Case study of an eight-year-old boy diagnosed with autism and some sort of eczema undiagnosed. His mother requested organic acid test from Great Plains lab. I don’t have any experience from working with this kind of test.

We didn’t cover organic acids in detail except for the markers related to dysbiosis in this course, but we will be covering this in the future of course.

“He has high lactic metabolites at 203, high quinolinate at 240, high quinolinate to 5-HIAA ratio at 185, very low vitamin C at zero, high 2-hydroxybutyric acid at 3.2.”

That’s not super revealing. Usually with kids on the spectrum when we run that test, what we see is a lot of fungal overgrowth, mold, yeast kind of markers. We see oxalic acid high, which is often caused by the fungal overgrowth. We see significant dysbiosis, often presence of Clostridium​ species, and all of this together usually increases. It can decrease the conversion of dopamine to epinephrine and norepinephrine, and then that can cause a lot of the telltale signs and symptoms of autism spectrum and other behavioral disorders. The vitamin C is often really low on the Great Plains lab test. Their explanation for that is that in a lot of patients, even with adequate vitamin C intake, if they are under any kind of oxidative stress, the demand is really high, so that’s what this marker is measuring. Even though they have an adequate C through biosupplementation or diet, they’re just not getting enough for what they need. I think maybe that’s true. It’s plausible in some cases, but I also question the accuracy of this particular assay for vitamin C because I’ve had people taking 3 or 4 grams or more of vitamin C that show up as being low with this test, so I would discount that finding. The 2-hydroxybutyric acid being a little elevated is not generally that much of a cause for concern.

kresserinstitute.com

The high quinolinate and high quinolinate 5-HIAA ratio, that’s just basically a sign of inflammation, that there’s an inflammatory process going, possibly a chronic infection of some type, and so that’s helpful to know, but it doesn’t actually tell you what it is … what the source of that inflammation infection is, so that’s where the other functional testing would need to come in.