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New drug that may help reverse autism is to be tested

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Tyri0n
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15 Mar 2013, 8:37 am

Wandering_Stranger wrote:
Are these mice Autistic then?

I have an issue with "cure" - what exactly does this cure remove? A friend posted something on Twitter and I said that if you cure Autism, (as a whole and not just the areas that are a problem) you also remove parts of someones personality. She replied and agreed. She said that her children (they also have Fragile X Syndrome) do need help to flourish; but she doesn't want to change their personality.


Or one could say that, due to autism, your real personality is trapped behind an autistic wall, and treatment would let it out. I think this would explain why many autistic people experience co-morbids like anxiety and depression and worse.



Joe90
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15 Mar 2013, 11:27 am

I just wish there was some sort of medication that I can take that doesn't have any side effects, and could make me feel less afraid of embarrassing myself and makes me think of the right things to say at the right time so that I don't make so many social faux pas, and just make me feel less anxious or shy in social situations, and that be it. I'm not asking to take meds to turn into an extroverted party animal, I'm just asking for a simple prescription what could just better my social skills, and even help with my body language aswell so that I can appear more approachable, because apparently AS seems to hold us back on that aswell. Maybe a pill like this already exists, maybe it doesn't, but if there's medication for people with ADHD and there's medication for people with depression and there's medication for people with Dementia and there's medication for people to help with other various disorders, then surely there should be some sort of medication for people with AS, especially as mild as me, who are too Aspie to be able to fulfill an improvement on social skills without appearing even more weird, but are not severe enough to kind of be locked in our own world too much to be able to have improvements to our social skills.


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15 Mar 2013, 11:39 am

goldfish21 wrote:
^ but what if there are treatments that help? Why not be open to trying different things & see if they benefit you?


Sure i could sprinkle my cornflakes with betablockers to reduce social anxiety, sure i could take concerta and crap like that to redice stress at work, but the price would be too high.

Besides, my main problem is the social dysfunction, i barely function in the workplace and i've been out of a relationship since the dinosaurs walked the earth. For problems like those you cannot just take a pill and expect things to get better.


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DeaconBlues
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15 Mar 2013, 11:43 am

And no one has spotted the main reason to believe this story is total bull:

It's from the Daily Mail!!

Seriously, you'd get better journalistic credibility by linking to the Weekly World News or Cracked.com at this point.


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TheygoMew
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15 Mar 2013, 2:01 pm

goldfish21 wrote:
^ but what if there are treatments that help? Why not be open to trying different things & see if they benefit you?


Most treatments for anything psychiatric related do more harm in the long run and people that are ignorant like to just say drugs problem solved.



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15 Mar 2013, 2:04 pm

DeaconBlues wrote:
And no one has spotted the main reason to believe this story is total bull:

It's from the Daily Mail!!

Seriously, you'd get better journalistic credibility by linking to the Weekly World News or Cracked.com at this point.



A fair criticism. So I hunted down the actual research paper that the article is referencing:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0057380
excerpt from the paper:
Quote:
Conclusions

Antipurinergic therapy with suramin corrected all of the core behavioral abnormalities and multisystem comorbidities that we observed in the MIA mouse model of autism spectrum disorders. The weight of the evidence from our study supports the notion that the efficacy of suramin springs from its antipurinergic properties, but additional studies will be required to prove this point. This study did not test the generality of purinergic signaling abnormalities in other animal models or in human ASD. Although our results are encouraging, we urge caution before extending our results to humans. Long-term therapy with suramin in children with autism is not an FDA-approved usage, and is not recommended because of potentially toxic side effects that can occur with prolonged treatment [61]. However, antipurinergic therapy in general offers a fresh new direction for research into the pathogenesis, and new drug development for the treatment of human autism and related spectrum disorders.


bolding by me

my understanding of their results: just because it fixed "autistic like" behaviour in mice by fixing purinergenic signaling between cells doesn't mean that there is any such defect causing autism in humans. And even if there was and even if this fixed it, the side effects are too dangerous.



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15 Mar 2013, 7:58 pm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 182019.htm

Quote:
Of course, correcting abnormalities in a mouse is a long way from a cure for humans," said Naviaux, "but we are encouraged enough to test this approach in a small clinical trial of children with autism spectrum disorder in the coming year. This trial is still in the early stages of development. We think this approach -- called antipurinergic therapy or APT -- offers a fresh and exciting new path that could lead to development of a new class of drugs to treat autism."


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whirlingmind
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15 Mar 2013, 8:39 pm

DeaconBlues wrote:
And no one has spotted the main reason to believe this story is total bull:

It's from the Daily Mail!!

Seriously, you'd get better journalistic credibility by linking to the Weekly World News or Cracked.com at this point.


...and yet refers to a bone fide scientific study, kindly linked to by Janissy...and a real trial is pending. Don't be so hasty.


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