Aspergers and high copper levels

Post Reply New Topic

I don't recall ever having my Copper levels check, but I went to donate blood recently and the screening Nurse told me my Iron levels were dangerously high and encouraged to look into that immediately. Works out great to be donating because it lowers those levels over time but interesting nonetheless.

So ... if I have an important mathematics test, suck on a penny?

Thanks for that link, WelcomeTo Holland, it's a very good one. I remember reading about it in Nature, because it led me to a very interesting fact that was strikingly novel at the time, and it's a timely reminder for the purposes of this thread too, and one I omitted to mention before:

Clonazepam (aka Klonopin) works for ASD anxiety et al only in SMALL doses for people on the spectrum

- another reason why it is important that doctors don't prescribe to us as if we were neurotypicals. Yet they do; and it is not helping...

It's not quite clear why but larger doses don't work for us, though the benefit of that is that effective dosages for our purposes are well below addictive levels (It's a common and natural enough assumption that if something is good then more of it must be better, though the opposite is true in terms of using Clonazepam to quell autism-related anxiety).

In my own case the low dose was confirmed, the most effective dose of Clonazepam was tiny: 0.25mg per day. Quite a lot of studies advocate taking GABA in any form with the agonist Taurine (an amino acid) - which I have tried, though there was no noticeable outward effect, positive or negative from the combination, though Taurine may assist uptake of GABA in the brain. In these minute doses, I have found Clonazepam without any side effects at all, though with benzodiazepines, it pays to proceed cautiously and experiment carefully to tweak the lowest effective dose to your own needs.

I really get your comment (and exasperation) about symptoms simplistically being attributed to autism - as if that were a total explanation instead of a circularity. What use is that?? It is only useful once - for example if you didn't know that anxiety is very predominant for people on the spectrum; simply knowing that doesn't explain the big picture of why anxiety is so prevalent, how it manifests, what helps etc. Knowledge, cause, effect, treatment are not the same thing, as we know, yet you get this kind of circular thinking pushed at you particularly as a parent of ASD children.

An example we had in my family is that my grandson's thinking is profoundly visual, though the doctors missed this altogether in his infancy and attributed his difficulties in learning some things such as toilet-training as "due to his autism". What use was that? But a physiotherapist realised within minutes of meeting him that he needed to process instructions visually, and was a very quick learner once this happened.

The thing that an ASD child crucially needs, as much as love, is an informed parent like you WTH; it makes so much difference to their quality of life and progress.

B19, you may already be aware of this, but one aspect that often gets left out of conversations around efficacy of supplements is the distinction between natural and synthetic.

One place where evidence of a distinction has been found is with synthetic vitamin C:

That's a very good point and thank you for making it.

I use SOLGAR brand products generally which are said to be the "Gold Standard" and personally I have found them to be excellent. They have been in business since 1947 (born the same year as me!). They are not the cheapest, though in this field as in many others, you tend to "get what you pay for" and the good ones cost more. Solgar will have a home page for sure that is readily accessible and in NZ they have a free number you can use to ask them whatever about their products and they tend to send free samples too, so that you can try before you buy.

It is probably the same for the American branch of Solgar?

There may be other excellent brands and sources that others can post here too

I've used Solgar in the past and am familiar with their good reputation. You can usually tell from the label what form the vitamin is in. Solgar's B6 is in the form of Pyroxidine HCl, so as best as I can determine, their B6 is a synthetic form of B6. So if it doesn't work, don't blame B6 itself.

It may just be that you need real B6. And it wouldn't surprise me if the synthetic form created reactions for some people, since it isn't naturally-occurring.

What I've found is food-source products will often list the food source on the label, as here: http://tinyurl.com/plmm7uf

Or they may list the name of the naturally-occurring vitamin instead of the synthetic form, as here: http://tinyurl.com/knc3mm8

Synthetic is just so much cheaper, that unless there's a real ethical commitment from the company leadership, most profit-driven companies will opt for synthetic.

And the difference isn't like a person can just pick one or the other based on preference and cost. I've come across several articles indicating problems and even toxicity associated with synthetics. So not only are they not helping, they may be actively harming:

I was curious as to how vitamins are synthesized:


HOW VITAMINS ARE SYNTHESISED
The precise details of how many vitamins are synthesised is a closed trade secret. However, in a number of cases, it is via an enzyme-assisted bacterial fermentation process. Unlike humans, bacteria make their own vitamins, and - to put the process simply - by growing bacteria on a substrate that is missing the vitamin you want, you can get the bug to produce it for you. Other vitamins are produced chemically, via a set of reactions from a starter ingredient which itself may be extracted from a food.

Minerals are inorganic substances and therefore cannot be manufactured. They are part of the earth’s crust, and we obtain them in our diets either from plants that have assimilated minerals from the soil (e.g. calcium in spinach), or from eating the animals that have consumed the plants (e.g. iron in liver).
Supplements provide minerals that have ultimately come directly from the ground. But to facilitate their absorption, these inorganic minerals may be bound to organic matter, e.g., yeast or amino acids.
References
Human Nutrition and Dietetics, Garrow and James. (9th Edition, 1993, Churchill Livingstone

Hey B19, ever since I heard that some vitamins were produced from coal tar, I've wanted to see exactly how the process takes place. Not sure if it's a trade secret or what, but it doesn't get talked about in ways that get widely publicized.

And the more I look into this, the worse it gets:

So what would be your preferred way to supplement the Vitamin B Complex?