My name is Dr. Marianne Teitelbaum. I am a Chiropractor and an Ayurvedic Practitioner and I’ve been in practice for the last 35 years in Southern New Jersey, 15 minutes outside of Philadelphia. I was very fortunate in that I was able to sit with my teacher and mentor, Vaidya Rama Kant Mishra, for 20 years as we tackled all kinds of health problems that my patients presented with.
Dr. Mishra was one of India’s greatest Ayurvedic practitioners. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of over 700 herbs and due to the purity of his family lineage of Ayurveda he was sent to America to develop herbs for one of the first Ayurvedic companies in the United States.
When I first began my studies with him, I asked if he could first address all the autism I was seeing because no one seemed to understanding the sudden incidence of it in the population and therefore no one knew exactly what to do about it.
So for the next several years I would bring in children who were diagnosed with autism, he would feel their pulse to determine the underlying causes and early on he developed a protocol for them to follow and eventually got all the herbs from India that we needed to make the formulas for these children.
Later in this discussion I will show you our approach, but let’s first learn some basic facts about autism — what’s causing it, why the cases are at epidemic levels now while they were much lower, almost non-existent before 1990, and what we need to do about it. I will present the latest research from all of the great medical institutions here in the United States and show you how we would treat everything using our Ayurvedic perspective, which dovetails well with what the research is showing.
So let’s start at the very beginning. Autism is a devastating condition that affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others. Symptoms appear during the early childhood years and can be mild to severe, creating what is known as the autistic spectrum.
Autism can affect children of all ages and presents with lack of spoken language. Sometimes the child just stops talking after they have been talking for some time or some children never put words together in the first place. Or there could be repetitive words or motor mannerisms such as head shaking, twirling, etc.
There is little or no eye contact with others, fixation on objects or parts of objects, lack of make- believe play and little or no interest in peer relationships.
The history of autism shows that it was extremely rare in previous years. When I first opened my practice in the early 1980’s I was told that I would probably see about one case of autism in the entire history of my career. This was true in the early years as I had never seen a case or known anyone with autism. But by 1990 the rates of autism began skyrocketing and children with autism started streaming in my office almost every week.
At first, not much research was done on autism because it was so rare. But then there was an 8-fold increase in autistic cases beginning in 1990 and the rates have continued to rise to the point where they are now affecting 1 in 59 children in the United States, according to the CDC.
So what is responsible for this huge increase in the rates of autism? As of now, researchers are looking at genetic causes, and have come up with some possible ideas. But if it were just from genetic causes then the rates wouldn’t have suddenly skyrocketed in 1990. We’ll discuss this a little later.
So here’s what the researchers know so far. They are mapping the brain with two diagnostic tools: magnetoencephalography (MEG) and functional MRI (fMRI). With MEG technology, sensors are put on the head and magnetic fields are being read by a machine as the patient is asked to do different things, such as lift a finger, imagine something, talk, etc.
The functional MRI measures and maps the brain activity and blood flow changes when the patient is asked to do certain things, such as tapping their fingers, listening to someone speak, for example, so they can pinpoint areas of the brain connected with autistic behaviors.
Here is some of what they found: First they discovered with is called synaptic dysfunction in the autistic brain. A synapse is the tiny junction between 2 neurons or brain cells consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass. Our billions of brain cells communicate with each other every second of every day as messages are transported continually across these gaps.
With very serious brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, ALS, and Parkinson’s Disease, the brain degenerates causing people to lose many of the synaptic brain connections. You can see this on an MRI — it actually looks like the brain has shrunken down dramatically in size.
HOWEVER…a major brain tissue study performed by neuroscientists at Columbia University Medical Center in 2014 made a shocking discovery: THE AUTISTIC CHILDREN DID NOT HAVE A LOSS OF BRAIN SYNAPSES!!! THEY HAD TOO MANY BRAIN SYNAPSES!!!
The autistic brain can thus be overloaded and overstimulated by too many brain synapses firing all day long. It’s like trying to understand 10 people talking to you at the same time, creating a brain overload. This explains why these children shun people and noise in general — it’s like a cacophony of noise that is just too much for them to process.
What then causes this problem with too many synapses? Let’s look a little further:
When babies are born they possess all of the brain cells (neurons) that they will ever have throughout their whole life. But babies aren’t born with the brain connections, or the synapses.
The brain cells are all there but the connections haven’t been made yet. All babies go from no synapses at birth to trillions of synaptic connections the first year of their life. By age 6 months lots of synapses are made. But by age 2 the baby’s brain ends up making TOO MANY SYNAPTIC CONNECTIONS!
So why do babies make more connections than they need? Researchers don’t really know. But after a baby’s brain makes all these massive connections in their first two years of life, the excess unwanted synapses start to die off! This is called Synaptic Pruning — much like a bush that needs to be pruned. So from age 2 to 20 the human brain will actually prune about 50% of the excess synapses that were formed in the baby’s first years of life.
This is our brain’s way of getting rid of too many synapses leading to overstimulation. But researchers discovered that the brains of children with autism did not undergo normal pruning during childhood and adolescence. So the autistic brain kept the majority of the unwanted and unnecessary synaptic connections, which can lead to autistic behaviors.
Researchers found a genetic abnormality can cause an overproduction of a compound called mTOR. mTOR blocks normal synaptic pruning, so the more mTOR a person has, the less synaptic pruning is able to occur. The more synapses a child has, the more overloaded their brain can become.
So the next questions if, is there anything that can inhibit mTOR so the brain can prune in the way that it needs to? A 2019 study reported that an antioxidant known as Sulforaphane inhibits mTOR. This is a sulfur compound found in only one classification of food known as cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts and radishes. These are the only foods on earth which contain sulforaphane. All these vegetables contain varying amounts of sulforaphane, but broccoli has by far the most compared to the other vegetables.
Sulforaphane crosses the blood-brain barrier thus it has the potential to heal right at the source of the brain-pruning probe by suppressing the mTOR.
This pruning problem is not the only cause of synaptic malfunctioning in the brain. Independent studies by Yale, UCLA and Johns Hopkins have all found yet another common genetic abnormality linked to autism. This affects genes that produce a protein called CNTNAP2. CNTNAP2 is a protein that causes dysfunctional synaptic misfiring when it is defective, kind of like a radio that is tuned to the wrong station and you’re just hearing static. Coupled with too many brain synapses would be like multiple radios all tuned to the wrong station creating static.
Now, in some autistic cases, there is a decrease in autistic symptoms when the child has a high fever. For many years parents have reported that their child’s autism dramatically improved during a high fever. At first it was considered only anecdotal evidence, then in 2007 researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health published in the journal Pediatrics that in many cases a fever episode can in fact significantly improve the signs and symptoms of autism.
When the fever goes away, the signs and symptoms return. However, it is not sustainable to have a high fever one’s entire life just so the symptoms of autism go away. So for the past decade researchers have been studying why the signs and symptoms of autism go away dramatically during a high fever. Year after year and study after study researchers could not figure out why so many cases of autism improve during a high fever.
Then in 2014 the researchers from Johns Hopkins and Massachusetts General Hospital finally unlocked the fever mystery. They found that it’s not the actual fever that lessens the symptoms, but the way our body protects our brain fro the fever.
When a child gets a fever the internal thermostat ramps way up to kill the pathogens their body is fighting. But the body innately knows that if a fever gets too high it can damage the brain, so special proteins are released inside the brain to protect it from fever damage.
These special brain proteins are called Heat Shock Proteins and their job is to protect our brain fro heat shock caused by a high fever. So during a fever you have an extra rush of heat shock proteins which protect the brain. They found out that they also help to make the synaptic brain connections work much better, which helps the autistic symptoms go away. But then the symptoms come back once the fever goes away.
So now the question is: is there anything that has the potential to activate Heat Shock Proteins but without needing to have a high fever? And the answer is: Sulforaphane, the same antioxidant found in cruciferous vegetables.
A study done in 2014, the first of it kind, randomized, double blind, placebo controlled clinical trial took a group of patients with moderate to severe autism and gave half of them sulforaphane from broccoli and the other half took a placebo. The symptoms improved dramatically in the patients who took the sulforaphane.
Another study was then performed to show if broccoli and other vegetables should be given. Supplement companies have made sulforaphane, but a 2006 study tested the supplements and found that the sulforaphane could not be detected in any of the supplements tested. So it is important to give your child the actual broccoli — organic, without the 50 pesticides which are usually sprayed on it.
While eating broccoli to get this important antioxidant, it is important to remember that other factors come into play here, or else everyone would be cured of autism by just eating more broccoli.
Oxidative stress in the brain is another issue: free radicals in the brain cause oxidation which is defined as an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants which can result in cellular damage, known as oxidative damage..
Neurons in the brain are extremely sensitive to attacks by destructive free radicals. Oxidative damage can cause chronic inflammation. In the brain tissue of patients with autism you will find high levels of inflammation in their brains. Spinal taps have found up to 200 times the levels of inflammatory-causing compounds.
Here’s the problem: our brain is a free radical factory. More free radicals are produced in our brain than anywhere else in our body. It’s the mitochondria which produces the free radicals. Mitochondria provide energy and nothing requires more energy resources than our brain. And the free radicals are formed from the normal functioning of the mitochondria.
So if there are lots of free radicals being produced at all times by the mitochondria and the brain is loaded with free radicals, why don’t we all have autism?
The answer is simple: It’s because of the antioxidants! Antioxidants protect our tissues, cells and DNA from damage caused by free radicals. Here’s how it works: a stable atom has two electrons. But a free radical has only one electron, so it steals an electron from the stable atom which creates oxidation, or oxidative stress. Antioxidants have spare electrons so they can donate one to the free radicals thus quenching it without harming any of our atoms.
Now this is very important: The main antioxidant that protects our brain from free radicals and known as the “Mother of All Antioxidants,” is called glutathione. In the non-autistic brain glutathione is able to clear free radicals out of the brain before they have a chance to cause problems. In an autistic brain, however, there is now evidence that the child may have chronically low levels of glutathione.
Oxidative stress tends to occur in the brain regions that are involved in speech and auditory processing, social behavior, memory and sensory and motor coordination.
Why would a child have chronically low levels of glutathione? The answer should be obvious: from over-exposure to chemicals which themselves cause free radicals combined with a diet lacking in antioxidants. This combination wipes out whatever glutathione the child may have.
This is what Vaidya and I found in the pulses of all the children we saw. Vaidya always told me that the amounts of toxins a four-year-old had in their pulse would have normally taken about 70 years to accumulate.
On top of that we found out that many of the autistic children we had treated had genetic problems, such as MTHFR, Glutathione-S-transferase gene, reducedOF-carrier transcobalamin II, catechol-0-methyltransferase. These genes protect our brain from oxidative stress. A child with these genetic issues can have lower levels of glutathione and higher amounts of free radicals as a result.
We quickly realized that a perfect storm had developed: the child was given way too many pharmaceuticals in the early years in the form of vaccines, steroids, asthma medications, antibiotics, and acid reflux medicines combined with a diet of foods lacking good antioxidants producing low levels of antioxidants and high levels of free radicals in their brains. And later when we finally had a chance to test their DNA, we saw that just about all of them had one or more of the genetic defects previously described, which prevented them from making glutathione in the first place.
In addition, in the early 1980’s researchers found that aluminum, found in underarm deodorants, aluminum pots and pans, and certain brands of antacids, was a potent neurotoxin. Much research since then has been done on this very fact. So since then everyone stopped using those products, but unfortunately aluminum is now found in most of the childhood vaccines.
Another mystery was why did the rate of autism skyrocket after 1989? One factor most people point to is that the vaccine schedule shot up from 11 shots per child to over 70 shots starting in 1989, flooding the child’s brain with tons of chemicals and heavy metals previous generations had never been exposed to.
Once Vaidya Mishra analyzed all the autistic children he immediately went to work, making formulas to fix the genetic pathways in the liver that were down in the children — these herbs can actually allow the liver to make more glutathione again. He even developed transdermal glutathione and brought in all the herbs fro India to heal the brain: herbs for speech delays, herbs that wake up the brain and herbs that calm down a hyperactive brain. He developed anti-inflammatory transdermal creams to put right on the areas where the nerves exit the spine, and also made formulas to chelate the heavy metals out of the brain. We also experimented with different yogurt starters and probiotic cultures to provide the best possible probiotics for the children, since the probiotic cultures in the gut make the vast majority of the neurotransmitters for the brain.
All the pharmaceuticals I just mentioned: the vaccines, antibiotics, steroids, antacid medications and asthma medications destroy this friendly bacteria. Don’t forget the important of the friendly bacteria as they have been described as the “brain of the brain.” For good reason.
He also cooked many of the brain herbs in ghee since the fat in the ghee delivers those herbs directly into the brain, across the blood-brain barrier. We also instruct the parents how to feed their children healthy wholesome diets filled with lots of antioxidant-rich foods.
So you can see how modern research is now able to determine the underlying causes of autism. The best answer is to prevent it in the first pace. I sincerely hope that in the future doctors will test all newborn babies to see if they have any of these gene abnormalities which would increase their likelihood of becoming autistic. And if they do demonstrate these genetic defects, then they should decrease the vaccination schedule, eliminating the vaccines for the mild childhood diseases and spacing out the very important ones, which will prevent an onslaught of free radical formation which comes from giving too many shots at once. And parents, always be mindful of the fact that you must replenish the friendly bacteria in the gut after taking vaccines, antibiotics or any other medication that might deplete them.
I hope you find this information useful as you attempt to heal your child from autism or to help you prevent your child from getting autism in the first place.