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...often, what's lost in all the finger-pointing over what's to blame for the problem is the salient question of how to fix it. A paper just published in the journal Brain Research Reviews is taking a stab at that, suggesting a brand-new strategy - one that focuses on a very particular part of the brain. (See pictures of a school for autistic students...
...attention, but the locus coeruleus does one other thing too: it regulates fever. Generations of parents of autistic kids have reported that when their child runs a fever, the symptoms of autism seem to abate. When the fever goes down, the symptoms return. In 2007, a paper in the journal Pediatrics reported on that phenomenon and confirmed that, yes, the parents' observations are right. What no one had done before, at least not formally, was tie it to the locus coeruleus - that is, until Drs. Dominick Purpura and Mark Mehler of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine published the idea...
...often that a mere flash of insight - as opposed to a formal, controlled study - commands much space in a medical journal, and Purpura and Mehler readily concede that a good deal of empiricism will have to be applied to their theory before it can become anything more than that. Still, they're convinced that the idea deserves attention. If the locus coeruleus is indeed malfunctioning in autism, the problem could involve hundreds or even thousands of genes. The researchers are careful to avoid the shooting war over what damaged those genes, suggesting that environment and toxic chemicals - but not vaccines...
...Stress is thought to have a significant impact on the ability of the locus coeruleus to regulate noradrenaline properly, and Mehler and Purpura cite an improbable 2008 study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders showing that mothers who lived through a hurricane during their pregnancy - particularly at the mid-gestational point - had a greater likelihood of giving birth to an autistic child than other women. "What would be involved here would be the mother's level of [the stress hormone] cortisol," says Purpura. "Between fetus and mother, the placenta acts as a very good barrier for maternal...
...study published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience offers some hope of lasting relief. A group of neuroscientists led by Glenn Giesler at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, hypothesized that the mechanism by which scratching relieves an itch takes place not along the nerve fibers of itchy skin but deep within the central nervous system - specifically, in the spinothalamic tract (STT) neurons in the spinal cord, which transmit information about pain, temperature and touch to the brain. (Previous studies have shown that STT neurons can be activated with the application of an itch-producing chemical like histamine and that...