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Clinically, I was also intrigued by the high rates of vision problems found among the ASD group. Although, as I mentioned, this may be due to a self-selection of the parents who agreed to participate, this is consistent with data suggesting that children with developmental disorders are more likely to have visual problems than typically developing children

The exclusion by autism self advocates of the intellectually disabled autistic population occurs despite the fact that many persons with Autistic Disorder are intellectually disabled. The ICD-10 mentions this fact expressly in its description of Autistic Disorder:

Autistic Disorder...In addition to these specific diagnostic features, it is frequent for children with autism to show a range of other nonspecific problems such as fear/phobias, sleeping and eating disturbances, temper tantrums, and aggression. Self-injury (e.g. by wrist-biting) is fairly common, especially when there is associated severe mental retardation.

All levels of IQ can occur in association with autism, but there is significant mental retardation in some three-quarters of cases.

There are more than 200 known causes of intellectual disability. Some common examples of intellectual disability are: Down syndrome Autism

The attempt by higher functioning persons with ASD's and Aspergers to disassociate "autism" from intellectual disability helps stigmatize persons with intellectual disabilities including the many persons with autistic disorder and intellectual disabilities.

And some ND's, to counter the fact that most with LFA are retarded, some "famous" autistics like to promote FC as "proof" that they aren't.

My cousin is profoundly autistic. He is around 20 and cannot communicate at all, not verbally or in the written word, and has never said a word. Luckily, his family is smart enough to know that if anyone tries use FC on him they will know it is a scam.If a facilitator told my aunt that P was writing poems and understood Shakespeare she would just laugh. She loves P as he is; she knows reality and doesn't try to force him to be someone he isn't.

The current Wikipedia article still shows a frequency of 25-70% incidence of mental retardation in people with autism.

Yet, the reader is drawn to see not the high percentage (25% is still very high) but the width of the range, therefore there must be something wrong with the ability of standard tests to measure "autistic intelligence".

Mentally retarded IMO comes from the intelligence scales. These do not address the learning styles of all people and are inflexible. I do believe there are better ways to understand how someone learns. I also don't believe there are limits on what we learn, the brain's placisity allows us to learn our entire life.

I've spoken hundreds of parents and it worries me that so many have problems accepting their children as they are and will be.For some intelligence is the magic word, a kind of hidden cure inside their child.But autistic kids with a normal IQ which they can use function better than those with high IQ's they can't use.

I am only concerned about the cases where the FC person NEVER does ANY kind of independent work, which seem to be the majority of FC cases.

15 children with down’s syndrome

25 typically developing children

The authors found that all three diagnostic groups showed anomalies in the development of face recognition when compared to typically developing kids.

The children with low (but not high) functioning autism show a disadvantage for identifying eyes but an advantage for identifying mouths. In addition, they were better at identifying eyes and noses when the these were upside down than when they were upside up. This is the opposite of what is expected in typically developing children.

The authors discussed how this may be due to an aversion to looking directly at eyes, especially in upright faces. Therefore, the observed deficiencies in face recognition among the low functioning autism group may not be due to problems in the development of whole face recognition processes per se, but instead this weakness may be due to a natural aversion to stare at the eyes area of the face.

Einstein researchers contend that scientific evidence directly points to the locus coeruleus–noradrenergic (LC-NA) system as being involved in autism. “The LC-NA system is the only brain system involved both in producing fever and controlling behavior,” says co-author Dominick P. Purpura, M.D., dean emeritus and distinguished professor of neuroscience at Einstein.

The locus coeruleus has widespread connections to brain regions that process sensory information.

It is also involved in a variety of complex behaviors, such as attentional focusing (the ability to concentrate attention on environmental cues relevant to the task in hand, or to switch attention from one task to another).

“What is unique about the locus coeruleus is that it activates almost all higher-order brain centers that are involved in complex cognitive tasks,” says Dr. Mehler.

Drs. Purpura and Mehler hypothesize that in autism, the LC-NA system is dysregulated by the interplay of environment, genetic, and epigenetic factors (chemical substances both within as well as outside the genome that regulate the expression of genes). They believe that stress plays a central role in dysregulation of the LC-NA system, especially in the latter stages of prenatal development when the fetal brain is particularly vulnerable.

Drs. Purpura and Mehler believe that, in autistic children, fever stimulates the LC-NA system, temporarily restoring its normal regulatory function.

the future of autism treatment probably lies in drugs that selectively target certain types of noradrenergic brain receptors or, more likely, in epigenetic therapies targeting genes of the LC-NA system.

“You can’t take a complex neuropsychiatric disease that has escaped our understanding for 50 years and in one fell swoop have a therapy that is going to reverse it — that’s folly. On the other hand, we now have clues to the neurobiology, the genetics, and the epigenetics of autism. To move forward, we need to invest more money in basic science to look at the genome and the epigenome in a more focused way.”

This study documented that autistic children experience behavior changes during fever.

Einstein researchers contend that scientific evidence directly points to the locus coeruleus–noradrenergic (LC-NA) system as being involved in autism. "The LC-NA system is the only brain system involved both in producing fever and controlling behavior," says co-author Dominick P. Purpura, M.D., dean emeritus and distinguished professor of neuroscience at Einstein.

The locus coeruleus has widespread connections to brain regions that process sensory information. It secretes most of the brain's noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter that plays a key role in arousal mechanisms, such as the "fight or flight" response. It is also involved in a variety of complex behaviors, such as attentional focusing (the ability to concentrate attention on environmental cues relevant to the task in hand, or to switch attention from one task to another). Poor attentional focusing is a defining characteristic of autism.

"What is unique about the locus coeruleus is that it activates almost all higher-order brain centers that are involved in complex cognitive tasks," says Dr. Mehler.

autism, the LC-NA system is dysregulated by the interplay of environment, genetic, and epigenetic factors

They believe that stress plays a central role in dysregulation of the LC-NA system, especially in the latter stages of prenatal development when the fetal brain is particularly vulnerable.

a higher incidence of autism among children whose mothers had been exposed to hurricanes and tropical storms during pregnancy.

autistic children, fever stimulates the LC-NA system, temporarily restoring its normal regulatory function. "This could not happen if autism was caused by a lesion or some structural abnormality of the brain," says Dr. Purpura.

future of autism treatment probably lies in drugs that selectively target certain types of noradrenergic brain receptors or, more likely, in epigenetic therapies targeting genes of the LC-NA system.

If the locus coeruleus is impaired in autism, it is probably because tens or hundreds, maybe even thousands, of genes are dysregulated in subtle and complex ways," says Dr. Mehler. "The only way you can reverse this process is with epigenetic therapies, which, we are beginning to learn, have the ability to coordinate very large integrated gene networks."

"You can't take a complex neuropsychiatric disease that has escaped our understanding for 50 years and in one fell swoop have a therapy that is going to reverse it — that's folly. On the other hand, we now have clues to the neurobiology, the genetics, and the epigenetics of autism. To move forward, we need to invest more money in basic science to look at the genome and the epigenome in a more focused way."

In theory, this finding could lead to educational techniques that could help very young children with autism build their social referencing skills. This could be hugely important for children with autism, since their challenges with "reading" social cues create so many problems as they enter school, interact with peers, and begin to navigate social relationships.

The results showed that participants with autism were slower to press on the key when the target X was presented than typically developing peers. However, the groups did not differ in accuracy of responding.

That is, both groups were equally accurate in responding to the X target, but the group with autism showed a slower patter of responses. The group with autism also showed a different pattern of brain activation when confronted with the novel distracters. Their differences were observed in both hemispheres, but were stronger in the right frontal regions. The pattern of responses observed (longer latencies and higher amplitudes) suggest greater effort when processing novel stimuli. This finding is intriguing because the brain response patterns to the other stimuli (target X and the common distracter O) were identical between the groups. These results suggest that the group with autism had difficulty processing and disengaging from novel distracting stimuli.

In neurofeedback, the person receives real-time feedback on their brain functioning and is taught how to progressively modify their responses. However, the debate regarding the effectiveness of neurofeedback is ongoing as the research is limited and highly contradictory.

Previous studies have suggested between 3 percent and 25 percent of autistic kids recover. Fein says her studies have shown the range is 10 percent to 20 percent.

But even after lots of therapy - often carefully designed educational and social activities with rewards - most autistic children remain autistic. Recovery is "not a realistic expectation for the majority of kids," but parents should know it can happen, Fein said.

The children in Fein's study, which is still ongoing, were diagnosed by an autism specialist before age 5 but no longer meet diagnostic criteria for autism. The initial diagnoses were verified through early medical records.

The researchers are also doing imaging tests to see if the recovered kids' brains look more like those of autistic or nonautistic children.

Imaging scans also are being done to examine brain function in formerly autistic kids.

Results from those tests are still being analyzed.

Most of the formerly autistic kids got long-term behavior treatment soon after diagnosis, in some cases for 30 or 40 hours weekly.

Many also have above-average IQs and had been diagnosed with relatively mild cases of autism. At age 2, many were within the normal range for motor development, able to walk, climb and hold a pencil.

Significant improvement suggesting recovery was evident by around age 7 in most cases, Fein said.

None of the children has shown any sign of relapse. But nearly three-fourths of the formerly autistic kids have had other disorders, including attention-deficit problems, tics and phobias; eight still are affected.

Somali women at high lattitudes may be at even greater risk of vitamin D deficiency if they observe the tradition of covering their skin.

results provide indirect support for the common clinical practice of considering signs of sensory sensitivities as one factor when determining whether a child has an ASD, a developmental delay, or a language delay.

early sensory sensitivity should be one of the factors examined by pediatricians during healthy baby checkups.

results do not tell us whether the levels of sensory anomalies observed in the non-ASD group are higher than what is expected among typically developing children.

Look at the content of any intelligence test—language, arithmetic, patterns, designs. What we measure with the aid of those I.Q. booklets are not the abilities we inherited from out our animal past, but instead their exact counterpart; we measure only those skills the species has been adding throughout all its history since. In some sense, an intelligence test measures the modernness of an individual; an intelligence test measures an individual’s ability to appropriate for himself the same set of skills the species has been appropriating as a whole—skills that do not find their origin in our biological nature, but instead owe their existence to the strange, brewing mixture of non-biological pattern, structure and form that has been rapidly taking shape all around us.

The unusual characteristics of humanity’s transformational individuals are not the result of their genius, they are genius’s prerequisite

But counter to prevailing wisdom, there are many autistic individuals—most likely a majority—who do make substantial progress by means of an alternative perceptual course, a course that allows them not only to navigate meaningfully their surrounding world, but also to assimilate, if somewhat awkwardly and belatedly, to the human species itself (and thereby explaining how autism, estimated to be present in nearly one percent of the human population, could go entirely unrecognized until as recently as sixty-five years ago).

all autistic individuals must crystallize their existence by means of this alternative perceptual course—it becomes, in essence, autism’s most salient feature.

The unusual behaviors and interests of autistic children—lining up toys, staring at ceiling fans, twirling, flapping hands repeatedly, fascination with knobs, buttons, switches, letters, shapes and digits, watching the same video again and again, singing the same song over and over—these activities betray a form of perception completely unlike that of most other children, a perception noticeably absent in social and biological focus, but also noticeably drawn to symmetry, repetition and pattern.

The unusual routines of autistic children are the natural, indeed the expected, mode of expression for a form of perception engaged primarily by the structural aspects of the non-social, non-biological world.

Autistic individuals would have been the first to notice the inherent structure contained in the natural world—the geometry of plants, the isomorphisms of natural objects, the logic of the celestial seasons—only they would have had motivation to embrace such form, only they would have had the need to perceive nature’s symmetry, repetition and pattern in order to form their cognitive grounding.

We know only bits and pieces about the four Greeks on Professor Flynn’s list, but filling in with the traits from the list’s more modern members, we can reasonably summarize all the unifying characteristics: late- or strange-talking, socially awkward, irascible, obsessed with structure, compelled by form, unusually—not necessarily greatly—intelligent.

The continuing medicalization of autism, the insistent demonization of autism’s spontaneous effect—these carry the danger of an unforeseen consequence. For the cure of autism will not be the end of a tragic brain disorder; autism’s eradication will not see the passing of a troubling mental disease. The removal of autism from the entire human species will produce only an ironic solution to the mystery of our expanding human intelligence, it will produce the ignoble end to the Flynn effect.

When confronted by data that runs counter to our accustomed way of seeing things, we as humans have but two choices: we can try to explain the results away, or we can adjust our perception of the experienced world. The former choice paves the all-too-common road of modern academic science; the latter, as described above, walks the more promising path of genius.

Autism is not a mental illness, not a brain disorder, it is instead the source of humanity’s changing perception of its experienced world; it is, with care and understanding, genius’s fertile soil.