A New Theory About Developmental Problems In Kids

Why Do Some Kids Develop Autism, Other Severe Developmental Problems, or Mental Health Challenges?

Understanding Neuro-Inflammation. We’ve been covering some concepts for Dr. Datis Kharrazian’s Neuro-inflammatory Course where he covered some of the latest research on neurological disorders that were occurring due to this process and what to do about it.

In the first post, I covered the basic ideas about neuro-inflammation, things that can cause the problem, or make it worse.

In the second post, we discussed the brain’s immune system, inflammation, and introduced what can be a devastating problem, ‘priming.’

This fascinating research describes what happens in an unborn child when the pregnant mother has some major stressor such as the ones mentioned in the bullet list here.

A 2016 paper described glial activation (called priming), the second hit (the next challenges you have after the initial priming), and mental illness.

Conclusions Directly From The Paper…

“There is consistent evidence that a range of psychosocial stressors lead to elevated microglial activity in the hippocampus and good evidence that this is also the case in other brain regions.

These effects were seen with early-life/prenatal stress, as well as stressors in adulthood. We consider these findings in terms of the two-hit hypothesis, which proposes that early-life stress primes microglia, leading to a potentiated response to subsequent stress.

The implications for understanding the pathoaetiology of mental disorders and the development of new treatments are also considered.”

Stress and neuroinflammation: a systematic review of the effects of stress on microglia and the implications for mental illness. Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2016; 233: 1637–1650. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4828495/

This maternal stressor pre-wires the unborn child’s immune system in the brain so that the cells change both shape and function permanently.

Even more frightening is that the child is now going to have a much stronger immune reaction to their physical or mental stressors.

This could be the reason some kids develop autism and other developmental delays even though the child appeared normal at birth… they had a primed immune system in the brain.

This is a potential cause of many other neurological problems in kids (and adults) ranging from some types of headaches to ADHD, sensorimotor integration problems, brain fog, fatigue, and a lot more.

It could possibly cause so many different symptoms because of course our brain is where we feel symptoms and it controls everything. The area attacked would determine the symptoms or problems.

An area of a ‘primed‘ brain immune system is also a suggested mechanism to how some kids suddenly go from apparently fine with no outward symptoms to autistic after receiving a medication, gets an infection, or after some major stressor to their immune system.

Importantly, some of the stressors can also be dietary and other lifestyle factors.

So there are many different possible causes of the ‘2nd hit‘ to a primed immune system and not just one thing. This makes finding causes of these problems in research very tricky.

The idea in this research reported above is that the stressor causes the brain’s primed innate immune system to go into attack mode destroying neurons in an area. There are also likely many other factors occurring including a breached blood-brain barrier.