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Showing posts with label Siegel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Siegel. Show all posts

Thursday 14 February 2019

More Politics of Autism, the NCSA, Prader Willi, Happy Puppets and the Crazy Car Wash


Kempton Park Racecourse, near London - now known for its Hot Dogs

A science-heavy post about microglia is in the works, but today’s post ties together some less complex issues.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a new book out called the Politics of Autism, by Dr Siegel.
I did buy 2 copies, so I could give one away. It is a bit heavy going and I did skip some parts, but it is as expected a good read. The author does personally know/knew some of the “big names” in autism like Lovaas and even Bernie Rimland.
I was interested to read that Lovaas basically cheated in his famous ABA “clinical” trial, where he showed amazing responses. All the trial participants that did not develop speech during the trial were “retired” during the trial. He rigged the result, by removing those less responsive to the trial therapy.  If you follow this subject, you will know that some Americans and Canadians get very upset when intensive ABA is not provided for free to their child, believing that it would likely "cure" their child, like in the Lovaas study. This trial is constantly used to support the idea of intensive early intervention producing dramatic life changing results.  In most people with severe autism, no amount of behavioural intervention is going to change the fact that they are severely autistic. It does though make many such people more functional, which can greatly help them. Expectations need to be realistic and parents should not feel guilty if they cannot provide many years of therapy costing $60,000 a year. You can achieve a great deal at much less cost.
Siegel thinks that Bernie Rimland (of ARI and DAN!) started out well and then went a bit dotty.
She makes excellent points about education.
She makes the mistake of venturing into the realm of medicine, which is clearly not her field and tells readers not to bother trying to treat the biology autism. 10 years ago I would have been mistakenly backing her up on this, but then I had my epiphany, thanks to reading about Professor Ben Ari’s small clinical trial of Bumetanide in 2012.

Who should buy the book?
This is not a feel good book, it is a very down to earth book that tells the story as it is, not the sugar coated version.

I thought this book would be good for people who study autism at University, like one of Monty’s assistants; she now has copy number two.
Many people with Asperger’s would likely hate this book and think Dr Siegel is a witch.

I thought most parents of people with severe autism probably do not want to hear more about how bad things are, but perhaps I was wrong. Dr Siegel provided one of her old posts as a guest blog post for the newly formed National Council on Severe Autism (NCSA).

The NCSA is a new group set up to represent what used to be autism, before the diagnosis got broadened. They are really all about DSM3 autism, or what we called Strictly Defined Autism (SDA).



Horror stories or just telling it how it is?
Some people with mild autism seem to be very upset by what NCSA are advocating, but that is hardly a surprise.

Decide for yourself whether you consider the NCSA to be spreading horror stories, or just telling it how it is.
An attention-seeking UK daytime TV “celebrity” has a son with Prader Willi syndrome and he is regularly described as having autism.  Prader Willi is associated with an insatiable appetite which, if uncontrolled, leads to obesity; reduced IQ, impaired vision, behavioural problems and a bad temper. It is caused by an anomaly on chromosome 15, which causes a loss of function of some of those 600 genes.

75% of cases occur when part of the father's chromosome 15 is deleted.  In another 25% of cases, the person has two copies of chromosome 15 from their mother and none from their father. As parts of the chromosome from the mother are turned off, they end up with no working copies of certain genes
A similar mechanism occurs in Angelman syndrome, except the defective chromosome 15 is from the mother or two copies are from the father.


People with Angelman’s have small heads and are not obese; because they are generally very happy, they are sometimes called Angels.  The condition used to be called Happy Puppet Syndrome, which apparently is not seen as politically correct these days. I should add the Prader Willi could be called “please lock the fridge syndrome”, because if you do not remove food the child may become severely obese before he/she is 10, develop type 2 diabetes, rapidly become insulin dependent and then have even bigger problems.
The Prader Willi mother is campaigning for disabled people’s rights, which is of course a nice thing to do; she is against abuse/trolling on the internet.  She recently revealed that at 16 years of age, her verbal, but obese son cannot wash or dress himself and no longer attends school regularly, because he has learnt that by having an early morning meltdown, the driver will refuse to take him to school. Like many teenage boys he would rather stay home than go to school.

The mother says she is concerned he is missing out on schooling.
I dare say Dr Siegel would ask what kind of schooling is this 16 year old getting? Perhaps learning to wash himself and dress should first be mastered.  In someone without severe MR/ID this is a matter of correct instruction and unlimited perseverance, by someone.

Dr Siegel could repurpose her blog post again, this time:

Diagnose and adios? Prader Willi families deserve better

The mother says she is thinking of putting her son into residential care. That sounds great, but who is then ever going to teach him to wash and dress himself and restrict his eating? If Mum cannot, why would some employee earning near minimum wage in a care home make a better job of it? What happens when he starts to need insulin injections twice a day, because obesity was not addressed?
Sometimes horror stories do not reflect the child, but how they are being cared for and all with the best intentions.  Most such parents need help, indeed it’s to be expected. This all could be solved by some home visits from someone like Dr Siegel.  More of these people do exist; our Greek-American ABA consultant would give very similar advice to Dr Siegel. Avoiding school would not be tolerated, regardless of any meltdown. Someone with an IQ>60 definitely can be taught to dress himself, even if occasionally a shirt goes on back to front.  Food has to be restricted.

Monty's morning assistant at school works with many other kids with autism and from what she tells me, it is clear that many issues repeat, even the publicity-hungry mother who ends up failing her own child. Since our morning assistant is writing a self-help manual for parents dealing with severe autism, I can imagine where my other copy of Dr Siegel's book is destined to go. At least my autism intervention library is being put to further use.
It should be noted that some autism mothers react very dynamically. We have one reader who identified a novel effective drug therapy for her child and is now trying to commercialise it, we have another reader who has inspired and funded research into what was a rarely studied genetic "autism". Parents react very differently to the challenge of raising a child with a severe disability, in some it brings out the best.  It is not just about having a high IQ, or a lot of money.
Some people cannot afford to pay for such 1:1 advice, but many might choose to, if they knew it existed. In many countries, like some provinces in Canada, families dealing with a disability are given substantial financial resources to help themselves. In Ontario there is currently uproar on the proposed $140,000 cap on free autism therapies per child. That is $140,000 more free money that we received. I recently calculated our total cost of autism up to the age of 16 and when converted into Canadian money it is $190,000. They should of course have different limits based on different levels of severity. In the DSM5 jargon you have 3 levels of need/severity and so you could have a low limit for level 1, since Aspies do not benefit from vast amounts of ABA, say $20,000 and a high limit for level 3, say $250,000. Then wait for the surge in (re)diagnosis of level 3 autism in Ontario.

            Diagnosing for Dollars (click, for Dr Siegel's take)
Many “horror stories” appearing on the NCSA forums likely could be avoided by applying personalized medicine, rather than cookie cutter medicine, or standard psychiatric medicine. 

Kids with undiagnosed genetic disorders 
I am not a doctor, but I do quite regularly get to play guess the undiagnosed metabolic/genetic disorder.  The latest one is what would cause deafness and hypertonia and apparently no other symptoms.

I recently read that US medical insurance generally will not pay for genetic testing for autism, because there are no therapies.
But yet there sometimes are, if you look.

Look at the recent comments in this blog about a child whose genetic testing revealed a problem with the KCNQ3 gene, which encodes the Kv7.3 potassium ion channel. You can look up Kv7.3 channelopathy, or just the KCNQ3 gene.
This is at least partially treatable just by using google and the excellent Genecards human gene database; both cost absolutely nothing.


You can both activate and block this ion channel.  You will need one or the other.


Jobs for adults with Autism
You do quite regularly hear about how an IT company like Microsoft, or a big bank is actively recruiting people with autism. This always makes me laugh.  IT jobs for Aspies - yes of course, but autism?

People with DSM3 autism are not commuting to work reading the Wall Street Journal, or the Financial Times; but there should be things they can do.
Many years ago there used to be special companies set up to employ disabled people. This became not politically correct, for some reason.

Remploy is an organisation in the United Kingdom which provides employment placement services for disabled people. It is now a “welfare-to-work provider” finding jobs for disabled people, but for most its existence it directly employed disabled people in a number of factories, owned by Remploy itself, and subsidised by the UK government.  This was phased out at the start of the 21st century, under the prevailing view that disabled people should have mainstream jobs.

Sadly, many disabled people cannot hold down a mainstream job.

You might recall Andreas Rett (of Rett Syndrome), as well as being a doctor, established a factory in which neurologically disabled youngsters could work. That was 50 years ago.

One supermarket chain where we live sometimes has young people with Down Syndrome, or MR/ID helping to pack your groceries.

Monty’s afternoon assistant was telling me how sad it is that one Aspie her age is still without any job. My reply was that someone has to create him a job, just like we will have to create Monty a job.
I am a big believer in developing musical and other artistic skills, it did not get the above Aspie a job, but it does give him something to do.

Our very worldly Greek-American ABA consultant told me long ago that the biggest problem “her kids” face, as they grow up, is that they have nothing to do with all their time.  No job and no hobbies is not a good combination.
As I write this text, Monty is downstairs drawing a frog. Before that he was playing all the melodies in his current piano book.  Before that he washed his Mum’s car and earlier on we were washing my car.

Monty’s Crazy Car Wash
You gotta be a little bit Crazy to work here!
You gotta be totally Crazy not to try it!

I think Monty will end up more capable than having a car wash, but it is quite a suitable job for many young people with DSM3 autism. It is a genuine job, whereas packing groceries is not and the Crazy Car Wash is a lot of fun.

Good journalism?
There are very few journalists who are credible when they write about autism; they generally do not understand it at all (you cannot blame them for that!); then there are some Aspie ones, who will by definition tend to lack empathy, and they can completely fail to understand the severe end of the spectrum, often in a jaw-dropping fashion.

I rather liked this article by a 28 year old journalist taking charge of her 24 year old sister with autism, for the first time and going for a girls’ weekend riding horses.


I wonder at what point my 18 year son will be taking charge of his 15 year old sibling with autism, for a boys’ weekend. Hopefully I will not need to wait 10 years.
I expect it will be something eventful like Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman on a road trip to Las Vegas, in the excellent, but nowadays much maligned, film Rain Man. Bernie Rimland was the autism advisor for this film. 

This Christmas in London on December 26th, Monty asked me if he was going to be having a hot dog for lunch; leaving me to ponder where did that idea come from. He accurately recalled that 12 months previously, on Boxing Day, he had gone with Uncle Stuart and Dad to Kempton Park for a boys’ day out at the horse races. The weather is usually cold and damp (i.e. miserable), but you do get to have a hot dog.


Conclusion
If you can take the sometimes brutal honesty of describing things as they really are, then Dr Siegel’s new book is going to be appreciated and you will also like the new US National Council on Severe Autism. 

A sense of humour will do you much more good than political correctness ever will. Upsetting people can sometimes be necessary to enable them to acknowledge their own delusions. I am beginning to sound like Dr Siegel, who likely would take her car to the Crazy Car Wash, should Monty open a branch in California.
It is up to parents to stop their child becoming obese, even more so when they have a genetic propensity towards this condition. 

If you do not have $60,000 a year to pay for ABA and feel you are missing out, make your own intervention program instead. Buy some books and recruit some helpers.  Don't spend years fuming in a waiting list, pondering what might have been.










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Thursday 22 November 2018

Sugar-coating Autism and Autism Misinformation










Do you tell it as it really is? Or sugar-coat it, to make it more appealing?
It looks like in the English-speaking world we are more and more being driven by emotional political correctness, rather than calling things out as they actually are. Now this does not really matter if you are talking about relatively trivial subjects, which is what we deal with most of the time, but is a problem when dealing with a serious subject. When it comes to autism, giving the cold truth is quite upsetting to many people.
Bryna Siegel, a Californian Psychologist working with autism for a few decades has been promoting her new book, The Politics of Autism, in various articles.

                            https://thepoliticsofautism.com/

She tells a lot of home truths that many parents and professionals do not want to hear and people often react very emotionally and quite aggressively. I have found myself on more than one occasion giving her support.
She has several key points to make.  Autism is indeed over-diagnosed and as long there is a financial incentive for this, prevalence will increase.
She is very critical of the results of inclusive education, based on what young people are actually able to achieve when they leave school. The idea of inclusion sounds great, but what actually matters is the end result, in terms of independent living skills and job prospects. She wonders if people with more severe autism are being taught the right skills, rather than just a dumbed-down version of the standard curriculum.
At times, even I think she is perhaps a bit too brutal, but I think I will buy her new book. Monty’s assistants are also keen to read it, so maybe I will also donate a copy to be shared.
I know one little boy with severe autism, who is entirely non-verbal, and has no sign language or facilitated communication device. I do not think he can read or write.  At primary/junior school he now has to learn a foreign language. 

Autism Misinformation
A good example of autism misinformation occurred recently following on from a popular UK daytime TV show, and was highlighted in the Questioning Answers blog.


The host was interviewing a mother about her son with autism and he asked the very reasonable question “has your child always been autistic?” This prompted an outcry from the public and a supposedly knowledgeable organisation called the National Autistic Society (NAS), the UK’s dominant autism organisation. The host was blasted for not knowing that apparently “autism is always present from birth” and “it is not something you can grow out of” and of course it is un-treatable.
Given this child was described by his own mother as having regressed at 18 months and lost his speech, he might well not have been born autistic. The research has shown that many things can trigger “autism” during childhood and we know that about 10% of kids diagnosed with autism do indeed later go on to lose their diagnosis, so they do pretty much grow out of their autism. But why let the scientific facts get in the way of the simple storyline?
I always found the idea of raising autism awareness to be odd; it very often is just promoting misinformation, or putting one random person forward to explain the condition to others. This just confuses other people.
It is much better to just raise public awareness of disability in general, both physical and mental and to tackle bullying at school. Kids should be aware that a small percentage of their peers have severe problems and a much larger percentage have less disadvantaging problems, that can often be mitigated with extra help and understanding during all those years spent at school.
People need to know that just as autism is a spectrum from severe to mild, so are many other conditions like ADHD or dyslexia. Some people just need a little extra help, but some others have profound problems. Sometime soon 10% of all kids will have a medical diagnosis, but only a small fraction will be disabled by it. 
You can have dyslexia and still make it through medical school, but don’t dream about it if your kid has Down Syndrome.

“Dr” Wakefield
I do think Andrew Wakefield was very unfortunate to have studied medicine in the UK and not the US; had he done so I rather doubt he would have ever lost his medical license and he would never have become so well known.  He has a right to his opinions and there are some far more cranky physicians merrily practising today in the US.
Wakefield seems to making himself a new life with Elle Macpherson.  This clearly upsets the UK tabloid media, who still portray him as the devil - how can the devil end up with a super model?  I wish them well. 
Wakefield likes to refer to autism as brain damage, which is rather brutal like Dr Siegel; but he is right in case of DSM3-type autism.
Nowadays people get upset if autism is called a disease, or a mental illness and even some researchers want to sugar-coat it and call it a condition as opposed to a disorder (Autistic Spectrum Condition).  
Giving a nice name to something disabling does not make it go away. It just makes some people without that disability feel better.
Having mentioned Wakefield, I suppose we have to touch on vaccinations.
It would also be great if it was possible to be entirely honest about what we know about vaccines and autism. It is well established that mitochondrial disease can be triggered by vaccinations and it can manifest as regressive autism. This does not mean that all regressive autism is caused by vaccines. This does not mean that people should not be vaccinated; it just means that there is a small risk of something bad happening. Left unvaccinated there is a much larger risk of something else bad happening. Public health believes lay people are too dumb to understand this, I disagree; you just need to be 100% honest and explain it.  It is fashionable to be selectively truthful, or let pass a little white lie. I think being 100% honest, brutally honest, is what is needed when dealing with such an important subject. 

Details do Matter
Whether it is an unusual medical condition like autism, or any scientific investigation, all the details in their entirety are extremely important if you want any chance of solving the problem.
I just had a medical procedure to correct a problem that I first raised 40 years ago. I had an operation 40 years ago for a Meckel’s diverticulum, but it was the wrong operation and for the wrong diverticulum. Last week I had the right operation and, what could/should have been identified and treated in childhood, got treated decades later. When I read the summary of the completed treatment, it is a very well written concise explanation, with all the diagnostic inputs.
Now when I compare this to autism, which is far more complex, I can see mainstream medicine in not yet prepared to try and treat it.
Where do you go to get a precise summary of your child’s unique variant of autism / brain damage, all in 100 words?  Perhaps this will also take another 40 years?
A first small step would be make sure what we do actually know about autism is more widely shared and that at least Autism organisations, with public funding, should be required to have a detailed understanding of what they are supposed to be advocating for. There are excellent organisations to represent other medical conditions, for example diabetes or even Rett syndrome, but not for autism.
Whilst waiting for my operation I had a visit from a curious Nephrologist who dropped by to take my photo (an ultrasound image) to show her friends. Being a liver specialist, she did naturally take a peek at that as well and asked if I knew I had some fat in my liver. Off she went, leaving me to figure out where this fat had come from. 

I am pretty sure it comes from another misdiagnosis I had recently.  I had a sudden reduction in hearing in one ear and not being able to resolve it myself, I went to an ear nose and throat clinic. The diagnosis was a simple case of wax in the ear. Unfortunately this was the wrong diagnosis; by the time I had returned from a trip abroad, quite some time had passed. The second doctor I consulted very quickly diagnosed an inner ear problem (Endolymphatic hydrops) that apparently is quite common but is often left untreated, leading to life-long problems. It leads to a degree of permanent hearing loss, tinnitus and potentially vertigo. A virus, infection or even a physical shock can cause a build-up in pressure in the fluid in the inner ear. If you begin treatment within a week, you have a good chance to avoid permanent hearing loss. My treatment started after almost one month, which was far too late, so I had ten days of injected steroids, starting at a very high dose.  
High doses of steroids can have many side effects, one of which is causing fat to get deposited in your liver. It seems the fat spotted by the curious nephrologist should gradually disappear. I hope so.
Not wanting to be left deaf in one ear and noting the doctor did not seem entirely hopeful, I did quickly engage myself and read up on the science and the medicine.  I regularly do this for my son, but did not think I really should have to do so for my own ear problem. Ménière's disease is an incurable condition, of unknown cause(s), that has major similarities to what was affecting me.  I found a study, with supporting MRI images of the inner ear, showing that the amount of fluid in the ear can be reduced by taking the diuretic acetazolamide/Diamox, at least in some people. I did take note of a Cochrane review saying there is no evidence that diuretics have any benefit, but I did check the MRI images for myself. There is plenty in the blog about Diamox and autism. In Ménière's disease, Diamox responders lose the benefit when they stop taking the diuretic and this is reflected in their MRIs.  Since my condition was hopefully not yet chronic, I thought the immune suppressing actions of the steroid were indeed the long term fix, but at this late stage only pretty immediate rather than gradual loss of inner ear fluid would avoid permanent hearing loss.
Since I have Diamox from a few years ago sitting at the back of my autism pill shelf at home, I decided to add that to my therapy for a few days.  Diamox is cheap, except in the US, and is usually very well tolerated. As a bumetanide family we have a good supply of potassium supplements and bananas, so no chance of hypokalaemia.
My hearing returned and I have no related symptoms (tinnitus, vertigo etc). I have no idea if Diamox helped, but I am certainly glad I took it.
Another side effect of high dose steroid plus acetazolamide/Diamox was a change to my eyesight, both near and distant vision. Both drugs can affect your eyesight, but I think it was the steroid, since I took Diamox once to avoid altitude sickness with no side effects.  The vision side effects gradually fade away when you stop taking the drug.
All this was a timely reminder that drugs and supplements can have unexpected effects and it is best not to get carried away with how many you give your child.  I did recently take Monty, aged 15 with ASD, to see a paediatric cardiologist for a lengthy ultrasound investigation and ECG because, rather bizarrely, his autism drugs are mainly repurposed heart drugs. Where we live it is simple to arrange such a check-up and there is open access to lab tests.  I am fully aware that in countries with universal healthcare trying to access anything unusual may not be possible, unless your GP “gatekeeper” is supportive.   One French parent told me that his doctor would not prescribe bumetanide for his son, but was willing to authorize the blood tests to monitor potassium, if he acquired the bumetanide somewhere else.

Conclusion
In a recent comment our reader David from Spain, who is trying to get his child into the large Stage 3 trial for Bumetanide, informed us that the current prediction is 2023 for commercialization of this autism therapy. That would be 11 years after my son began to benefit.  That is how long it takes to repurpose an existing drug.
This really makes me think that it is not just a case of autism needing personalized medicine, but rather parent-inspired personalized medicine. This is much easier if the parent is a doctor.
As I know to my own cost, medicine currently can struggle with even slightly unusual conditions, so we should not expect wonders from strangers, even when they finally do have approved drugs to prescribe.  
The key will remain parent-inspired personalized medicine. When you do finally get 0.5mg of bumetanide twice a day as an approved autism therapy, it will be up to parents to realize that 1mg once a day or 2mg once a day might actually be much more beneficial.
If you ever have sudden hearing loss in one ear, go to your doctor straight away and have him/her specifically rule out an inner ear problem. If you live in the UK, hopefully you will not be made to wait 2 weeks to get an initial appointment with your GP.  If you don’t live in a country with universal healthcare or don’t have insurance, I suppose some people just go deaf.