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Researchers’ Discovery Promises Answers on Autism

Isn’t it great that we have all seen such good results with autism, when parents simply ‘change brands’ and put their children on some nutrition, to help build their immune system. This both helps the body deal with toxins and reduces the overload, as we know, but it’s great that science is now finding ‘proof’. Thanks Deb MacNamara for bringing this article in The Australian to our awareness, we have included the article below.

Here is a testimonial from one happy family who used our Savvy strategies to rebuild health: 

An eight year old son of our friends had been on Ritilan for some years plus other medication to make him sleep, because the Ritilan caused insomnia. The drugs would suppress his appetite so that he never, ever ate lunch and his behaviour was always erratic and disruptive in home and at school. When they went to the pediatrition and told her that they were about to undertake a nutritional program for him, she said “That’s great. In the next ten years that is how these diseases would all be treated.” That was really encouraging to this worried mum.

After talking with us (friends from his school) we shared an audio with the family and then talked about what it discussed and what they felt was best. The mother decided to take our advice and put him on a children’s multivitamin, some antioxidants and essential fatty acids and a natural mineral drink. Here is what she said: “Within weeks we noticed that he was able to sleep at night without the medication. His appetite came back within days of introducing the nutrients, and his behaviour began to dramatically improve.” Suddenly she had a little boy who would say please and thank you, instead of screaming and yelling for and at everything.

It took only a month or so and he was able to reduce the Ritalin . . . until over time he was no longer taking it. We were thrilled to be able to lend information that really made a difference to how they viewed their son – and to see the dramatic changes in him.

If you want to hear other peoples experiences, just contact us on info@savvy-team.com For more information on children’s health, check out this post.

New Information on Autism

“Researchers have for the first time identified two biologically different strains of autism in a major breakthrough being compared with the discovery of different forms of cancer in the 1960s. The findings, to be announced at an international autism conference in Perth on September 08, 2011, are seen as a key step towards understanding the causes of autism and developing effective treatments as well as a cure.

The findings bring hope that the communication, socialisation and other difficulties that autistic children experience can be tackled more easily and earlier. Researchers from the University of California Davis’s MIND Institute in Sacramento began the Autism Phenome Project in 2006. They have been studying the brain growth, environmental exposure and genetic make-up of 350 children aged between 2 and 3 1/2 years, and have so far found two biologically distinct subtypes of autistic brain development.

One group of children – all boys – had enlarged brains and most had regressed into autism after 18 months of age; another group appeared to have immune systems that were not functioning properly. Throughout the 1960s, researchers identified different forms of cancer – for example, specific to the breast, lung and skin – which led to a better understanding of their causes and ultimately improved the manner in which they were treated.

Clayton and Rhona Bolger’s two children – Alyssa, 6, and Lachlan, 4 – have been diagnosed with autism. Mr Bolger, of the Perth suburb of Maddington, said any help was welcome. “To be able to knock some of the barriers down, almost circumnavigate them before they happen – like socialisation and communication – if those barriers are down before they even get to school or a peer group, that would be amazing,” Mr Bolger said.

Psychiatry professor David Amaral, who led the MIND Institute’s longitudinal study, said the findings could lead to more individualised treatment. “The ultimate goal is when a child comes into the clinic, rather than saying you just have autism, to be able to say you have autism type A, or type B, or type C,” Dr Amaral said. “And then based on that description, we would know whether there is a different treatment profile that we should recommend to the families.

“As an example, if a child has an immune form of autism, it may be that what we want to do is manipulate their immune system rather than trying something else that may be related to synaptic functions in the brain.”

Families were currently presented with a vast array of treatments without necessarily knowing which worked. “But if we can give them more information about what exactly is the causal process for their child’s autism, then we can focus in on that and hopefully have a more productive intervention,” he said.

Dr Amaral will present his team’s research to the Asia Pacific Autism Conference today, in front of some of the world’s leading autism researchers. He predicted there would be many more biological subtypes of autism identified just as there were many forms of cancer. “If we were trying to cure all cancer at the same time, it would be hopeless,” he said. “Well, the same is true for autism. My guess is that there just isn’t going to be a single diagnostic marker for autism – there’s going to be a whole panel.”

Bruce Tonge, emeritus psychiatry professor at Monash University, agreed that many subtypes of autism were likely to emerge. “It has been for some time known that at least for some children with autism, their brains grow too rapidly in the first couple of years of life and then plateau out,” Professor Tonge said. “So further refinement of that knowledge will be important. Currently, a number of people are also looking for other possible environmental contributing factors, and the interaction between the environment and a person’s immune system might be an interesting possibility there.”

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