Autism-World

One thing is for certain, autism lyme connections do exist. For those of you reading this that are unfamiliar with lyme disease, it is a primarily tick borne illness that stems from a bacteria called Borrelia. This type of bacteria is very hard to detect as it is generally a spirochete, a form of bacteria that bores into cells and eventually causes the cell walls to collapse. When the cell walls collapse around the bacteria, the bacteria is then covered by the cell wall. This makes the bacteria virtually invisible to the immune system, and very hard to treat. If this bacteria gets into the nervous system, it can cause neurological insult and result in autism spectrum symptoms for its victims.

When our daughter became really ill at age 6 1/2 just prior to her extreme autistic regresssion, she showed signs of lyme disease. She had a Bell’s Palsy type drooping of her face, a red round rash beside each of her eyes that looked like a ringworm, and extreme neurological assault symptoms. She had shooting pains in her arms, legs and feet, and complained that her feet felt fuzzy. We had recently pulled a tick off of her and my wife had saved it. So, when my daughter became acutely ill, we took her to the nearest children’s hospital where they began tests for encephalitis and seizures. We gave them the tick and asked them about the rash beside her eyes. They dismissed the rash as ringworm and we assumed that they had the tick examined. We even mentioned lyme as a possibility because I had recently read an article about lyme disease being able to masquerade as many other diseases.

Well, we assumed that they had tested her for lyme and the results had been negative. We assumed wrong. They did do some preliminary tests such as white blood cell counts etc., which would show ordinary bacterial infections. They never did the specific tests such as the Western Blot (which is the only really definitive test for lyme). So, as we went through the process of taking our daughter from one specialty clinic to the other in various states, we continued to ask about lyme. They all dismissed it as a possibility. We still didn’t know about the autism lyme connection that can exist with lyme induced autism.

Then in the fall of 2006, a full two years after our daughter first became ill, my wife came across the Lyme Induced Autism Foundation, and began reading about the autism lyme connection. The more she read, the more she became convinced that we needed to have our daughter tested for lyme disease. The pediatrician’s of course resisted ordering the tests, but we eventually got them to concede to our wishes and order the tests. The results showed that our daughter had lyme disease.

So, we then went through the difficult task of determining how to treat the disease. We then found out that most doctors know very little about lyme disease and that there is much controversey about treatment protocols. We discovered that it is very important to see a LLMD (Lyme Literate Medical Doctor) Otherwise it is very likely that the lyme will not be treated correctly.

The results with our daughter have been very promising so far. She has been being treated with anti-biotics for around three months as of this writing, and she has improved quite dramatically. For those of you worried about anti-biotics causing gut and yeast problems – so were we. However, Lyme Literate MD’s understand the gut issues and yeast issues associated with autism, and they will prescribe Nystatin and Difulcan to deal with the yeast during treatment. So far, we have not had any significant issues with this.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 8:31 pm and is filed under What Causes Autism.