Autism, which now afflicts more than 1 million children in the USA, is associated with a spectrum of disabilities, including repetitive behaviors and problems socializing and communicating.
The quest to unravel the mystery — and get children and families the help they need — has become more urgent as autism has become more widely diagnosed. The condition now affects one in 88 children, according to a report last month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Yet researchers today also say they’re beginning to make progress, perhaps for the first time, in understanding the autistic brain. Thanks to children such as Nicky and babies far younger, scientists are getting a glimpse of what might go wrong in early brain development, says Sarah Paterson, a developmental psychologist at Children’s Hospital who works closely with the May family.
And while some of the field’s most exciting discoveries have come only in the past year or two, researchers such as Paterson say the findings could soon make a real difference for toddlers like Nicky. A decade from now, she expects doctors to diagnose the condition earlier and treat it more effectively, at least for children whose family history singles them out as high-risk.
Autism brain science “has moved stunningly fast,” says Kevin Pelphrey, an associate professor of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center. “We’ve fundamentally moved around a corner where we will move much faster now.”
I’m less impressed with the ‘moving faster’ than I would be if they were ‘moving effectively’.
“Autism” is not a single ‘condition’. Technically it is a catch-all classification bin for a wide variety of possibly-related symptoms.
In medicine the first step to dealing with a ‘disorder’ is always to give it a name, but in this case, the name only provides the illusion of understanding.
The challenge is that in different patients the same condition can manifest different symptoms, while different conditions can manifest extremely similar symptoms. Building the bridge from Symptoms to Cause is the
diagnostician’s challenge.
Some of us with Asperger’s Syndrome (“Aspies”), one of the most common ‘forms of autism’, actually resent being treated as if we have a disorder. We are admittedly different. We feel our ‘different’ abilities are overall superior to the abilities of mundane people. Where we are admittedly deficient compared to the societal norm (social skills), we are willing to accept and accommodate to those deficiencies.
I feel no loss in having no interest in team sports (I haven’t watched a football game since 1964), because I *understand* chemistry, physics, celestial mechanics, astronomy, general relativity, and mathematics.
I’m another that would have been diagnosed with autism if was born today. Most of my friends on the Robotics team in high school or the Engineering school in college would also qualify.
The diagnosis of autism is so wide, it’s less than meaningless.
I did a little background research. The DSM didn’t even list “autism” until 1968, and then it was a “sub-disorder” of other illnesses. In 1980, Autism got it’s own listing – ONE disorder, 6 symptoms, and you had to have all 6 to qualify for the “Autism” label. In 1994 (hmm…the year the “explosion” started?) there were 4 distinct types of autism listed (along with Asperger’s, Rett’s, and others). To be “autistic” a child only had to exhibit 6 of 16 symptoms to be diagnosed.
I wonder why there has been an explosion in the number of kids diagnosed with autism?
Autism is one of the diseases of the Left (like asthma which is being used by the EPA to justify regulations on power plants) and so is on the “rise.” This first came to my attention while reading a scientific paper written by a researcher at Harvard (of course) which tried to link autism to global warming. Enough said.