Friday, January 21, 2011

Summary of Dominic since Jan 2010 Neurologist Appt (aka my note to the doctor)

ABA Therapy
Dominic has done 15hrs a week of ABA at Alpine Autism Center the entire year, Except June and July when he did 30 per week. Additionally he’s had a 1 on 1 para in D11 since August and they are working off the ABBLS curriculum for another 10hrs per week.

GI
When we saw you last, Dominic’s gut was still shredded by H1N1. It took us until June to get it healed up to the point that he was not having diarrhea daily, and what finally did the trick was the Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy we started mid-May. His gut has been stable since, we’ve even had to add prunes off and on due to constipation.

Immune system

Seems to be much more stable than in the past. We are seeing him get mild colds where we will be knocked on our backs for a week. His gut is not reacting at all to immune challenges. We are not seeing speech regression with illness either.

Behaviors
Have varied throughout the year, had a couple of flares related to springtime allergies and a major yeast flare in the fall. He is having minimal behavioral issues currently. See graph on next page.

Speech
Making steady positive progress. We’re to the point where we’re able to work on some pronunciation now as well. We’re seeing regular use of 3 word sentences, with lots of single word vocabulary growth. Please see speech graphs below. We are not currently seeing a private speech therapist, just one at D11.

OT
We stopped private OT in August when we started school back up because Dominic was just so tired after being at D11 in the morning and Alpine in the afternoon that he would not focus. We’ve had the school and Alpine continue his OT exercises.


Best interventions of 2010

HBOT –

We starting mild chamber hyperbaric oxygen therapy (1.3 ATA) in early May and saw immediate, huge gains in his speech. Please see monthly averages of his speech from Alpine (this is based upon 3 hrs of therapy per day). We noticed a huge increase in night sweats initially with HBOT (presumably from the resulting detox) that we added in infrared sauna treatments right before the HBOT session to encourage additional detox. We no longer see night sweats, but still do the sauna/HBOT combination. Not sure what he detoxed out, but it was intense for a few months. We’ve completed around 130 dives and are getting ready to go into maintenance mode (once a week)


Quericitin / Neuroprotek
(Neuroprotek includes Quercitin with a couple of other anti inflammatories). Both of these are TNF-alpha inhibitors, and we’re seeing really nice shifts in behavior, focus, and speech with them.

Speech Charts



And a new category... Average number of behaviors tracked each day by Alpine...

2 comments:

Biffy said...

oh this is so great, at least I think I'm reading it right, so much improvement! Congrats to all your hard work mama...

fullsoulahead.com said...

Glad he is doing so well! I admire your organization and record keeping!