Slide 76:

Now, this a 7 year-old boy who started with me late 1995/early 1996. Again, I want to bring out the timeline here. He had a history of pneumonia as a child, frequent ear infections, high fever. By the second year of life he had no real speech, no specific words. This mother said she was worried from the very beginning. Many of you have come to me and said, ‘my child wasn’t quite right from the beginning’. The key is that many children are different. As a pediatrician I can tell you that within the same family healthy children have different personalities. But, on the other hand, I believe that some of these children are being hit by a virus fairly early. What was important here was that the mother had been told by good pediatric neurologists, good developmental pediatricians, that there was nothing wrong with her child. That’s part of what you’re looking for; that the child does not fit into a given, known, developmental disorder.

So, when I met him, I got a NeuroSPECT scan. It showed temporal hypoperfusion. We had a significant finding here of low natural killer cells and, in this case, an interferon alpha that many researchers will say is unbelievably high above 500. This child’s was 1612. That is one of your cytokines, but it is a very clean marker to say that there is a virus in the background. He also had a borderline HHV6 titer. And interestingly, he had positive Coxsackie B3 and B4 titers.

Now there is a very interesting story there. In adults with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, this country has focused on the idea of herpes-related viruses. And the reason for that is that we know that herpes viruses can live in your body for a long time and can create some of these low grade infections. Cold sores are herpes when they reactivate. Vaginal sores are herpes. And, we have focused on discussions of Epstein-Barr, CMV, HHV6. The British, interestingly enough, focus on what they call the Coxsackie-Echo viruses, and they see them causing the same type of herpes-like syndromes in that population. So again, we can argue; is it going to be a herpes virus, is it going to be a coxsackie virus, is it going to be a retro-virus? These are areas we need to research. The key is that we need to help your children now with the knowledge we have while we accelerate the research to define those specific answers.

img076.JPG (89595 bytes)

First Previous Next Last Index Home Text

Slide 76 of 88