My "quirky" 7yo son has been diagnosed at different times with High Functioning Autism, Tourettes, OCD, Aspergers. At my request, our paediatric neurologist ran blood tests including a Dnase test and to his surprise, my very physically healthy son's Dnase titers came back at 1300+. But my son has not been ill in ages, and in fact the last time he was sick enough for antibiotics was a pneumonia episode 4 years ago. Is it possible that a strep infection has been raging in my son's body for four years, and that his symptoms have been neuropsychiatric in nature rather than the typical sore throat that I so often had as a child? Or could these Dnase levels be purely coincidental? Surely people with autism/ocd/anorexia pick up bugs along the way after their psychiatric disorder has developed? My question is, how do you know which came first - the strep or the neuropsychiatric disorder? In our case we don't know when he could have had a strep infection, and we also can't pinpoint when his "differentness" began.
