butterflyinthewell:

whatshappeningtothekids:

Autism Symptoms Improve After Fecal Transplant: Small Study

Children with autism
may benefit from fecal transplants – a method of introducing donated
healthy microbes into people with gastrointestinal disease to rebalance
the gut, a new study has found.

Behavioral symptoms of autism and gastrointestinal distress often go
hand-in-hand, and both improved when a small group of children with the
disorder underwent fecal transplant and subsequent treatment.

In the study of 18 children with autism and moderate to severe
gastrointestinal problems, parents and doctors said they saw positive
changes that lasted at least eight weeks after the treatment. Children
without autism were included for comparison of bacterial and viral gut
composition prior to the study.

“Transplants are working for people with other gastrointestinal
problems. And, with autism, gastrointestinal symptoms are often severe,
so we thought this could be potentially valuable,” said Ann Gregory, one
of the study’s lead authors and a microbiology graduate student at The
Ohio State University.

“Following treatment, we found a positive change in GI symptoms and neurological symptoms overall,” she said.

The study, which appears in the journal Microbiome, was
conducted while Gregory and her adviser and co-author, Matthew Sullivan,
were at the University of Arizona. Other lead researchers on the
project are from Arizona State University and Northern Arizona
University.

The study will appear in Microbiome during the week of January 23, 2017.

The reason “problem” behaviors lessened or stopped is the autistic people weren’t experiencing tummy discomfort. A gassy, upset or crampy stomach can make it hard to tolerate other stimuli.

Imagine having a fan in your room that’s really loud and grating, but you have to deal with it because you can’t afford a new one. You have to blast your TV to hear it, you plug your free ear while talking on the phone and it’s hard to get the little nuances of music with the constant buzzing or droning noises in the background.

Then one day your friend comes over and takes the fan apart, cleans all the moving parts, oils them up and puts it back together. No more grating noise, it’s just a quiet hum again.

You can listen to your TV at a comfortable volume again. You can relax while on the phone. You can study all the little nuances in the music you listen to. No more distracting “background process” is vying for your attention.

That’s what resolving gut problems does for autistic people.