Executive Functioning, Pre-mature Aging & Staffing

​Val's Take/Conjecture

• ​The RATE OF AGING is IDIOSYNCRATIC and dependent on a number of factors among which is MATERNAL IMMUNE ACTIVATION.
• Also, there are complicated sex differences in aging.

Further, we are prepared to fund Alzheimer's Units and Locked Nursing Home Wards 

• ​Some of the people on those locked wards are younger people with "mental illness" or "brain injury" who could live in the community with sufficient supports.
• There are a lot of people with "mental Illness" in jails or prisons, there are even more with "Neuro-Developmental Disorders" and an IQ over 70.
• Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) needs to be available to people transitioning out of the nursing home as well as the Jail or Prison.

​Neonatal inflammation impairs developmentally-associated microglia and promotes a highly reactive microglial subset (2025)

So What?

"These findings suggest major changes in microglial subsets developmental trajectories and reactivity contributing to NDDs [Neuro-Developmental Disorders] induced by neonatal inflammation."

Staffing

• There is so much that can be gained by Public Education,
• A website dealing with the challenges and strengths of being a person with a Neuro-Developmental Disorder and an IQ over 70 --- could be very helpful.
• AI could potentially be very helpful.
• These new understandings are the precursors to better treatments and likely reduce the need for more Staff across education, employment, healthcare, etc.
• Neuro-Diversity is often associated with many diverse chronic disease categories --- of course, it is.
• If you've lived this --- you know there are a lot of Highs and Lows.
• In the meantime, there is a need to re-allocate resources and staff.

​For younger people with Neuro-Developmental Disorders and an IQ over 70

• Historically, we haven't appreciated the underlying biology and executive functioning deficits or the idiosyncratic strengths.
• At least sometimes the Societal Response has been --- "If you don't stop crying, I'm gonna give you something to cry about."​ 

​Prenatal maternal C-reactive protein prospectively predicts child executive functioning at ages 4-6 years (2020)

​"These findings provide novel, prospective evidence that maternal inflammation uniquely predicts child cognitive flexibility deficits, and that these associations depend on the timing of exposure before or during pregnancy."

​Aggression and its correlation with plasma C-reactive protein levels in patients with schizophrenia: A hospital based cross-sectional study (2023)

The effects of Maternal Immune Activation are not static over the life span, although those effects are not uniform and are idiosyncratic.

• Something needs to be brought to bear on this challenge of people with Neuro-Developmental Disorders and an IQ over 70 who make up big chucks of:
  • the Homeless
  • Criminal Justice
  • Child Welfare populations
  • as well as a problematic Elite