http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs...9907210337

Look familiar? Manuel F. Casanova is a registered member of AFF.

I'll point everyone's attention to the final line of the article. Good ND PR imho.

?lysDexia

Who'd 'ave think it?

It's so awesome we have someone here, who's so influential in the medical/psychiatric world!

Wait a minute...

He's wanting to cure autism and dyslexia with magnets?

He says that autistic brains and dyslexic brains have opposite structures.  Isn't dyslexia a comorbid of autism and Asperger's?

His sample is ridiculously small -- he only examined 15 dyslexic brains.

Excuse me while I go fetch a grain of salt...

More rTMS stuff?

Bit of a mixed message there - "they just have different cognitive styles, so we need to keep fighting". Fighting what precisely?

rTMS is the closest thing modern technology has to the ability to actually put your hand into someone's head and rewire the brain.

Low frequency TMS can affect GABA interneurons in the cortex, essentially aiding in rewiring the excitatory cells the interneurons moderate. It also has no additional risks of increasing seizures, like high frequency TMS can do.

"Magnets" sounds odd to most people. But when you consider that many forms of energy are electromagnetic it makes perfect sense. And conduction in neurons is electrical.

With the whole ND/cure approach, he's attempting to tread a very fine line between not pissing off parent groups (which he needs in order to get funding, get participants, etc.) and helping to begin to promote the "cognitive style" idea amongst the professional community.

It sounds contradictory, but it's a brazen concept to the pathologically-minded research community. So rather than hit them over the head with the ND-brick, he's taking a more subtle approach.

Ah, forgot to discuss autism v. dyslexia and autism + dyslexia, but I'm running out of time this morning so I'll have to come back later for that...

I like the avatar there Sophist. Any reqason you cose that image? I always see the young woman. I can only see the old woman if I go looking for it.

If magnets had any effect I should be free of everything. I work with NMR (+1Telsa) on a routine basis. Somehow I just don't believe magnets, if they work, which I seriously doubt, has much more than a tempory effect. I certainly don't feel any different while loading the thing or operating it. 400MgHz is the usual frequency used in NMR by the way.

They do only have a temporary effect with limited uses. However, if you do enough treatments over a period of time, the brain will begin to rewire. I won't use the word "permanent" because so few connections within the inner and outer radiate white matter of the cortex could be considered truly permanent. But it's the whole idea that use drives connectivity. Essentially, the rTMS would be causing the focal area to be excited in a different way, driving a change in connectivity. The brain, afterall, is meant to be adaptable, particularly the connectivity within the neocortex.

And just working with magnets would likely have a negligible effect on you. TMS uses a very high-powered, very focused magnet at close range.

When it comes down to it, rTMS has the potential to decrease sensory discomfort, aspects of anxiety, etc. All the stuff we auties tend to complain about no matter how pro-ND we are. And it has none of the side effects you see in medications. It's not the perfect treatment, granted, due to the number of treatments needed, the fact you can't just pop an rTMS in your mouth daily and have done with it, and the potential impermanence of the treatment. However, considering this appears to be the ONLY treatment that brings some relief to deficits/discomforts even pro-ND auties are prone to complain about while not affecting any of our abilities that we cherish and make us positively unique, I don't know how much more an ND-activist could ask for.

The rTMS trials are going well so far. To the point that families are asking for continuation of rTMS even after the trial is over. And it doesn't appear to sedate and mask problems, but that it actually treats some of the sensory and anxiety issues at their root.

I don't know about anyone else here, but growing up I certainly could've used a reduction in my sensory issues...

PS- This is one of my older avatars, but my original training was in Psych (hence the gestalt image) despite that I'm now in neuroanatomy.

Very true. And we're actually coming out with a paper soon which will be addressing this apparent contradiction. In essence, it proposes that the dyslexia seen within autism and typical developmental dyslexia, while having similar deficits in reading, actually have different underlying causes. So that neuroanatomical opposites can potentially have identical behavioral effects. It all has to do with signal-to-noise ratios, in that the signal in autism tends to be considerably increased, while in typical dyslexia it's significantly reduced. However, both HIGH signal and very LOW signal can cause a disruption in reading. Therefore, inverse neuroanatomies/connectivities can produce identical behavioral output.

Very true, although more studies are getting underway. And with the original small sample, multiple studies have been performed on them looking at various aspects of connectivity, utilizing cell staining, larger volumetric measurements, gyrification, corpus callosal size, volumetric measurements of the outer radiate and commissural white matter tracts, and computer modeling. All aspects of these studies continue to support the original hypothesis. So of course only time and more research will tell whether the theory is a sound one, but it looks exceedingly promising.

Sorry, I had to laugh at that one Next time I'm at some neuroscience seminar where they talk about TMS (which is actually quiet big at my department at uni, but I personally don't know too much about it), I'm going to ask So you want to cure ____ with magnets? It's funny because it's such a huge simplification, but true at the same time. Kind of like 'Our thoughts are made of electricity!' totally brushes over how brain cells communicate with each other.

Anyway, electric fields (pardon me if I'm a bit wrong here, my physics is rather weak) run at right angles to magnetic fields, and I think changing one changes the other or something. If you try to stimulate the brain directly with an electric current, the scalp and skull absorbs the current. But if you put a strong magnet at right angle to the head, you can stimulate that brain easier, removing the need to have to cut the person's head open. Well then I guess what he wants to do is cure autism and dyslexia by making brain cells fire (neurons and glia).

In the world of neuroscience, that's not small. Average sample sizes are from 8-12 per group. Depends on what the statisticians work out how many subjects are needed for statistical significance. But if this was a clinical trial, which it isn't, yes, 15 would be ridiculously small.

It's not the actual magnet doing the 'curing', it's the magnets being used to stimulate the brain directly. And in the case of studies using rTMS, stimulating the same region of the brain repeatedly. The magnets you use probably don't even go near your brain (don't know for sure )

I lol'd.

I don't think pissing off parents or whatever is an issue, but looking for cures probably gets more attention/grants, etc. I guess the best way to spin it is as a treatment for specific symptoms. That's what I plan to do when looking at oxytocin. I also want to learn about how social cognition works in general and its endocrine influences, and autistics have a different type of social cognition I can look at.

I'm interested in neuromodulators like oxytocin for their potential excitatory effects, albeit indirect ones.

Oh dear! I can hear LiliMarlene's patter of tiny sharp feet coming right atcha!!!!

Is she fond of oxytocin? LOL