I remember reading about autistic kids having more harmful bacteria in their gut compared with non autistic kids.
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Professor Gibson told the annual British Association Festival of Science in Norwich that autistic children often suffered with bowel problems such as diarrhoea and constipation, suggesting that they may not have a normal collection of microbes in their guts.
His team compared the bacteria in faeces samples taken from 50 autistic children with those taken from 50 non-autistic subjects, and found that the samples from autistic children had raised levels of the bacterium clostridium.
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AutismConnect - British study links autism to gut bacteria
Quote:
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Clostridium tetani is an ubiquitous anaerobic bacillus that produces a potent neurotoxin. Intestinal colonization by C. tetani, and subsequent neurotoxin release, have been demonstrated in laboratory animals which were fed vegetative cells. The vagus nerve is capable of transporting tetanus neurotoxin (TeNT) and provides a route of ascent from the intestinal tract to the CNS. This route bypasses TeNT's normal preferential binding sites in the spinal cord, and therefore the symptoms of a typical tetanus infection are not evident. Once in the brain, TeNT disrupts the release of neurotransmitters by the proteolytic cleavage of synaptobrevin, a synaptic vesicle membrane protein. This inhibition of neurotransmitter release would explain a wide variety of behavioral deficits apparent in autism.
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Entrez PubMed
