ond this study would have to be done before scientists and doctors could know whether a BDNF-related drug could have a therapeutic effect for patients with Christianson syndrome or any related form of autism.
"We don't think that this is everything about the condition," Morrow said. "But if we were able to treat this one mechanism by adding exogenous drug, would it repair enough or some element of it?"
Christianson syndrome and perhaps only a subset of autism appears to relate to deficits in neural branching. Some forms of autism, in fact, may result from too much branch growth. Moreover, doctors have no precise ways to tell whether a child diagnosed with autism has too much or too little neural branching.
But given the study results suggesting that NHE6 may play a role in some autism forms perhaps by hindering neural branching, the new research suggests a target for addressing it.
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