I’ve been trying, with marginal success, to focus on things other than arguing with people on the Internet lately. I have noticed the updates to leftbrainrightbrain and am generally impressed with the production qualities. [if not, at times, how you treat my biomed buddies]

Anyways, in any case, I would agree that diagnosing mercury toxicity based on porphyrins is not supporable right now. But remember, the study in question used reference ranges from several other studies of normal children, and found very significant differences against control in all cases, including studies completely unrelated to autism. If a big flaw of this study is the lack of a local control group, I’d say drawing conclusions based on court testimony and the statement that ’some’ normal children also have abnormal patterns is very risky stuff.

To start with, we’d have to understand the number of children that ’some’ children means, and how much their profiles varied from normal.

If I am not mistaken, you tend to take a poor view of discarding applied scientific findings based on unpublished, heard it by mouth findings by DAN doctors. Would you agree with Mumper that we can use porphyrin analysis to detect differential toxicities? It does seem clear that there are good number of studies showing differential porphyin values in people who have known mercury, or other environmental agent exposure.

There very well could be things other than environmental agents that could cause a backup in porphryin components; but we’d need to find a mechanism to explain why chelating agents got values to normalize.

Such an explanation would also do nothing in so far as our ability to explain away the re-analysis of Wong/DeSoto and/or increased relative risks for autism by means of mutations in glutathione encoding genes.

- pD

Q: You order this Porphyrin test in your own practice?

A: Yes.

Q: And do you find them to be a reliable measure of mercury toxicity in autistic patients?

A: I’m split on that now because I think that they’re good at showing differential toxicities but the thing that is worrying us now is that we’ve not looked at a lot of control children and we’re starting to do that and finding that some normal children have abnormal Porphyrins too.

The government has been as open as the law allows in posting details from the vaccine court. CBS just figured out it is on the web site.

I just read that the other day. I was pleased, because previously the other duplication porphyrin profiles observed by Nataf was by the Geiers, who have obvious credibility issues.

If the ‘mercury militia’ is guilty of overplaying the role of vaccines (they are, IMO), the neurodiverse can be just as guilty of underplaying the importance of our increasing dataset on the biology of autism in regards to external agents. The analysis that this paper proves nothing about casaulity, or vaccines, is dead on; but that doesn’t mean we should discard xenobiotics as potential problems in children with autism. Treating this additional knowledge as flippant runs the same risk as shouting that it proves mercury causes autism; a sense of bias when evaluating science.

We now have three clinical analysis showing abnormal porphyrin profiles in children with autism as compared to ‘normal’ children. In at least one study, (Nataf), administration of chelating agents resulted in a normalization of porphryin profiles.

Two sets of researchers have found that having mutations in a gene responsible for glutathione encoding roughly doubles the risk of developing autism. Likewise, glutathione levels and precurosor chemicals in children with autism have been found to be abnormal when compared to normal children.

The Wong/Desoto debacle told us that kids with autism do have more mercury in their blood than their peers. As Epiwonk nicely pointed out in a recent blog entry, the clinical significance of the rise is unknown, but the increase is not in dispute. Kids with autism are more likely to have higher levels of mercury than undiagnosed children.

While none of this means mercury causes autism, it does mean that the physiology of people with autism tends to lend itself poorly to dealing with mercury; and a host of other agents. Getting a better understanding of what has been observed is good for children with autism; the more we know the more we can help.

Remains to be seen how others “read” these results.

So true.

- pD
-pD