FEAT DAILY NEWSLETTER Sacramento, California http://www.feat.org
December 20, 2001 News Morgue Search www.feat.org/search/news.asp
· Autistic Child Is A Joy To Her Family
· Autistic Kids Have Unexplained Brain Growth
· Garlic Extract Helps Ward Off Drug-Resistant Bugs
· Streptococcal Infection Linked to OCD in Children
[By Candy Hatcher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer.]
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/hatcher/50844_candy17.shtml
Tori’s smile is fleeting, but it dazzles just the same.
When her eyes focus, when the little girl looks at you and her eyes
crinkle, it’s just like the delight you experience when you open the door to sunshine and blue skies after weeks of gray.
Tori Boes is 9 -- beautiful, affectionate and, like many girls her age, fascinated by horses. But Tori has a tough time communicating. Her social skills are like those of a preschooler. Concentration, even for a minute, is a victory.
Tori has autism, a neurological disorder more common than childhood cancer. It prevents her from making connections. She isn’t the typical autistic child, because there is no such thing. But her autism hampers her learning to such an extent that she will need some level of supervision for the rest of her life.
Tori’s parents, Gene and June Boes, are learning the ins and outs of the disorder—the controversies, the various treatments, the efforts to figure out what causes autism and how it might be cured. The couple, who live near Issaquah, recently helped start a Northwest chapter of Cure Autism Now to raise money for research.
They know that many other families—former Sen. Slade Gorton’s and former Seattle Mariners pitcher Bill Krueger’s among them—are also coping with the challenges of autism.
But this isn’t about the politics, questions and debates involving autism. This is about how one child is teaching a family to appreciate the little things. It seems appropriate now, when there’s so much stress and hype over the holidays, to focus on a little girl whose goal in life is figuring out the simplest things.
“SPELL DOG,” therapist Crista Graves tells Tori.
The child has just tried to bite one of the toys Graves is using as
part of this two-hour therapy session. Graves has pulled the toy from Tori and has refocused her.
Tori pauses. “D ... O ... G,” she says. “It’s a dog!” Graves asks Tori to write the word, and Tori does. “Good job!” the therapist says.
“Now fish. Spell fish.”
Tori looks away. Her concentration is gone.
Crista puts her hand on Tori’s head. “Tori.”
The child mumbles. “Fish,” Graves says.
Tori looks down. “F ... I ... S ... H.”
TORI SEEMED NORMAL as a baby, June Boes recalled. She wasn’t fussy. She couldn’t compare with her older brother, Andy, a precocious child who talked and walked early. But Boes, a pediatric nurse, didn’t see anything that caused her concern.
When Tori was about 20 months old, her parents noticed her language skills weren’t progressing. She didn’t wave goodbye. She could repeat a word, but “she couldn’t tell me when she needed something.” She was diagnosed with autism at 23 months. The family was stunned. There was no guidance, no prognosis, just, “Your daughter has autism.” Did that mean she was like Rain Man? No. Nothing like the man with the phenomenal memory. Would she be able to have any semblance of a normal life?
Nobody could answer that. But the differences between Tori and her preschool playmates became more obvious as the child grew. Tori, her mother said, “could sing a whole song, but she’d never called me mama.” The family became very structured. They worked hard to keep Tori on an even keel.
Andy asked his mom why God gave him a sister like Tori. Because, his mother replied, “God believed Tori needed a brother like you.” CRISTA GRAVES, the therapist, started working with Tori every day. She taught Tori how to pay attention. Within five weeks, Boes said, Tori was calling her “mama.” She could say she needed to go to the bathroom.
This past summer, Tori learned to read.
The child, who is slender with large, brown eyes, is in third grade
now, mostly in special education classes. Andy, 10, helps take care of her. And every Saturday is “aunt-sister day,” when her Aunt Kim and her cousin spend the day with her, take her to a movie or shopping.
“I’ll never have the pleasure of walking her down the aisle,” said Gene Boes, a Microsoft manager. “But the value of Tori being able to say ‘mama’ is very different to (other people) than to me.” Said June Boes: “Our highs come with Tori’s successes; the support of our family and their unending willingness to pitch in; teachers, therapists and assistants that look beyond Tori’s disability to the potential within; Andy, who surprises us with his insight and tenderness; and an eye-to-eye exchange with Tori that leaves no doubt that she loves you.”
It’s possible Tori will one day be able to live in the family’s downstairs apartment.
For now, it means the world to them to hear Tori say “mama.”
* * *
[By Serena Gordon, HealthScoutNews.]
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/hsn/20011219/hl/autistic_kids_have_unexplained_
brain_growth_1.html
No one knows exactly what causes autism, but researchers are zeroing in on some basic biological differences between autistic children and children who develop normally.
New research has found that young autistic children have larger brains than most kids. But bigger isn’t necessarily better, because the autistic children were not able to recognize or react to changes in other people’s emotions.
“These studies tell us that autism involves problems in very basic levels of social and emotional processing,” says Geraldine Dawson, one of the researchers and the director of the University of Washington Autism Center.
The University of Washington researchers studied a group of about 50 children who were 3 and 4 years old. Some were autistic, some had developmental delays and others developed normally. The autistic children had varying levels of autistic symptoms, says Dawson.
One of the first things Dawson’s colleague, Dr. Stephen Dager, a professor of psychiatry and radiology, noted was that the brains of the autistic children were about 10 percent larger than those of normal or developmentally delayed children, according to Dawson.
At birth, all of the children’s heads measured a normal size, so something happened between birth and age 3 in the autistic children to accelerate the growth of their brains, she says.
Using a special type of magnetic resonance imaging, Dager also discovered that one portion of the brain, the amygdala, was disproportionately larger in autistic children. The amygdala is a part of the brain used for emotional processing, particularly for picking up cues on people’s emotions, according to Dawson. It is located in the lobes on either side of the brain behind the temples.
“This finding is intriguing because we know autism involves problems connecting with people’s emotions,” says Dawson.
Dawson’s team wanted to see how well autistic children would react to pictures of people showing different emotional expressions.
After being fitted with sensors that monitored their brain activity, the children were shown two pictures. One was of a woman with a neutral expression. The other showed the woman with a frightened expression.
Dawson says the researchers chose the fear expression for two reasons.
The first is that the amygdala is sensitive to picking up on fear.
From research on normally developing children, it is known that by the age of 7 months, babies show a different reaction to a fear face than to a neutral one. Dawson says this response probably developed during evolution because it would be important to be able to respond if another member of your species was showing fear.
However, she says, the children with autism had no difference in brain activity when shown the two pictures, while the normally developing children showed a larger brain response when they saw the fear picture.
“This suggests that at a very basic level . . . these children are not really interpreting or responding to emotional cues in a normal way,” Dawson says.
“Some pretty basic brain systems are disrupted.”
Knowing this could lead to better and earlier intervention programs,
she adds. “If at 10 to 12 months, a baby is not responding, it would alert us that we should be checking the child for autism,” she says. And early intervention is important because the earlier treatment starts, the more chance there is to rewire the developing brain, she adds.
The findings of these studies were presented early last month at the first International Meeting for Autism Research, which was part of the annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience.
“This is an extremely important area of investigation,” says Dr. Eric London, vice president of medical affairs for the National Alliance for Autism Research.
“There could be a very discreet biological system involved in facial recognition,” London adds, and if this is the case, there could end up being a relatively simple biological treatment for it when researchers discover exactly what’s going wrong in the autistic brain.
What to Do: If you’d like to know more about autism, read this article from Kid’s Health, or this one from the Autism Society of America.
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Garlic Extract Helps Ward Off Drug-Resistant Bugs
[Intestinal disorders are frequently present in children with autism. This report says garlic has some remedial effect on some colon bacteria. By Anne Harding, Reuters Health.] http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2001/12/20/eline/links/20011220elin018. html <- - address ends here.
Garlic might be able to ward off more than vampires, reports presented here Wednesday show—it may also fight two types of drug-resistant bacteria.
The new reports, presented here at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, suggest that garlic’s active ingredient, allicin, could be useful in the battle against infection that does not respond to antibiotic drugs, a serious and growing problem.
Dr. Ronald Cutler of the University of East London, UK, reported on his research using a cream containing allicin, garlic’s active compound, to fight methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). MRSAs infect hospital patients, and are also a danger for healthcare workers and people with weakened immune systems.
About half of people carry MRSAs in their noses, he said. A topical drug, mupirocin, was released in 1985 to help wipe out nasal MRSA carriage—which is where most infections originate—but the bug has already begun to develop resistance to it, he added.
Cutler and his colleagues developed creams that were able to carry allicin in a stable, effective form and mask its odor. They tested the creams against 30 different samples of MRSA taken from patients and grown in the laboratory. An allicin concentration of 32 parts per million (ppm) inhibited the growth of all of the bacteria samples, and all were killed by allicin at 256 ppm.
A topical treatment for MRSA infection is sorely needed, Cutler told Reuters Health; he said he has seen patients with extensive, weeping lesions caused by MRSA infection that don’t respond to treatment and have lasted for months.
There’s probably little danger that bugs will develop resistance to allicin, Cutler said. While allicin is not effective against certain species of bacteria, bugs that are susceptible to allicin have never been seen to develop resistance to it, he explained.
Cutler told Reuters Health that he and his colleagues will begin clinical trials of the allicin cream for MRSA infections next year. Nopex Ltd., the company that is developing the allicin creams, participated in the research.
Dr. Jaya Prakash of the National University of Health Sciences in Lombard, Illinois, reported on her research on allicin’s effects on another drug-resistant bug, vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE). She and her colleagues conducted laboratory tests of allicin’s effect on VRE samples taken from patients with the infection.
Allicin did not kill the VRE, but it did hold their growth in check. This suggests, Prakash told Reuters Health, that an allicin preparation could be given to patients when they enter the hospital to prevent VRE from taking hold in their digestive tracts. She explained that garlic would be especially effective against bacteria living in the colon, because up to 20% of the garlic is not absorbed in the body but excreted in the feces.
“This was a very important first-step study,” Prakash told Reuters Health.
She noted that patients may enter the hospital with VREs in their digestive tracts, or they may contract the infection in the hospital. Once the bug takes hold, she explained, it can spread to the bladder and to catheters, resulting in a serious and very difficult-to-treat infection.
Both Prakash and Cutler noted that the garlic preparations are very safe.
“There’s a huge margin of safety,” said Prakash. “That’s why it may be the ideal candidate.”
The next steps in her research, Prakash said, will be to try to figure out allicin’s mechanism of action against VREs and to conduct clinical trials. This study was partially funded by Phytopharmica, a company that makes garlic-containing products.
Copyright © 2001 Reuters Limited.
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[By Anne Harding, Reuters Health]. http://www.reutershealth.com/archive/2001/12/19/professional/links/20011219c lin011.html <- - Address ends here.
Group A streptococcal tonsillopharyngitis, if it occurs repeatedly and is untreated, can lead to the development of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and Tourette’s syndrome, according to study findings presented on Tuesday at a major infectious disease meeting..
OCD and Tourette’s have been linked to infection with group A streptococcus in the past, but this is the first prospective study to confirm the link and demonstrate that antibiotic treatment can resolve the symptoms, study co-author Dr. Michael Pichichero, from the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, said. He presented the findings at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy..
Dr. Pichichero and Dr. M. Lynd Murphy, from the Elmwood Pediatric Group in Rochester, have identified 25 cases of the condition, known as Pediatric onset, Neuropsychiatric Disorder (PANDAS). At the meeting, they reported on findings in 12 children..
The children’s mean age was 7 years. Parents usually brought the children for medical attention after they began exhibiting “severe OCD behavior,” Dr. Pichichero said. Tests confirmed that the children had group A streptococcal tonsillopharyngitis, he added..
Once the children received antibiotic treatment, with either penicillin or a cephalosporin, their psychiatric symptoms disappeared. When symptoms reappeared in six children, another course of antibiotics cleared them up..
Dr. Pichichero believes that such infections might account for a significant number of OCD and Tourette’s cases in children. He proposes that repeated group A streptococcal infections could lead to “kindling” in the brain. Once neural damage occurs, a permanent case of OCD or Tourette’s syndrome may be the result. For this reason, he noted, rapid treatment of these infections is vital..
Drs. Pichichero and Dr. Murphy have begun a National Institutes of Health-funded study to investigate the relationship between strep A and OCD in 800 children..
Copyright © 2001 Reuters Limited.
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