New Government Sponsored Study Looks To Treat Autism With An Antibiotic

Online, April 6, 2011 (Newswire.com) - The consensus that autism is from an infection while the fetus is still in the womb has been growing. In a 2007 issue of Science, Patterson said that by far the most important environmental risks for autism consists of intrauterine infection before birth. Fatemi mentions the same, based on major agreement and several decades of studies.

Were he alive today, John Langdon Down, a subset of whose children were autistic, would certainly feel almost vindicated. The reason: the infection he saw behind his "developmentally disabled" children with Down Syndrome and what is today called 'autism' was, "for the most part" from the same disease being addressed presently by a National Institutes of Health study.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health reports that Indiana University, in [url:http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01086475] collaboration with the Department of Defense is currently and actively recruiting participants to determine the effectiveness of an anti-tubercular antibiotic to determine if it can improve social impairment in children with autism, Asperger's Disorder, and the Pervasive Developmental Disorders. This particular anti-tuberculosis drug, Seromycin, first tested in the laboratory at the Eastern Virginia Medical School, previously worked to improve the sociability of mice with limited social behavior. Study investigators in Virginia said that the study held potential towards similarly changing the social skills in kids with autism. Why was a drug heretofore used only for tuberculosis now being tested to treat autistic children? The answer lies partially in the history of medicine itself.

Some perspective of this history, little focused upon to this point, is addressed in the paper John Langdon Down's Infectious Autism by researcher Lawrence Broxmeyer MD, a previous lead author in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, and is available by going to:

http://www.articlesbase.com/mental-health-articles/john-langdon-downs-infectious-autism-part-1-4528057.html

http://www.articlesbase.com/mental-health-articles/john-langdon-downs-infectious-autism-part-2-4533441.html

Broxmeyer is enthusiastic about the present Department of Defense study, although not a fan of the particular anti-tubercular antibiotic being brought to trial, which he feels has too many side effects, some of them psychic. Time will tell.