Probiotics: Healing the Mind
Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride knows about children’s health from
personal experience. Her son was diagnosed autistic when he was three.
At three and a half, he started a program of treatment. Now 15, he
attends a mainstream school.
“I remember that traumatic moment of the diagnosis ‘Autism’, being
announced to us by our doctor followed by a statement 'There is
nothing that can be done', says Natasha. “Well, being a doctor myself,
I have to say ‘Your doctor is wrong! There is a lot that can be
done’.”
Natasha and her partner Peter were founding members of PEACH (Parents
for the Early intervention of Autism in Children). PEACH is a parent-
led group helping parents of children with autism Intensive Behavioral
Intervention Program. Also known as ABA, this approach is based on
highly personalized, one-to-one coaching that teaches children
language, play, academic, intellectual, self-help and social skills.
An ABA program can sometimes achieve miracles, but Natasha’s research
and experience has shown her that it is still not enough.
“Looking back now, nobody could predict that a little boy without any
language, constantly self stimulating, eating very little apart from
milk from a baby bottle could undergo such a transformation. On the
whole what happened to him can only be described as a miracle.
However, his achievements are not due solely to the ABA program", says
Natasha.
“A huge part of his transformation was in his nutritional management.
Being trained as a medical doctor I knew that conventional medicine
has nothing to offer children like my son. So I went backto university
and trained as a nutritionist. We have changed his diet and after
trying various nutritional supplements we have found the ones that
work. An autistic child needs a very special nutritional management, a
major part of it being – putting his gut flora right! Gut flora is a
living organism very sensitive to the diet, antibiotics, steroids and
stress.
“Diet on its own is a very powerful tool in helping an autistic child.
But it cannot solve all the problems without nutritional supplements.
In order to rebalance the gut flora it is essential to use a strong
multi-strain probiotic.
“He showed an excellent response to probiotics. From about two to
three months after starting it we saw dramatic improvements in our son
– his eye contact became normal and stable, the self-stimulation had
almost disappeared, he generally became more aware and with us.
Everybody comments on how healthy he looks. He used to be on a milk-
free diet. We introduced some milk products back into his diet and
found that he tolerates it now without any symptoms.“
As a result of their experience, Peter heads up Cambridge
Bioceuticals, a UK company founded by a team of doctors, nutritionists
and scientists dedicated to advancing the research and use of
probiotics. And he has become one of many children able to be helped
by a combination of treatments with one thing in common – the use of
powerful, multi-strain therapeutic probiotics.
“More than 400 children have gone through my clinic“, says Natasha.
“Hyperactive children, children with dyslexia and asthma and eczema
and ADHD and other disabilities, and what I see is that what we have
in our society is an epidemic of compromised gut flora.“
As a result, she says, we also have an epidemic of poor health in
children. “We hardly have any healthy children nowadays. One survey
showed that only 10% of school children did not have a diagnosed
condition. If you look at a typical school, you hardly see any healthy
children. Some are obese, some look malnourished, a lot of them are
very pale, a lot of them have eczema, a lot of them have asthma. About
30% of them are on inhalers. The situation is very sad.“
Recent international studies have suggested a relatively strong causal
relationship between increased risk of childhood asthma and exposure
to antibiotics during childhood, especially during the first year of
life.
Prof Julian Crane of Otago University has commented: “Our paper,
together with a study published …in Thorax (Farooqi IS, et al. Thorax
1998;53:927-32), raises the possibility that broad-spectrum
antibiotics, particularly in the first year of life, may be associated
with an increased risk of atopy and asthma. For reasons that have been
pointed out in both papers, these results cannot be taken as
definitive, but rather as hypothesis-raising.
“On the other hand, the results are plausible. Broad-spectrum
antibiotics came into clinical usage in the 1960s, and their increased
use coincides with the time trends for the increasing prevalence of
asthma. There is a plausible mechanism, namely that broad-spectrum
antibiotics may alter and reduce bowel flora and thus switch off the
immunological signals that these gut bacteria send to the developing
immune system.“ (1) Crane has also showed, with a study of 450
children at six Steiner schools in New Zealand, that even with•
parents opposed to the routine use of antibiotics, a staggering 75% of
the children had used antibiotics, 36% in the first year of life!
Autism is also exploding. “In this country one child in 250 is
diagnosed as autistic, when 10 years ago we had one child in 10,000“,
says Natasha. This is nothing to do with improvements or changes in
diagnosis, she says. “The medical establishment and the government are
trying to present it that way. But what that would mean is that 10
years ago doctors were so bad at diagnosing our children that they
were missing one child in 250. But autism is not a disability that
goes away as the child grows up. If they had missed one child in 250
10 years ago, then we would still only have one in 250 teenagers with
autism now, which we don’t. Everybody who knows and works with autism
is convinced that there is an epidemic going on.“
Although various causative factors have been promoted, Natasha is
convinced that disturbed gut flora is at the root of it. She has a
well-worked out chain of events that even explains how a compromised
flora – and all that goes with it – has been passed on through the
generations. Unless it is corrected, future generations are doomed to
an ever-increasing level of ill-health, with potentially no one safe
from a cycle of infections, allergies, arthritis, digestive disorders,
atopy and, for some, hyperactivity, ADHD and autism. I asked her to
explain this devastating theory; she started with the basics.
“We really started prescribing antibiotics for everything and anything
in the ‘70s and ‘80s“, she says. “That’s when we started to get
generations of people with compromised gut flora. Antibiotics wipe out
the beneficial bacteria as well as the pathogenic bacteria. Remember,
our beneficial bacteria are very vulnerable to antibiotics and get
wiped out very quickly. If the course of antibiotics is short and the
person has a fairly solid gut flora, then it usually recovers. But if
antibiotics are repeated quite often, and particularly when people are
prescribed long courses – such as when people with acne are put on
tetracycline for 2 years or so – they invariably finish up with
digestive disorders like IBS, because their gut flora gets wiped up.
When the beneficial bacteria are not there, then all sorts of
pathogens and opportunists get a chance to grow to occupy the gut and
to populate it. They start digesting food in their own way, breaking
it down into inappropriate substances. And they also damage the gut
lining, making the gut leaky and allowing this mal digested food to
get absorbed. The immune system reacts to this mal digested food as
foreign substances and hence you get allergies.“
Now maybe it’s just the fashion, but everybody you meet these days
says they have some sort of allergy. It’s either hay fever or
permanently runny nose or skin rashes or food intolerances.
Practitioners may distinguish between true allergies and “mere“
intolerances or sensitivities, but the public doesn’t. To them,
there’s not doubt whatsoever that there’s an epidemic of allergies
too.
“Allergies usually happen when the immune system gets out of balance“,
says Natasha. “The major balancing agent of the immune system in the
body is the gut with its gut flora. The flora can literally be
described as the right hand of our immune system. But when the
beneficial gut flora is not there, the two major arms of immunity, TH1
immunity and TH2, get out of balance. [*types of helper cells: current
wisdom is that TH2 cells stimulate production of IgE, the master of
allergic reactions, while Tl cells inhibit].
The end result of abnormal gut flora is a weakening of the TH1 arm;
the TH2 gets over-active, and that’s the arm of the immunity that’s
responsible for allergic type reactions, atopic type reactions. So
instead of reacting to the environment stimuli in a normal, natural
way, people start reacting in an allergic type of way.
“The gut flora’s really a huge, huge agent. On average everyone
carries two kilograms of bacteria in their gut. There are more cells
there than there are in an entire human body. We can’t live without
this mass of bacteria and it’s a highly organized microbial world,
dominated by beneficial bacteria.
“What I am seeing now are generations of people in this country with
compromised gut flora – because I don’t just examine the child, I get
a full medical history of the parents and the grandparents.
“A grandmother, for example, perhaps has arthritis, which is another
sign of toxicity in the body. When opportunists and pathogenic
bacteria occupy the gut, they produce a lot of toxic substances. These
toxic substances seep through into the bloodstream and settle in
different tissues of the body causing an auto-immune attack on those
tissues as the immune system tries to clean the body up. So someone
with arthritis usually has some abnormalities with the gut flora; they
are being poisoned by their own gut. There is a certain level of
toxicity in the body, which has particular design to settle in the
joints. So the grandmother will have arthritis, or rheumatoid
arthritis, or allergies or digestive disorders.
“A baby is born with a sterile gut and as the baby goes throughout the
birth canal at birth, it swallows its first batches of bacteria. So a
major part of the gut flora which would populate the virgin gut of the
baby, comes from the mother. So this grandmother gives her compromised
gut flora to her daughter. So now the daughter will be prone to PMS
perhaps, to migraines, to digestive disorders – that’s what I see in
mothers of autistic children. Between 95-100% of mothers of children
with autism, hyperactivity, asthma, eczema and other problems, also
have conditions that are related to abnormal gut flora. I hardly ever
see healthy mothers.
“What happens is that she initially inherited the compromised gut
flora from her mum, but she grows up and at the age of 15 or 16, she
goes on a contraceptive pill. Many mothers use an oral contraceptive
for quite a few years before they’re ready to have children. The
contraceptive pill is a steroid and that damages the gut flora even
further. It has a devastating effect on the gut flora.
So by the time this woman is ready to have children her gut flora is
seriously compromised and that’s what she passes to her child.
“Because the gut flora is the major part of the immune system, when
children are born with compromised gut flora they are left immune-
compromised as well. With autistic children and hyperactive children,
we see that in the first year of life and second year of life they’re
very prone to infections, to ear infections in particular, and a lot
of chest infections as well. They quite often go through one ear
infection after another and eventually they are put on permanent
antibiotics, which would wipe out whatever precious little beneficial
bacteria they got in there.
“If you thought that grandmother’s breast-feeding may have gone some
way to repairing this damage, think again.
“Breast-feeding is the best thing to establish normal gut flora. But
breast milk is a two-sided coin. On one hand it’s the best food for
the baby, because children who are not breast-fed develop completely
different gut flora from those who are. And that sort of gut flora
predisposes them later to all sorts of health problems. So breast-
feeding is best. On the other hand, a woman whose gut is populated by
abnormal flora will have toxins from that gut flora in her blood. And
whatever’s in her blood is likely to be in her breast-milk. So she
will be passing toxins through her breast-milk to her baby.
“A lot of these children have low stomach acidity. So when they start
solids at the age of six months, they usually can’t digest them –
particularly dairy milk proteins. This results in toxicity coming from
pathogens such as the clostridia and candida families, which grow in
abnormal gut environment producing particular kind of toxins that
reduce the ability of the stomach to produce acids.“
Vaccinations
Then we have to stir in vaccinations – another assault on the immune
system. “Vaccinations are designed for healthy immune systems. But
children who are born to mothers with compromised gut flora are
already immune-compromised. They can’t take these vaccines. They
cannot react to them the way they are supposed to. Vaccines deepen the
damage to the immune system in these children. Indeed in certain cases
MMR just tips the scale. In some children it’s not MMR that tips the
scale it’s DPT, the triple vaccine which is given to children at a
very early age – at 1.5 months, 2.5 and 3.5 months. This vaccine also
contains thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative, which is in
most DPT vaccinations.“
Because of all these factors, a baby is not going to develop normal
gut flora. If the normal bacteria are not there, then the coast is
clear for all sorts of pathogens to take hold. On top of that, says
Natasha, because the normal gut flora plays a huge role in digestion
and absorption of food, these children go on to develop multiple
nutritional deficiencies. “In parallel, the pathogenic flora convert
the food into a whole host of toxic substances. A lot of these toxins
have been well-studied and you can test for them. They have been found
routinely in autistic children and in hyperactive children.
“Some of these toxins are well-known to CAM practitioners, such as the
acetaldehyde produced by yeasts acting on sugars, and the ethanol that
results from that when candida species get going. Others are less
familiar, but can be found in the medical literature. Clostridium, for
example, one of the opportunistic pathogens unleashed by antibiotics
is known to produce a potent tetanus neurotoxin, which has been
identified as a possible cause of autism in some case. (2) The
suggestion is that this neurotoxin can be transported along the vagus
nerve from the intestinal tract to the central nervous system and into
the brain, disrupting the release of neurotransmitters. Another form
of clostridium produces a botulinic neurotoxin, says Natasha.
Other researchers believe that sulphate-reducing bacteria in a
disturbed gut flora may explain why around 95% of autistic children
have low serum sulphate – about 15% of that found in controls (3). The
resulting reduced sulphation not only increases gut permeability and
inflammation but may also inactive neurotransmitters involved in the
modulation of mood and behavior. The sulphate research trail was kick-
started by the observations of the UK self-help group Allergy Induced
Autism. AIA encouraged Dr Rosemary Waring of Birmingham University,
whose pioneering research proved that autistic children have problems
with detoxification, so that certain foods and used neuro-transmitters
are not processed effectively. (4)
One of the most significant findings is that opportunistic fungi in
the gut can produce opiate-like substances. Dr Alan Friedman, PhD, a
Johnson & Johnson researcher with an interest in autism, has found
dermorphin and deltorphin in the urine of autistic children (5). As
Reading university’s Dr Max Bingham, PhD, comments, these compounds
are “many times more potent than morphine“ and had previously only
been found on the skin of “poison dart frogs“ and traditionally used
as arrow-tip poisons and hallucinogens.
There is already a well-established “opioid theory of autism“, in
which researchers have confirmed that children with autism had many
abnormal peptides (small pieces of partially broken down proteins) in
their urine. These included casomorphine and gliadomorphin. These
peptides are the breakdown products of casein and gluten, giving a
sound biochemical basis for a successful dietary intervention first
investigated in Norway and then replicated at the university of
Sunderland’s Autism Research Unit by Dr Paul Shattock and colleagues
(6). Opiates and the gluten/casein sensitivity turn autism into a
living nightmare for the afflicted children. “These opiates absorb
very well, cross the blood-brain barrier and then block the brain in
certain areas“, says Natasha. “These children have got normal eyes,
normal ears, normal tactile sensitivity, but their brains cannot
process the information. So the result is that children don’t hear,
don’t see and don’t feel the same way we do. The whole sensory input
gets jumbled up in their heads. They don’t develop speech because they
don’t hear properly. The speech that is addressed to them from their
parents, from their careers, is jumbled in their heads. They can’t
make sense out of it. The highly functioning autistic individual they
say that quite often they can see one half of the page and can’t see
the other. They can hear certain vowels and they can’t hear others.
They can hear certain frequencies but not others.
One child, for example, could clearly hear his mother’s voice, but not
his father’s. The same happens with children with dyslexia; that’s why
they can’t read, because their visual areas of the brain are blocked
with toxicity.“ And this all comes from the gut. Just like the nature
cure pioneers always maintained: your gut can poison you. The good
news is that the gut can be helped back into balance and the research•
clearly supports dietary intervention. – autism is NOT all in the
mind.
“Diet is a huge part of the treatment for these children“, says
Natasha. “They need the kind of diet that heals the digestive tract,
stops it leaking and establishes the normal gut flora.“ Natasha
employs the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, a strict grain-free, lactose-
free and sucrose-free meal plan that limits the particular
carbohydrates needed by harmful yeasts and bacteria. (See panel.) Only
mono sugars are allowed: fructose, galactose and some others found in
fresh vegetables, fresh fruit and honey.
The original diet was developed in the 1950s by Drs Sidney and Merrill
Haas to cure patients with coeliac disease and was first published in
the Haas’s book The Management of Celiac Disease in 1951. It has since
been championed by biochemist and cell biologist Elaine Gottschall,
MS, author of Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health through
Diet (first published in 1987 and still in print). Gottschall’s eight-
year-old daughter, diagnosed by specialists with incurable ulcerative
colitis and with a deteriorating condition, was symptom-free in two
years after following the Haas instructions. With more than 40 years
experience of the diet, Gottschall says; “Some of the most dramatic
and fastest recoveries have occurred in babies and young children with
severe constipation and among children who, along with intestinal
problems, had serious behavior. problems. These included autistic-type
hyperactivity as well as hyperactivity, often accompanied by severe
and prolonged night terrors. Very often the behavior. problems and
night terrors cleared up within ten days after initiation of the Haas
Specific Carbohydrate Diet.“ (7)
Natasha says, “Autistic disorder is essentially a digestive disorder.
So once you put the digestive tract right, you lay the ground for
recovery.“
Dr Andrew Wakefield is the internationally respected
gastroenterologist who was researching Crohn’s and Ulcerative colitis
when he found a type of inflammatory bowel disease in autistic
children who had received the MMR vaccine. He was sacked when he
published his findings in the Lancet. Wakefield has written: “I sit
across from you as the parent and you say: 'this is what happened to
my child, they were developing normally, they had speech, language,
social skills, they received their MMR vaccine and they developed
bowel symptoms and their behavior. deteriorated, I lost them, the
light went out'. You listen to that story, you don't buy into it, but
you say: 'is there anything I can do to substantiate this in my job as
a physician?' You investigate the symptoms and you find that there is
an inflammatory bowel disease that has gone unrecognized in these
children . So the parents were right“. (
According to Natasha, before Wakefield started investigating, the
medical profession didn’t want to know about digestive abnormalities
in autistic children. “How many autistic children that I see have
digestive abnormalities!“ she says. “All parents talk about it. They
have diarrhea, constipation, flatulence, pain, bloating, the whole
picture. So the occasional child who actually made it to
gastroenterologist and whose gut has been x-rayed, invariably showed
faecal compaction. Old compacted rotten faeces glued to the walls of
their gut.
“Wakefield was the first gastroenterologist to seriously look at it;
he found the same thing – an autistic child’s gut is chock a block. He
also found inflammation, which in some features was similar to
ulcerative colitis, in others was similar to Crohn’s disease and
others were unique to autistic children. He found abscesses filled
with pus. He found ulcers, he found compaction, he found erosions, he
found the whole length was inflamed. And because these children cannot
communicate, they cannot tell you that they’re in pain, cannot tell
you that their tummy is hurting, the parents don’t know about it. But
many do go to doctors and say ‘My child has diarrhea’, ‘My child has
constipation’. Some of these children have horrendous constipation.
They don’t go to the toilet for a week to ten days and then they have
an enormous, extremely painful hard stool, which cracks their anus and
the anus bleeds. This sort of experience is very painful for the
child, so they end up holding on for as long as they can, until they
just can’t hold any longer – and they have another hard stool.“
Remember, these are children who are also unable to communicate to
their parents and care givers the pain they are in.
Along with diet, Natasha says supplementation is very important.
Probiotics are the absolute foundation – but they must be the right
sort. And that means a multi-strain product containing soil bacteria,
not just lactobacilli and bifidobacteria. These are what she calls
“therapeutic“ probiotics as opposed to the milder, prophylactic
products. “You need soil bacteria to break down the putrefaction and
clear out the pathogenic flora because they are aggressive, they
actually use them in industry because they have great ability to clear
out putrefied waste. They work in a clinical setting far more
effectively.“
Even so, a child is typically kept on the strict diet and taking
probiotics for at least two years. “Nothing works that fast in
nature“, she says. The good news is that autistic children are born
with normal brains and recovery is possible. “The majority of them are
developing normally until the scales are tipped and toxicity starts
affecting their brain development. It usually happens in the second
year of life. If you catch them early and you teach them
appropriately, they become perfectly normal, they finish up in
mainstream schools. Obviously they’re all different, some of them
would have some idiosyncrasies, or they’ll be a little bit eccentric,
but they’re within normal range.“
Apart from fish oils, she doesn’t include many other supplements. “I
do believe in providing most things through the diet with children.
Once the diet is put right, the gut starts healing and the child
starts absorbing nutrients from food.“
Similarly, she finds that once the gut flora is right a lot of food
intolerances disappear and the major source of toxicity is removed,
easing the load on the liver and detoxification systems. However, some
children will need to be actively detoxified using combinations of
juices. “We all have a so-called detoxification system. When the
system is overloaded with toxicity, overloaded with work“, she
explains, “then the more you store it in various tissues in order to
deal with it later. But in children which are highly toxic, autistic
children, the time never comes for the toxins which are stored in
tissues.“ They also tend to store a lot of heavy metals – even so, she
prefers the gentle effectiveness of juices to chelation. "The child
has a couple of 8oz glasses a day of freshly pressed juice.
Therapeutic kinds of juices are generally vegetable juices,
particularly green juices, which taste ghastly! So I suggest 50% of
something tasty, like pineapple or orange or apple or mango, to
disguise the taste of the other 50%. Of that about 40% will be carrot
juice, 10% beetroot. You have to be careful with beetroot because it
is extremely powerful and can really make you sick. So other juices we
use are celery, lettuce and then greens like spinach, parsley, dill,
fresh nettles, dandelion leaves, those sort of things."
The children use the juices while on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.
The only other thing they drink is water – un chlorinated, bottled or
filtered, and lots of it.
To check progress, Natasha may use a Great Smokies stool test. "It is
useful when we have been through the intial stages of the programme
and if we are struggling with something and what to know what's going
on. I don't do the test before we have done the intial baseline
treatment."
The only other test she is liable to use is the organic acid test
(OAT) developed by Dr William Shaw of the Great Plains Laboratory. A
non-invasive urine test, it measures around 70 different biochemical
compounds, picking up abnormal urinary metabolites that are the
"signatures" that can reveal what specific overgrowth a child has. It
also reveals some nutritional deficiencies. We'll give Shaw the last
word: "The last half of this century could be termed the era of
antibiotics.
The next century will be involved in developing new antimicrobial
treatments (probiotics or beneficial bacteria) or other therapies that
have less potential for harming young children. Pasteur and others
found that lethal strains of bacteria could be rendered harmless if
animals were given other benign bacteria simultaneously." (9)
· Dr Campbell-McBride holds a Degree in Medicine and a Postgraduate
Degree in Neurology. She also holds a second Postgraduate Degree in
Human Nutrition from Sheffield University. In her Cambridge Clinic she
specialises in Nutrition for Children with Learning Disabilities, and
Adults with Digestive and Immune System Disorders. She lectures at a
BANT-accredited conference
in London on October 9.
· Cambridge Bioceuticals Probiotics site:www.bio-kult.com Includes
case histories and other articles by Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride.
· Reprinted from CAM Magazine August 2003.
References
1. Wickens K, Pearce N, Crane J, Beasley R. Antibiotic use in early
childhood and the development of asthma. Clin Exp Allergy
1999;29:766-771. Crane quoted at
www.chiroweb.com/archives/17/17/01.html
2. Bolte ER, (1998). Autism and Clostridium tetani. Medical
Hypotheses 51(2): 133-144.
3. Waring (2001). Sulphate, sulphation and gut permeability: are
cytokines involved? In: The Biology of Autism – Unravelled.
Conference proceedings 11th May 2001, Institute of Electrical
Engineers, Savoy Place, London.
4. Alberti A, Pirrone P, Elia M, Waring RH, Romano C.Sulphation
deficit in "low-functioning" autistic children: a pilot study. Biol
Psychiatry 1999 Aug 1;46(3):420-4
5. Unpublished research reported in Autism and the Human Gut
Microflora, by Dr Max Bingham, PhD, Food Microbial Sciences
Unit, University of Reading, accessed online at
www.fst.rdg.ac.uk/research/fmsu/Autism.htm6. Shattock P and
Whiteley P. (2001) How dietary intervention could ameliorate the
symptoms of autism. Pharmaceutical Journal, July 7; 267(7155).
7. From chapter one of Breaking the Vicious Cycle, accessed
online at
http://66.40.242.169/chap1.html
8. "Why I Owe It To Parents To Question Triple Vaccine", Andrew
Wakefield explains why he first warned of a possible link between
the MMR jab and autism, Sunday Herald (Scotland), 10 Feb 2002.
Accessed online at
http://www.sundayherald.com/22194
9. Interview with Dr William Shaw about microbial metabolites in
autism and other developmental disorders, accessed online at
www.autism.com/shaw-yeast/interv.html
http://www.guthealth.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=1
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