Turns out my mom, her dad, and so on and so forth were all B-12 anemic. It took my son being severely impacted for ME to finally get tested to finally figure out for the whole family what the problem is.
The interesting part is when the methylation process is disrupted by this mutation one of things whose production suffers is glutathione. It's a very important antioxidant (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/glutathione-the-...). Thinking about one of the major detoxifiers of the body being broken is interesting in light of the seemingly tenuous links between "autism" and vaccines etc.
In short my armchair speculation is that there's likely a large overlap between undiagnosed 677T/1298C mutation sufferers and "autism" and when you think about injecting those kids with things that contain known irritants causing even more inflammation that the body can't clean out, it's not hard to imagine why it seems like they "cause" autism. To me it's simply more like pulling the trigger on a gun that's already been loaded and pointed to your head.
Homozygous 677T mutation rate is somewhere between 1-15% in the US.
Do you have other references I could follow up on? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTHFR
If you want to see what happens with an actual double-blind experiment, check out http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20804367
http://drneubrander.com/blog/2011/08/why-is-methyl-b12-stres...
It can be a real pain in the f'in ass but once on the diet I've felt and looked the best I have in years.
(I forgot to mention, in addition to being diagnosed with the 677T mutation I also found out that I had severe IgG food sensitivities to gluten, oats, dairy, soy, all eggs, all fowl meat, almonds, peanuts, cranberries... shudder to think the 10 years I spent being vegan eating tofu and seitan full-time...)
Glad the diet and vitamins are working well for your family. We need to get our daughter back on a more restrictive diet, I think.