Later On

The use of parasites in medical treatment is not new: leeches have been used for centuries and are still in active use because they are tremendously effective at what they do. Maggots delicately remove dead flesh from wounds, leaving living flesh alone. And hookworms seem to treat autoimmune diseases well.

Bob Grant has an interesting article in The Scientist on using roundworms to treat autism:

In 2005 the Johnson family was at its breaking point. Lawrence, the family’s 13-year-old son, was diagnosed with autism at age two and a half, and his parents had valiantly coped with his illness for the ensuing decade.

Throughout his childhood, Lawrence’s disorder progressed along the typical path: he would not engage in pretend play like other children, he repeated himself incessantly, his interests were very restricted, and he was frequently agitated and anxious.

By his teenage years, Lawrence had veered into the dangerous realm of self abuse. He smashed his head against the wall dozens of times a day. He bit himself until he bled. He gouged at his eyes and tore at his face. A normal school experience was virtually impossible. He couldn’t walk a single block from the family’s Brooklyn brownstone without kicking and screaming when a traffic light changed at the wrong moment or streets were crossed in an unacceptable order. “If people haven’t actually experienced those symptoms of autism, they’re the killer,” says Stewart, Lawrence’s father. “They’re the things that destroy families.”

Over the years, the Johnsons tried several treatments to curb Lawrence’s violent and disruptive outbreaks. They started with applied behavior analysis when he was young, and attempted interventions ranging from dietary modifications to music therapy. Lawrence took every pharmaceutical that could potentially treat his problems—antiseizure medications, serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, atypical antipsychotics, lithium, and others in various combinations.

Some of these treatments offered the family momentary reprieves from what Stewart calls Lawrence’s “freak outs.” But any improvements in the boy’s behavior were usually short-lived. “Of all of them, the only one that gave us a brief respite was risperidone [a potent antipsychotic], and that actually did, for a brief window, stop his agitation and aggression,” Stewart recalls. But after a year or so, the drug stopped working. While still on risperidone, Lawrence began to gain weight rapidly and his daily bouts of violence and aggression returned.

When traditional pharmacotherapy failed, Stewart began to search outside the medical establishment for ways to help his son. “Lawrence was somebody who had had several trials of other medicines that have been well studied and really hadn’t gotten a therapeutic response,” says his doctor, Eric Hollander, then the head of Mount Sinai Medical Center’s Seaver Autism Center in New York City.

But Stewart, a portfolio manager in Manhattan, eschewed unproven and potentially dangerous alternative autism treatments, such as chelation therapy or intravenous hydrogen peroxide, to which some parents fall prey. Instead he employed a scientific approach, combing Web sites like PubMed and MedLine for published literature on promising treatments. “A large part of my free time and a lot of time I should have been sleeping was given over to researching what, if any, ways there are to try and get a handle on some of these symptoms,” Stewart notes. “I wasn’t looking to cure autism. I was looking for a way to make our lives bearable.”

His search would lead him to an idea that, on its face, might seem just as farfetched as some of the alternative autism treatments Stewart calls “junk science.” He discovered the work of a trio of physician/researchers at the University of Iowa who had successfully treated patients with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis using a nematode parasite found in the intestines of pigs—Trichuris suis, the pig whipworm. Both are autoimmune disorders in which the immune system essentially attacks the intestinal walls. Stewart also found data that pointed to a link between some autism symptoms and inflated levels of proinflamma​tory cytokines, an apparent result of the immune system attacking glial cells in patients’ brains.¹ Putting these bits of information together, Stewart wrote a short review paper and presented it to Hollander. His central hypothesis was that parasitic worm infection would modulate Lawrence’s immune system and calm inflammation that was causing his disruptive behaviors. . .

Continue reading. It’s a lengthy article, with a lot of specific detail, and includes a video.

UPDATE: And here’s a long, interesting article by Amy Harmon in the NY Times about two college students in love, both being on the autistic spectrum.