Lizaveta Radzevich, the founder of Aurelaus and the creator of a unique method of Autism diagnosis, tells why many years of research on autism have not brought us closer to a cure for the disorder. Her company plans to tackle this issue ambitiously.
1) Tell us about yourself: how did you come to business, and what kind of education do you have?
I have already managed to complete several educations in my life. I am a biochemist and started my professional career at the Minsk State Medical College. There, I studied the Medical and Diagnostic business. I continued my studies at Minsk State University, at the Faculty of Biochemistry of Medicines. I also interned at the Klumov Clinical Hospital.
The topic of neurobiology seemed to me more interesting than others—how do drugs and supplements affect the nervous system, reactions, feelings, and our personality? However, the primary interest was in autism, and I realized early on that my specialization would be at the junction of these two disciplines.
In 2018, I moved to Warsaw with my family. At that time, chelation was mainstream in autism therapy, so I needed to become a certified specialist in this field. That is why I received a certificate of chelating therapist at the ACAM College of Complementary Medicine in the USA. This year, I entered the Master's degree program in Neurology in the UK and have already managed to establish working relationships with many neurologists. Education in the States and Britain proved invaluable for the interpretation of complex laboratory tests and formed the basis of my methodology. During this time, I gained not only knowledge but also connections—I established working contacts with many neurologists. Our combined expertise proved invaluable for the interpretation of complex laboratory tests and formed the basis of my methodology.
2) Tell us the key difference between your technique and conventional therapy.
We have to state the sad truth: to date, all research about autism and autism spectrum disorders, as well as many other serious neuropsychiatric disorders, have minimally affected the treatment, treatment results, and prevention of autism. The reason is simple: scientists focus on analyzing the behavior of a child and not on biochemical anomalies of the body. When a child with suspected autism comes to a doctor, doctors run psychological and neuro-behavioral tests without even trying to conduct a metabolic or immunological diagnosis. As a result, specialists who characterize their work with verbal behavior—speech therapists, psychologists—work with your child. Such therapy can help a person cope better with daily chores but ignores the root of the problem, which increasingly turns out to be at the level of the metabolome. In addition, more than 90 metabolic errors (which are potentially treatable) are known to result in neuro-behavioral or mental delays or psychiatric disorders.
3) What is a metabolic error?
The metabolome is the tip of the iceberg of the molecular processes of the body that we can observe. It is a collection of small molecules in the body, such as amino acids, organic acids, nucleotides, and many others. Simply put, everything that happens between genes and proteins we see in our metabolites. Everything we inhale, eat, and drink is metabolized, and we can see this in the analysis of metabolites. Sometimes, a mistake happens on a normal, adequate biochemical pathway, and the process changes. Take away some useful substances, consume some vitamins, accelerate the work of some enzymes, and this already affects the behavior of children and adults.
4) Besides autism, what other disorders can your technique help with?
Autism spectrum disorders also include ADHD, anxiety, and depression. The cause may be immunological, metabolic, or biochemical, and we must work with this cause through the correct diagnosis, followed by the correct treatment. Metabolic analysis can detect, among other things, problems with the gastrointestinal tract, mitochondrial diseases (mitochondria determine energy levels), and endocrinological problems. At the cell level, we observe the disease, and until it has passed to the tissue, to the organ, even before the onset of inflammation, we are already beginning to help specialists, telling them what to work on first of all. At this stage, our clinical focus is neuropsychiatric and neuropsychiatric disorders.
5) Describe the general trends.
Due to the fact that the mainstream views autism as a behavioral disorder, doctors turn a blind eye to the possibility of other interpretations. As a result, all information about the biochemical processes that are the primary sources of autism is not systematized. Amsterdam Hospital independently investigates the issue, but doctors in, let's say, Colorado, for example, do not pay attention to it. If research is conducted, it is still mainly based on psychology. There is no methodology—experts put forward hypotheses on the principle of "finger in the sky." There is another problem: a clear categorization of people with autism spectrum disorders has not been developed. A test substance, a medicine, can help one person and harm another—and tests still do not divide autistic people into groups, testing developments on everyone at once. Without a correct diagnosis, there is no adequate interpretation of this diagnosis. Even with the necessary tests on hand, the doctor does not have the tools to draw the right conclusions. We set ourselves the task: to collect disparate information and create a unified diagnostic scheme interpretation of the metabolic map of each person with ASD.
6) How many people are affected by this?
On average, 25% of patients aged 5 to 30 are just not receiving the necessary treatment but are still waiting for a correct diagnosis. If in 2004 we said that one child out of 166 thousand suffers from autism, in 2012, one out of 80 today, the approximate estimate is one out of 38 children. Most likely, there are even more autistic people, and many cases are not diagnosed. People live with autism and don't know it; they have maladaptive anxiety reactions, neuroinflammatory patterns, become sociophobic, and blame themselves without realizing they have a health problem.
7) How to understand that something is wrong with a child? How to detect a deviation in time?
As a rule, the diagnosis is made after two years; there are certain behavioral scales. But even before that time, the disorder can be predicted by passing an analysis of organic acids of urine, for amino acids—to exclude the maximum number of errors.
Up to a year old, a child must necessarily be able to point a finger at something (pointing gesture), even before the development of speech, which is formed for up to five years. But if a child under a year does not respond to his name and also does not maintain eye contact, this is the time to sound the alarm and help at an early stage of the development of the disorder.
8) What should adults do? On the phrase "I get tired," you hear the answer: "Everyone gets tired!"
People get tired in different ways. Someone really works a lot and sleeps a little, but often, the problem arises at a deeper level. Hypothyroidism is a deficiency of thyroid hormones. The thyroid regulates the entire metabolism, and disorders in it can cause, among other things, fatigue, lethargy, and lack of energy.
Or, for example, ammonia; if there is too much of it, it acts on the brain as a neurotoxin. Children develop a so-called "drunken gait." In adults, an excess of ammonia is most often manifested as anxiety. Devices for measuring the level of ammonia in the blood appeared in the offices of a few neurologists only in the last two years. Immune deficiency or over-stimulated immunity can lead to neuro disorders.
Anemia is a lack of oxygen, problems with hemoglobin, which carries oxygen to the cells. Hypoxia is due to iron deficiency and vitamins B9, B12. Low blood pressure, mitochondrial diseases—no need to be shy and try to "overpower" the moments when the body clearly sends a signal that something is wrong. We listen to ourselves and make an appointment with a specialist who will carry out the correct diagnosis and prescribe treatment. Many people lack hormones or vitamins—the main thing is to understand which ones.
9) Who is your methodology primarily designed for? Will it be useful only to doctors, or will parents also be able to use it?
The technique will help both, but specifically neurologists, not clinical centers. The centers have their own goals, pursue grants, and sit comfortably for years in an established environment. And we want to help people. If you treat in the right "window"—up to 10 years, when the gray-white matter is developing and reprogramming the brain, at 15 years old, the child will not remember that he was once autistic.
We plan to connect artificial intelligence to our program to simplify the diagnostic process as much as possible. The long-term goal is software in which you can download all the necessary data and get a preliminary diagnosis, a primary understanding of which direction to move and what to pay attention to in therapeutic strategies. Such an application would simplify the work of specialists and would suggest the next steps to parents in an accessible form.
10) Share your long-term plans.
In all my clinical experience, I have never seen a single method of prevention and treatment of autism in any country. The task of Aurelaus is to change the global diagnostic strategy of autism and neuro diseases and to unite the whole world in a single clinical system so that patients from all over the world and of all ages go through a single diagnostic path and develop an AI that will eliminate the human factor. This is imperative in order to make the lives of autistic people much better and bring the maximum number of children out of the spectrum.
