An end of the semester puzzle:
Regarding kids w/ PKU, Carlson's Foundations of Physiological Psych (p424) says that
"Once myelinization is complete, the dietary restraints can be relaxed, because a high
level of phenylalanine no longer no longer threatens brain development."
Unfortunately, no references.
It has been a loooong time since I did any reading on PKU, but in the olden days (20
years ago) kids were kept on the phenylalanine-free diet into the teenage years. My
memory of the literature of the time was that even preteens & teenagers who went off
the diet were at high risk for irreversible IQ drops. In fact, the purpose of the
project I was periferally involved with was to develop an early warning system to
discriminate between the kids (10-16 yrs old) who could safely go off the diet & those
who couldn't. The Carlson quote seems to contradict that whole notion. Although I
don't read that literature, it just seems that, if we had reversed our understanding
of diet & PKU, I would have heard about it somewhere. Am I really that far out of the
loop?
Can anyone shed any light on this for me?
Thanks,
Bob F
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Bob Ferguson, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
Buena Vista University
http://ferguson.bvu.edu/
"The world is older and bigger than we are.
This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow."
--Edward Abbey
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
