Our Latest DAN! Appointment

Yesterday we had our second appointment with our new Defeat Autism Now! Doctor. After a slow start, the doctor was behind schedule and we waited at least an hour, we got in to see the doctor. He immediately told us how well Matthew was doing. Matthew, unlike many other ASD kids his age, talks to the doctor and answers his questions. He even asked a few Why questions, which tickled the doctor pink.

We started by going over Matthew’s lab results. They showed that he does have metal overload, some seeming to be quite significant. But our doctor, after looking at Matthew as a whole child, does not feel we need to aggressively chelate him. Instead, he says, that because Matthew is such a verbal child and has good cognitive skills he does not feel Matthew is a “metal” kid. That means that we will need to get the metals out, but they are probably not the major contributor to Matthew’s autistic behaviors. We then looked at the next lab report and saw that Matthew does have a lot of markers for “leaky gut” and gut inflammation such as low levels of Bifidobacterium and Enterococcus spp. which are good beneficial gut flora, and high levels of Lysozyme which is an enzyme secreaed at the site of inflammation in the GI tract. So these are the two areas he really wants to focus on fixing in the next four months. He chose four months instead of three because he will be going to some additional biomedical classes in April (maybe the mini DAN!, I don’t know) and wanted to see what came from those classes. I really like that.

So our current plan of attack is as follows:
Month one:

• increase Zinc to 2 teaspoons at bedtime (we are doing this because we saw such huge cognitive gains when we added zinc in the first time)
• IgG2000 1 teaspoon a day. I will need to order this immediately. This is supposed to help with the leaky gut and gut inflammation we are seeing.

Month two:

• Co Q10 50mg in the morning
• LCarnitine 250 mg twice a day

both of these seem to be related to helping Matthew’s hypotonia. There is a good possibility that Matthew has a mitochondrial disorder and both the Co Q10 and LCarnitine are helpful to mitochondrial issues.

Month three:

• Metal Free 1 spray daily working up to 45 sprays a day over the period of the full month. This is the mild chelator that will not stress his liver.

Month four:

• DMG/Folinic Acid/B12 complex 1 tsp in the morning. This will hopefully continue to fine tune his cognitive functions.
• If Matthew is still showing increased signs of hyperlexia we are to remove phoschol from his therapies for one week and see if he improves.

Then at our next visit we will readdress our current recommendations and go from there.

So I hate to say it, but I still haven’t told you all about my love of Kombucha. Maybe next time.