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What was especially remarkable was the number of ways the intervention reversed Fragile X symptoms. The specially bred mice had fewer seizures, more normal brain structure, a more typical rate of body growth and they performed better on a learning task than mice with uncorrected Fragile X. The experiment suggests that treating Fragile X with a drug that inhibits mGluR5 receptors could have similarly healing effects...
...This gives the whole field of autism a lot of hope for targeted treatments that can be beneficial," says Dr. Randi Hagerman, medical director of the MIND Institute and director of the Fragile X Research and Treatment Center at the University of California, Davis. "It's likely that the mGluR5 pathway may be involved in other kinds of autism," she says. That means that a drug that works on this pathway could have broad application in treating autism...
...happens, drugs that block the mGluR5 receptor already exist. Hagerman's group and a team at Rush University in Chicago are about to test one such drug, fenobam, as a treatment for Fragile X. Bear, meanwhile, has founded a company called Seaside Therapeutics that hopes to begin human safety tests of another drug as early as next year. Both researchers believe that a safe and effective mGluR5 inhibitor would help both children and adults with Fragile X Syndrome, though drug treatment early in childhood would seem to offer the most promise...
Hagerman, one of the nation's leading researchers on Fragile X, hopes that the current explosion of interest in the disorder will lead more people with autism and their relatives to be tested for the Fragile X defect. Just being a carrier of the disorder can have health implications, including an elevated risk of premature menopause for women and tremors and cognitive decline in older men. Theoretically, a drug that treats Fragile X could lower risks for carriers as well. Says Hagerman: "It's a very exciting time...
...Translated by Andrew X. Pham and annotated by Tram's younger sister, Dang Kim Tram, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace offers a rare combination of lyricism, grit, passion and humanity. "What am I?" Tram asks at one point. "I am a girl with a heart brimming with emotions, yet with a mind that never falters before a complex and dangerous situation." She might have been speaking for a generation of idealistic young Vietnamese who never returned from the battlefields...