A few days ago, DDT made headlines again; but not for the reason you think.  We all know that DDT was used for years in the U.S. to help with pest control and is still used bya number of countries world wide. 

But what grabbed our attention was the fact that DDT has been linked to high blood pressure, increased testicular cancer risk and increased risk of breast cancer - but did you know that DDT has also been associated with autism?

The Journal of Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers examined concentrations of DDT and from blood samples taken from women while they were pregnant between 1959 and 1967.  Researchers conducted phone interviews between 2005 and 2008 with the daughters of these women (who were all between 39 and 47 years old) to see if they had any diagnoses of hypertension.  The researchers found that the odds of having hypertension were higher if the women were exposed prenatally to DDT, with the odds of having high blood pressure increasing with higher concentrations of DDT in their mother's blood.

Autism is thought to be linked to DDT via the hepatocyte growth factor receptor as is demonstrated in the diagram below from this study.

The above diagram is a disease–chemical associations network. The circles represent diseases, with colors representing phenotype categories: red, reproductive disorders; blue, neurodevelopmental-related diseases such as autism; green, cancers; gray, other diseases. Rectangles represent the three chemicals studied. The heavier the weight of the connecting lines, the greater the number of proteins linking a chemical to a disease.  The DDE concentration may reflect, to some degree, past exposures to the parent DDT compound that had been metabolized later, but it may also originate directly from DDE residues in food. 

In my practice, we have had success detoxing from DDT using the CEASE therapy.  Deborah Merlin, author of Victory over ADHD kept a blog diary about her experience of detoxing from DDT using CEASE.

If you need help detoxing from DDT, call us at 310-738-8878.  We are here to EDUCATE not MEDICATE!