When Natalie and her wife, Stephanie, got the diagnosis that their older son was on the autism spectrum, the doctor also told them the boy might benefit from Prozac when he got a little older.
They were taken aback and decided to look for help that didn’t include prescription drugs.
They soon found out about Brain Balance Achievement Centers, a company with franchises across the country, that says it has helped roughly 25,000 children without the use of drugs.
"We were very excited," Stephanie told NPR’s Chris Benderev. "Maybe we found a solution that wasn't going to be about medicine. I was very, very hopeful."
An NPR investigation of Brain Balance reveals a company whose promises have resonated with parents averse to medication. But Brain Balance also appears to have overstated the scientific evidence in its messaging to families, who can easily spend over $10,000 in six months, a common length of enrollment.
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Scientists using genetic data to look for differences between healthy brain tissue and brain tissue from people who died with Alzheimer's disease found something unexpected.
The team kept finding hints that brain tissue from Alzheimer's patients contained higher levels of viruses.
"When we started analyzing the differences, it just sort of came screaming out at us from the data," Icahn School of Medicine researcher Joel Dudley told NPR’s Jon Hamilton.
The finding adds credence to a decades-old idea that an infection can cause Alzheimer's disease.
It also suggests that it may be possible to prevent or slow Alzheimer's using antiviral drugs, or drugs that modulate how immune cells in the brain respond to an infection.
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Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently visited a shelter in Texas' Rio Grande Valley that housed some of the young children separated from their parents after unlawfully entering the country.
"We normally see kids who are toddlers [are] rambunctious and are running around and laughing and playing, and you didn't see that there,” she told All Things Considered's Audie Cornish. "What we saw were a number of little kids keeping pretty quiet to themselves, some of them playing with toys, and one little girl in the center of the room who was sobbing and wailing and crying."
It's normal for children to experience some daily stress and, when buffered by the presence of their parents or family members, it is how they learn to develop healthy stress response systems.
But Kraft said that little girl was inconsolable.
"We all knew what the problem was,” Kraft said. “We all knew that this little child needed her mother, and none of us could give that to her."
Your Shots editor, Scott Hensley
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