File under WTF. Curing Autism with Parasitic Worms?

Housecall for Health: Treating Autism With Worms « FOX News Radio


Top doctors say they are on their way to successfully treating autism…using parasitic worms. A team at Albert Einstein College of Medicine is leading a trial to see if TSO, the eggs of a whipworm, can cure the symptoms of autism.

In the past 20 years, doctors have used parasitic worms to help patients with Crohn’s Disease, and hope the worms’ effect on the immune system will stop the inflammatory response they believe is linked to autism.

Housecall for Health, I’m Chris Hoenig, FOX News Radio.

Timothy Syndrome and Autism

How Timothy Syndrome Mutation Causes Wiring Defects Associated With Cognitive Impairment

The present study reveals that a mutation of the disease-causing gene throws a key process of neurodevelopment into reverse. That is, the mutation underlying Timothy syndrome causes shrinkage, rather than growth, of the wiring needed for the development of neural circuits that underlie cognition. 

"In addition to the implications for autism, what's really exciting is that we now have a way to get at the core mechanisms tying genes and environmental influences to development and disease processes in the brain," said Dolmetsch, Senior Director of Molecular Networks at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. 

Reshaping the brain

Reshaping the brain: scientists reprogram neurons after birth | Ars Technica

they still don’t know how plastic they are—if they can change fates after they started differentiating down one particular path. In the context of brain injury, it would be useful to know if certain neural circuits could be reprogrammed and repaired by having the neurons that are already present change fates to adapt to the damage. But this has been challenging to determine, because changing the fate of specific neurons in the latter stages of differentiation has been technically difficult.