You can also get direct absorption from toxins from the digestive tract from the yeast and bacterial overgrowth. I have seen it clinically many, many times in my practice over the years. An onset of constipation can lead to behavioral problems, lack of eye contact, it will even lead to lack of speech in many kids. So if you are seeing improvement in the therapies you are doing, it doesn’t even have to be biomedical therapies, it can be speech, occupational therapy, behavioral therapy but then they start to regress and you can’t figure out why, maybe there is an underlying constipation problem and they are not having bowel movements as normally as they should.

Ideally they should have a bowel movement once a day or even twice a day. The other thing to watch for with constipation is I have heard a lot of parents say their child has a bowel movement every day but how big is it and what is its shape and size. They may have a bowel movement that is fairly large but there may be a lot more stool left in your child’s digestive tract that they are not getting rid of. Or they could be pooping out little small pellets that are really hard and dry. So the assessment of the digestive tract is key.

A simple thing you can do is to take your child to your doctor, pediatrician and have an abdominal x-ray done and see if there is a large amount of fecal matter stored in their digestive tract. So the bowels become a seat of not only nutritional input into our bodies from food but they also become a seat for toxicity for our body if there is a tendency for constipation. That constipation can also lead to behavioral problems too.

There could be an underlying pain response so just being constipated and not being able to have a bowel movement could lead to irritability because it is painful. Because many kids on the Autism spectrum can’t speak and they can’t communicate their needs they will either act it out whether that is hitting themselves, head banging or just being irritable.

There is another reason too, it is called autointoxication. What happens is the digestive tract is the large portal of entry of nutrients into our body. It is this tube that runs through the middle of our digestive system. It can also be a major seat of toxicity because it is also the main route to get rid of toxins through our body as well. If we become constipated we block the ability to get rid of those toxins and some of those toxins can actually be reabsorbed back into the blood stream and then dumped out into general population. There are toxins from yeast, there are toxins from bacteria that are known to actually cause imbalances in brain chemistry. For a child who already has a susceptibility to neuro chemical imbalances, anything else that adds insult to injury can potentially worsen behavior.

What happens is there is a venous system called the portal venal system that returns blood back to the liver of things that have been removed from the digestive tract and if you have a constipation issue, particularly in the large bowel you may get toxins that would normally get excreted out through fecal matter and bowel movements, it gets reabsorbed, taken back into the liver, dumped back into the blood stream and starts to recirculate over and over again causing chemical imbalances.