An Autism Recovery

Systems Interacting

Interesting systems biology point of view on treating autism here. This lines up more or less with the biomedical side of what we've been thinking.

Concentration Is Not Accumulation

Reflecting on my Holy Mackerel! post, I got to thinking...suppose that every time your body encounters mercury that it’s able to clean itself of all but just a little bit that stays behind like a stubborn wine stain on the carpet. When you encounter more, the body again rids itself of most of it, but again can’t quite get it all out. The stain grows slightly larger.

At some point, the accumulation reaches a harmful level.

So while ppb is certainly a useful metric, what could be an important complement is how much raw mercury is in a given dose/serving/exposure period/whatever. If you have an 8 ounce serving of salmon at its .000014 ppb mercury level, does that mean that’s equivalent to a .00000012656 gram dose of a 25,000 ppb vaccine?

Holy Mackerel!

So a mercury level of 200 ppb is considered hazardous waste. Mackerel has 0.00073 ppb. Salmon has .000014 ppb, which is the real reason for this post. As part of the wondering what we might’ve done differently phase of all this, we wondered if our salmon consumption during pregnancy might have been a contributing factor to what we’re facing today.

I had read how healthy salmon was for the developing baby, and we had salmon quite often. We happened to live pretty close to an Outback restaurant at the time, and between the salmon and my beloved Foster’s, we spent almost as much time there as at the Dairy Queen packing on the pounds for the long winter. I shudder to think how much salmon we might have consumed if DQ had offered a Salmon Blizzard LTO at any point during the summer of 2002...actually, I just shudder to think of a Salmon Blizzard.

But my point here is that it looks like we would’ve had to eat a ton of salmon for it to be harmful relative to vaccine mercury levels, which, by the way, were around 25,000 ppb for lots of kids. Logan was born during the “run-out” period where mercury was supposed to have been removed from some of the vaccines being created, but existing supplies of the old stuff was okay to use until it was all gone.

Sorry, m’ am, we don’t have the new shipment of toys yet, but we can still sell you these with the choking hazard defects.

Priorities.

Supplementation & Dosages

We’ve been giving Logan a children’s chewable multi-vitamin for a while. Yesterday some reading pointed out that multi-vitamins for children on the autism spectrum should not contain copper. Excessive copper can be neurotoxic, and ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) children typically have already-elevated levels of copper for the same reasons that they’re bodies cannot detoxify the other heavy metals (mercury, lead, etc.). So giving him a supplemental daily dose of copper to keep adding to the accumulation is clearly a bad idea.

On to shopping for a replacement multi-vitamin.

RDA/RDI
We’ve all seen the Recommended Dietary Allowance charts on nutrition labels. You can also call it Recommended Daily Allowance since conveniently the unit of time measure for RDA is one day.

They (the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences) set the RDA at the level meeting the needs of 97-98% of healthy people. They further break it out according to age, sex, pregnant, lactating, etc.

It’s odd, though. The chart calls for 1.1mg of vitamin B6 for children four to six years old. And then at age seven, it jumps to 1.4mg. Really?

Clearly this is not meant to be exact, and my need for precision may be blinding me to the bigger picture here.

Speculation
I would think that since B6 is water-soluble and carried by the blood, that a more informative dosage would take that into account. If weight were a good proxy for blood-volume (and I don’t know that it is or isn’t—yet—help appreciated), then it seems you could say you need a daily B6 quantity of x mgs per pound of body weight.

So at this point I just need to dig further to understand what this is all about.