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There was an article in the latest issue of Discover magazine about how
researchers have been finding things out that support the idea there's a
connection between autism and the immune system.  The article mentions
gluten/dairy free diet as helpful but the research they're talking about
is more on autism and the immune system in general.  They say there's
evidence of chronic inflammation in the brain in autistic children - 
Pardo, Annals of Neurology 2005, that autistic children had an abnormal
profile of cytokines (cytokines are messenger molecules in the immune
system), and a reduction in immunoglobulins - Pessah.  Also a long
article by Martha Herbert in Clinical Neuropsychiatry.  They said 
allergies are common among autistic people. 
It's interesting to me because research seems to be finally validating 
some of the success people have with diet and autism.  Not that I have a
connection with autism - I went crazy as a teenager but not since then,
but after that there was a quasi-hallucinatory aspect to my vision, 
which I didn't realize (thinking of it as "being an artist"> until it
went away after I found my food intolerances, to gluten/dairy and some
other foods.  So I'm sure there is a lot waiting to be discovered about
gluten-brain connection.
Autism happens to children, and their parents can control their food 
intake.  But schizophrenia happens to young adults, less taken care of 
than children - and a lot of chronic schizophrenics are too scattered or
too addicted to gluten to do all the enormous work that a gluten-free diet
and finding other food intolerances, etc. requires.  I used to have a
keyboard-pal, who I never met personally - after a while I realized she
was chronically somewhat schizophrenic.  I was convinced she ought to try
an elimination diet or Enterolab, but she didn't want to.  But she was
very scattered, she seemed to believe whatever suited her needs at the 
time, not much reality-checking.  I don't know if she could have gotten 
herself to read food labels carefully enough to follow a gf diet.
And I knew a guy who'd been very schizophrenic, slowly recovered.  I kept
on telling him he needed to find out if he was gluten intolerant.  He
got celiac blood tests and they came back positive.  But he didn't go on
a gf diet, he was unbelievably, mind-bogglingly casual about something
that had likely fucked up his whole life, trying vaguely to cut down on 
gluten.  One could blame the doctor perhaps and the whole war-vet system
he was in, for not drumming the necessity of being really gluten-free
into him.
All three of these people - me, my keyboard pal, the schizo guy, also had
really bad inhalant allergies, to grass pollen among other things.  I
had 53 inhalant allergies when I got tested last spring.  It
seems that some people are crazy because of immune system problems.

Laura

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