Case Study: Hyperactivity, Speech and a Microphone

Adebayo is eleven. This summer, at his school assembly, he sat up on the stage on his own. No teaching assistant beside him, no ear defenders. He sat through all the other children doing their bit without interrupting, and then at the end he got up, took the microphone, and did the closing remarks. His mum was at the back. She'd come in half expecting to be pulled aside and asked to take him home.

These days he's winning maths awards, a year ahead of where he should be. He gets himself to school on the bus. He won't hold his TA's hand any more, which is its own small win. For his birthday they did the cinema, then bowling, then a meal out, and he managed the lot, and when he'd had enough he was the one who said so.

Eighteen months before that, he couldn't get through a morning in his classroom.

Where he was

At the end of 2024 he was in a real state. He couldn't sit still for a minute. On the go the second he woke up. He'd started screaming and lashing out, and the school was phoning home most weeks. He could talk, but ask him anything straight, what did you do today, that kind of thing, and you'd get nothing. Any change of task threw him, even going from adding up to taking away in the same lesson. Noise and crowds were more than he could cope with.

What was going on

We ran our usual investigations, a proper look at his metabolic and gut health. What stood out the most was what was going on in his gut. A marker called p-cresol came back at over four times the upper limit.

P-cresol is made by a group of gut bacteria called clostridia, which had overgrown in Adebayo's gut. Clostridia build p-cresol out of tyrosine, an amino acid, a bit of protein. The trouble with p-cresol is that it impacts the enzyme that's supposed to turn dopamine into noradrenaline. Block that enzyme and dopamine piles up with nowhere to go. And a child with too much dopamine behaves more or less exactly like Adebayo did: hyperactive, stuck in loops, permanently wired. A lot of his behaviour was being made in his gut.

What we did

We have learnt over the years that we can't get nowhere with a child who can't self-regulate, so the first job was to get him calm enough to function. The basics:

 - adrenal support, because his stress system was running on empty- L-theanine and an evening mood support to take the edge off- magnesium and a decent mineral base- digestive enzymes and a bit of stomach acid, so he was getting something out of his food

It worked faster than I expected. Within a few weeks he could sit, he was staying in class, and the hyperactivity was much less. His osteopath, who'd known him a while, said he'd held a proper conversation with her for the first time - ever.

Then we went started working on the gut in a more targeted way:

•  a herbal antimicrobial plus Saccharomyces boulardii, a friendly yeast, to push the clostridia back- molybdenum and active B6 to get his sulphation working again, the pathway that clears p-cresol out- butyrate and zinc to patch up the gut lining- glutathione and phosphatidylcholine to help him shift the waste

And then the bit I keep coming back to with this one. He'd been put on tyrosine and phenylalanine, to help him along. Both are raw material for dopamine. And tyrosine, as it happens, is the very thing the clostridia were turning into p-cresol. He was getting it from both directions at once. We took them out.

What happened

By the summer he sat through a whole film at the cinema, which a year earlier would have been laughable. He was talking more. He'd started writing things on a little whiteboard when the words wouldn't get stuck, and it turned out, once you could get at it, that his reading was good and his handwriting put most of the class to shame. By autumn he was staying in lessons and his bowels had finally settled.

It wasn't a clean run. Early in the spring he had a horrible fortnight, back to screaming and lashing out, and it lined up almost to the day with the start of pollen season, which has always been the worst time of year for him. We didn't panic and tear the plan up. We brought in luteolin, which settles the mast cells that fire off histamine and, handily, gets into the brain to do it, and that saw him through. And we started the plasmalogen oils. Plasmalogens are a kind of fat that makes up a big slice of the membranes in the brain and the myelin around the nerves, and a lot of these children are running low on them. The oils are still fairly new and the science is catching up, so I won't make grand claims. But this was the point where the biggest change came, especially around speech and attention.

Where he is now

He's a calm, independent boy holding his own in a mainstream classroom. His mum spent years being told to be realistic, to accept this was simply who he was. That isn't who he turned out to be.

The bottom line

The behaviour was never the real problem. What was going on in his gut was. We worked out what was feeding it and dealt with it.

If you've got a child who can't hold it together in a classroom, if you dread seeing the school's number come up, if someone's told you it's just autism and you'll have to make your peace with it, please don't. There's nearly always something underneath, and what's underneath can be changed. It's slow. It doubles back on itself. There'll be weeks grim enough to make you want to pack it in. His mum didn't, and you've read where that got him.

We're here when you're ready.

IMPORTANT

This information is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always consult with medical doctors or qualified functional medicine practitioners before introducing any new supplement, test, or intervention.

If this has raised questions about your child, we'd love to help you find some answers.