Autism risk in very young babies may be detected in brain fluid

It may be possible to predict autism in infants as young as 6 months who have older siblings with the disorder, according to a new study.

Parents of children with autism take note. It may be possible to predict autism in infants as young as 6 months who have older siblings with the disorder, according to a new study by a national network of researchers.

Infants in such families are at increased risk of developing autism, which is typically diagnosed when a child is 2- to 3-years-old and develops symptoms such as challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, delayed speech or nonverbal communication.

Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging — or MRI — to scan the brains of 343 infants when they were 6 months, 12 months and 24 months old. The scans showed that 70 percent of toddlers diagnosed with autism at age 2 had an elevated amount of cerebrospinal fluid around their brains at 6 and 12 months, compared to toddlers who were not diagnosed with autism. Cerebrospinal fluid is a clear, colorless liquid that bathes the brain and spine.

This excess fluid "could possibly be an early biological marker for autism," said Mark Shen, the lead author of the article, published in Biological Psychiatry, and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina's Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities. Additional studies are needed to confirm the finding, he said.

Such a marker would allow doctors to identify infants at high risk of developing autism before symptoms are present.

"The earlier we can get biological markers for autism, the earlier intervention can be initiated, and the greater the chance of better outcomes, " said David Kennedy, Ph.D., co-director of the Child and Adolescent NeuroDevelopment Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Typically, therapists work with children and parents to improve eye contact, social interactions and communication skills.

The study results are "very exciting," said Dr. Adriania Di Martino, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Medical School. Excess brain fluid may be more than an early marker for autism, Di Martino said. It may also be a mechanism in the development of autism, and it opens up new possibilities for research, she said. "You can start thinking about conditions that might lead to increased cerebrospinal fluid."

Shen and his colleagues are already looking for genes associated with excess brain fluid. Normally, the liquid, refreshed four times a day, washes away byproducts that build up in the brain. But if the fluid is not flowing properly, these byproducts hang around and cause inflammation, which could "hamper brain development" and lead to autism, said Shen.

Completely different mechanisms may be at work for kids without an older sibling with autism, said Shen and Dimartino. More studies are needed, they said.

Parents with children with autism should not rush to their pediatrician demanding brain MRIs for younger siblings, Shen said.

"We wouldn't recommend that every high-risk infant get an MRI until we know that the accuracy can be improved closer to the 90 percent range" from the current 70 percent, Shen told TODAY.

He and his colleagues are working on improving accuracy by combining their brain fluid findings with other recent research. In addition to flushing out the brain's garbage, brain fluid also delivers signals to the brain that tell it how and when to grow. In a study published last month in Nature, 80 percent of infants diagnosed with autism as toddlers had an increased rate of growth in the surface area of their brains in their first year, compared to toddlers who were not diagnosed with autism.

"We're going to combine those two markers to see if we can improve the prediction closer to the 90 percent range, where it could be really clinically useful," said Shen.

About 1 in 68 children develop autism in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, But as many as 20 out of 100 infants with an older sibling with autism will develop the disorder, said Di Martino.

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Indian villagers are drinking cow urine to cure acne In Hindu culture, the cow is a sacred animal, and many of its followers believe any cow byproduct has healing properties.

Don't knock it until you try it?

The men in the Indian village of Udaipur drink and bathe in cow urine to cure their acne, which doesn’t sound like a legit skin-saving solution to us . . . but only because we haven’t tried it.

In Hindu culture, the cow is a sacred animal, and many of its followers believe any cow byproduct has healing properties.

That’s why lots of guys in Udaipur swear by the urine to not just get rid of pimples, but also eliminate all health problems, according to a report in The Daily Mail.

One man, Hemant Paliwal, has guzzled a warm glass of cow urine every day for the last 4 years, and regularly takes pee baths with his buddies.

“I was suffering from acute lung diseases and would catch a cough and cold regularly,” Paliwal told The Daily Mail. “I even had acne and pimples on my skin, but once I started applying urine, my face was crystal clear in just a week. Since then, there hasn’t been a single day when I haven’t drunk cow urine.”

Hey, everyone needs a morning routine.

Another guy, Yogesh Paliwal—it’s unclear if they’re related, or if everyone in Udaipur has the same last name—told The Daily Mail that women in the village also subscribe to cow urine’s powers, but threw some serious shade at the fairer sex.

“Many girls in the village are curing their acne with cow urine but they won’t admit it,” Paliwal said.

Believe it or not, more than 40 percent of twenty-something guys still suffer from acne, according to a study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. So if you’re still popping zits as a grown-ass man, here are 5 Ways to Treat Your Acne that don’t involve holding your nose while taking a swig of cow piss.

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The science behind why only one nostril clogs when you’re sick Ever wonder why it seems like one nostril feels way more clogged than the other?

Your nose is smarter than you think.

Being stuffed up sucks. Ever wonder why it seems like one nostril feels way more clogged than the other? It’s not just your imagination: There’s a scientific reason behind it.

Credit a physiological response called the nasal cycle, a process where your nostrils take turns sucking in more air, says Rachel Roditi, M.D., a surgeon in the division of otolaryngology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Find out why your nostrils play tag team—and what you can do when one side’s all jammed up.

Why One Nostril Gets More Congested

Structures in both sides of your nose called inferior turbinates are responsible for warming and humidifying air before it reaches your lungs, says Dr. Roditi. This protects your lungs by reducing dryness and irritation. That process is a lot of work. So your nose funnels its resources more to one side than the other to make the process more efficient.

It sends more blood flow to one nostril, which warms the air coming in through there, but also causes the turbinate on that side to swell.

That swelling means there’s less room for air to make its way in. It’s pretty subtle, though - unless you have a cold, infection, allergies, or a structural problem like a deviated septum, you probably won’t notice it going on.

But when you are sick, blood flow to your nose increases even more, sparking more swelling and greater mucus production in your nasal region, says Dr. Roditi.

Even though you’re congested throughout your entire nose, you feel it more strongly in the one nostril where the turbinate is already swollen as part of the normal nasal cycle.

How to Treat Your Congestion

There’s really nothing you can do to shut off the nasal cycle, says Dr. Roditi.

It’s likely that one nostril will always feel more stuffed up than the other when you’re sick.

Still, after about 90 minutes to 4 hours, your nose switches sides. When that occurs, you’ll probably feel some relief when the swelling in the one nostril goes down - but then the other side will start to feel clogged instead.

Your best bet is to work on easing the congestion overall. Steam from a hot shower or humidifier can help open the floodgates, says Dr. Roditi. And saline nasal sprays can help flush out mucus, too.

Consider topical nasal congestion sprays with oxymetazoline, like Afrin which constricts blood vessels - more of a last resort, says Jonathan A. Bernstein, M.D., an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Asthma. “These sprays can cause rebound congestion,” he says. That means your nose becomes addicted to them, and relies on them to open up.

If you must use them, stick to two puffs a day for no more than five to seven days, he says.

If your stuffed-up symptoms persist beyond 10 to 14 days, or you notice nasal congestion at times other than when you’re sick, check in with your doctor to make sure that something bigger - like a deviated septum - isn’t at play, says Dr. Roditi.

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Before Vaquitas Vanish, a Desperate Bid to Save Them

No more than 30 vaquitas are left in Mexico’s Gulf of California.
Experts propose keeping some in captivity as a last resort.

A vaquita that was caught in a gillnet in the Gulf of California. The vaquita are simply bycatch, trapped and drowned in curtains of illegal gillnets set for an endangered fish called the totoaba. Credit Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures

SAN FELIPE, Mexico — In the shallow sea waters of the Gulf of California swims a porpoise that few have seen, its numbers dwindling so fast that its very existence is now in peril.

Known mostly by its Spanish name, the snub-nosed vaquita is the world’s smallest cetacean, a miniature porpoise with a cartoonlike features and dark smudges around its eyes. The species lives only in the fertile waters of the gulf’s northern corner.

The size of its population has always been precarious, but now voracious demand in China for a fish that shares the vaquita’s only habitat has pushed the tiny porpoise to the brink of extinction.

No more than 30 vaquitas are left, according to a November estimate based on monitoring of their echolocation clicks. Half of the vaquitas counted a year earlier have disappeared.

This calamity has hardly gone unnoticed. The vaquita has been vanishing in plain sight, to the despair of conservationists who have been advising the Mexican government on how to save it. All of the resources brought to bear, including the protection of the Mexican Navy, have proved to be no match against the illegal wildlife trade.

“If we continue on the path we’re on, we’ll have no vaquitas in two years,” said Barbara Taylor, a marine mammal expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The vaquita are simply bycatch, trapped and drowned in curtains of illegal gillnets set for an endangered fish called the totoaba. The fish’s swim bladder is dried and smuggled to China, where wealthy diners pay thousands of dollars for the delicacy, believing it to have medicinal powers.

Vaquitas in the Gulf of California. No more than 30 vaquitas are left, according to a November estimate based on monitoring of their echolocation clicks. Credit Paula Olson/NOAA

To feed that appetite, totoaba poachers have killed 90 percent of the vaquita population since 2011, according to the acoustic monitoring program led by Armando Jaramillo Legorreta at the Mexican government’s National Ecology and Climate Change Institute, known as INECC.

With so few vaquitas left, experts advising the Mexican government have proposed capturing several specimens and holding them in a sea pen as a way of conserving the species until the threat to its habitat is removed. It’s a last-ditch measure that conservationists had hoped they would never have to resort to.

“We had always been opposed to captivity,” said Lorenzo Rojas Bracho, a marine mammal expert at INECC and the chairman of an advisory group, the International Committee for Vaquita Recovery. But nobody expected that the population would decline so quickly.

“There are risks,” Dr. Rojas Bracho said of the capture plan. “But they are fewer than leaving them with the fishing as it is.”

The plan would entail training United States Navy dolphins to locate vaquitas, capturing them for transfer to a temporary pool and then to a sea pen to be built in their habitat along the Gulf of California coast. The majority of vaquitas would remain in the wild.

But the unknowns loom large. “We don’t know whether they find them,” Dr. Taylor said of the dolphins. “We don’t know whether we can catch them. We don’t know how they will react.”

“If you get a negative result in any one of these steps,” she added, “it’s basically game over” for the capture plan. Even in the best of scenarios, breeding in captivity is unlikely to restore the population. A female vaquita gives birth to one calf every two years on average.

If the proposal goes forward, the vaquita would join other species at the brink of extinction — like the California condor and the golden lion tamarin, in Brazil — that are being closely managed in some form distinct from their natural setting. It would be the first such effort for a marine mammal.

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