MRSA Medications worsening Autistic symptoms ??

My 7 year old Autistic son, who also has seizures and asthma has been on about every imaginable medication known to mankind. Over the past 2 years I have been keeping an informal journal of various meds he takes for his many ailments. I work in the medical field myself, so I am always one to keep an eye out for any possible change that worsens our already frustrating symptoms of Autism. A huge med that affects him is of course the oral steroids for asthma and when his lungs get congested, we just know those 10 days on Prednisone are going to be awful and then he will eventually have kitten crash almost the 2nd day he is off of them. My new discovery, which I have suspected for the majority of the year , is his response to the MRSA antibiotics, especially the Clindamyacin. He has once again been on a full regimen for 10 days and HOLY COW , everything has been terribly worse. My oldest son is actually a carrier for MRSA and apparently always will be, and thank goodness he is healthy as he can be, but with having a special needs child the MRSA totally affects him differently and the Clindamyacin is about as bad as Prednisone for our son, Jac. Do any of the research studies have any reports of correlations to the strong antibiotics being used to fight the MRSA infections and the side affects that seem to make the "classic symptoms" of Autism worse, or should I say much worse??? Thank you to anyone who has some information.

Hi curtisp40z, and welcome to IAN.

Just to clarify for our readers, MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It's a strain of staph that's resistant to the broad-spectrum antibiotics commonly used to treat it. You can read about it on the Mayo Clinic website, here: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/mrsa/DS00735

To my knowledge, there has not yet been full scale research on this topic. I was able to find a letter to the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology by two doctors from Drexel University who had noticed a negative response to clindamycin in a girl with autism who was also taking risperidone (which is also called Risperdal).

They wrote: "This is a report of unusual movements developing coincident with the addition of clindamycin in a 14-year-old girl diagnosed with autistic disorder who was receiving ongoing treatment with risperidone. These movements resolved when clindamycin was discontinued, making it likely they were the result of clindamycin-related neuromuscular blockade. Because patients may be prescribed this combination of drugs, it is important that clinicians are familiar with this as a possible adverse event."

See: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18439121?dopt=abstract

Keep in mind that this was just one case, and involved the combination of two drugs (clindamyacin and risperidone). We cannot necessarily conclude that the response of all children on the autism spectrum would be similar. Still, it is interesting that they noticed a negative response to this specific medication, in this case, unusual motor movements, including hiccough-like or twitch-like abdominal movements, and then later shoulder and jaw-jutting movements.

Like curtisp40z, I would be interested to hear if any other families have also noticed a change (positive or negative) in autistic symptoms or behaviors when their child was on this medication.

Connie,
thank you so much for your reply. My son is actually on Risperdal and it is the one medication that we can't seem to go without. Do you happen to have a date of that journal entry you found, I would love to see if I could locate a copy to just have for myself and to also pass along to my son's pediatrician, as he is a very hands on doctor and totally interested in his Autism patients.

Sure, curtisp40z. This was not a journal article, but just a letter. It was in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Psychopharmacology, April 2008.

If you wanted, you could email the link in my first post to your physician, and he'd have all the info about it right there.