09 Nov 2009, 7:31 pm
09 Nov 2009, 9:03 pm
First let me get this out of the way WOOOOT! 
As far as what to do now I'm the wrong parent to answer this as Jake has never realy spoken over a few words here and there and when my older son started speaking after not for a year his trouble was with letter blends ect. Someone here is sure to have walked in those shoes and can help you better then I can.
10 Nov 2009, 5:24 am
My probably AS/PDD son, now 10 years old, had speech difficulties. He barely spoke until he was four, nearly five, and when he did he was unintelligible/incomprehensible to almost everyone. Even when he started to produce more well-formed sounds/words he still spoke in telegraphese, and we went to two different speech therapists, over a few months, who came up with nothing better than "We can't say what the problem is because he won't speak", 
this despite the fact that he had talked, volubly if in telegraphese, about dinosaurs, ( his special interest at the time ), with one of them on the one occasion that he was allowed/encouraged to talk about something other than their card systems, etc.
We gave up on professional help at this point, and decided to just trust that he would learn. And he has. His delivery is still rather unusual, heavy, and/or too accentuated, and not entirely idiomatic, but it is "fluent", and he has a huge vocabulary.
The biggest most dramatic improvement happened when he started reading, aged 7 and a half, ( I had "trusted" there too, putting no pressure on him, apart from the occasional anxious meltdown about it that is!! ! 
) , going from looking at pictures in comic books ( Tintin, Smurfs, and Asterix, etc ), to reading almost anything. He is now a very fast reader, and has swallowed Harry Potter, "The Lord of the Rings", "Kim" by Kipling, and the first half of "David Copperfield" among many other books.
As soon as he started reading it was as if he suddenly started getting the data he needed to structure and complete his speech.
His speech development pathway simply didn't "match" the standardised one they expect in schools etc. And, probably luckily, he didn't go to school. He has homeschooled almost all the time.
He is celiac, and has been gluten-free since about two years old. I am gluten-intolerant, ( I soon become severely depressed, anxious, overwhelmed, manic/alienated, etc, and experience poor sleep, fatigue/lethargy, brain-fog, etc when I eat gluten, and sugar ), and I have generally paid quite a bit of attention to our diet, though not always in the most well-informed way. I discovered recently that perhaps I could have done something about his speech delay with diet:
"Scientists Characterizes New Syndrome Of Allergy, Apraxia, Malabsorption":
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 104002.htm
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 071309.php
The new study, led by Children's Hospital & Research Center Oakland scientist and pediatric emergency medicine physician, Claudia Morris, MD, and Marilyn C. Agin, MD, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician at Saint Vincent Medical Center in New York, however, suggests that the symptoms of verbal apraxia are, at least for a sub-group of children, part of a larger, multifactorial, neurologic syndrome involving food allergies/gluten-sensitivity and nutritional malabsorption.
...In the study, Dr. Morris collected information from nearly 200 families with children who suffered from verbal apraxia in order to better characterize the symptoms and metabolic anomalies of a subset of children. The data clearly demonstrated a common cluster of allergy, apraxia and malabsorption, along with low muscle tone, poor coordination and sensory integration abnormalities. In addition, Dr. Morris was able to gather laboratory analyses in 26 of the children, which revealed low carnitine levels, abnormal celiac panels, gluten sensitivity, and vitamin D deficiency among others. ...
...All children genetically screened carried an HLA gene associated with gluten sensitivity and celiac disease. "The sample size is still small and should be interpreted with caution," says Dr. Morris. "However this is of particular interest given the recent publication by Eaton and colleagues in the July 6 online edition of Pediatrics demonstrating a greater than 3-fold risk of autism in children born to mothers diagnosed with celiac disease. This brings some credibility to the anecdotal reports of gastrointestinal and behavioral improvements in children with autism spectrum disorders and/or verbal apraxia when eliminating gluten from their diets. Although the implications of these observations remain to be determined, this association and the utility of dietary modifications warrant further investigation, particularly if we can identify a genetically vulnerable group". ...
Most significantly, the data indicate that the neurologic dysfunction represented in the syndrome overlaps the symptoms of vitamin E deficiency. While low vitamin E bioavailability may occur due to a variety of different causes, neurological consequences are similar, regardless of the initiating trigger. The study suggests that vitamin E could be used as a safe nutritional intervention that may benefit some children. Growing evidence support the benefits of omega 3 fatty acid supplementation in a number of neurodevelopmental disorders. Anecdotally children with verbal apraxia will often demonstrate leaps in their speech production when taking high-quality fish oil. The addition of vitamin E to omega 3 fatty acid supplementation in this cohort of children induced benefits that exceeded those expected from just speech therapy alone, according to parental report. ...
She points out that it is equally important for children given an apraxia diagnosis to receive a more comprehensive metabolic evaluation than what is current practice. Many of the nutritional deficiencies like low carnitine, zinc and vitamin D are easily treated. By not addressing the nutritional deficiencies, the child will continue to suffer from significant medical consequences of those deficiencies. The first step is to identify and treat the deficiencies. The next step is to try to figure out why they have these deficiencies and a fat malabsorption syndrome in the first place.
.
11 Nov 2009, 6:35 am
11 Nov 2009, 6:43 am
My son is once again homeschooling, after trying school this year for three and a half weeks. He has almost always homeschooled. Autonomous learning style!
( "radical unschooling" as it is also apparently known )
.
