La nutrición: una estrategia de intervención en el niño autista

Abstract

Autism is a generalized disorder of the child´s development. Starting early in the child’s life, autism is one of the most serious disorders of development, behaviour and communication, with neuropathological, neurophysiological, neurochemical and genetic foundations, among others. The autistic syndrome is a disorder especially refractory to both psycho-educational and biological treatments, thus making the autistic patient the subject of every kind of intervention, some of them without enough scientific support. Will be the gluten- and caseine-free diets one of them? Several lines of research can lead us to the role of the function of the opioid systems in the development of social behaviour. According to these theories, autism presents early in childhood because of an overload of the Central Nervous System with opioid peptides, affecting brain neurotransmitters. These
peptides are probably of exogenous source, and derived in part from the incomplet digestion of gluten and casein.
Favourable changes can be observed in those autistic children in whom certain gluten- and casein-containing foods has been removed from their diets, and the intake of sugars and some industrial products with chemical substances added has been reduced. In contrast with these observations, those autistics who have not sticked to such a diet, maintain their behavioural and comprehension disorders. What’s the bottomline? That there certain foods which might contain opoid peptides as intermediate products capable of reaching the brain and become active in cases of alterations of the intestinal permeability, thus leading
some authors to proppose that hypendorphinic action might be regulated by means of dietetic restrictions. So, what is the solution? I think there is a challenge for professionals in the field of Nutrition and Neurosciences to find new perspectives and answers to the questions that still existing in this matter