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Since most of the ways we diagnose autism are based on behavior, we can't rely on biological, structural, or chemical findings to determine if a treatment is working. We primarily measure success based on a patient's change, or lack thereof, in behavior.

The behavioral changes produced by the few effective treatments make life in social settings (including the home) possible, but we have no idea whether they have any effect on the underlying cause (or causes) of autism or whether they even make severely affected patients feel better.

One method intended to help, "facilitated communication," is based on the idea that a sensitive facilitator will hold the hand of a patient over a kind of Ouija board. She will then help the patient respond to questions by sensing his intention and helping guide his hand to spell out answers. Rigorous studies have shown that the spelled-out answers come from the unconscious (or, worse, the conscious) mind of the facilitator. Nonetheless, the practice is still in use, and I know parents who are utterly convinced that it is valid and useful. Frankly, something important did happen when facilitated communication was introduced to my patients: They improved, they brightened, they became more social and more interactive, and they seemed, somehow, happier, even though facilitated communication didn't actually translate their thoughts into words. I'll come back to "why" in a minute.

we had dismissed perinatal anoxia as a likely factor contributing to autism’s apparent rise because we could not see how ITS incidence could be growing over the past several decades.

it has recently been argued that the especially high susceptibility of the highly metabolically active auditory brainstem to brief periods of anoxia that we and others have documented comes into play in the few to many tens of seconds of oxygen starvation that can stem from very rapid umbilical cord clamping— practices for which have changed (more rapid clamping has been adopted) over the past several decades.

earlier clamping of the umbilical cord became the standard of care world-wide beginning in the mid 1980’s, i.e., corresponding to the epoch in which scientists and educators began to first recognize an increase in autism incidence.

Autism gives many unique traits to an individual, and many of these people go on to do great things (it is said Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, and other innovators and scientists had forms of autism). I can’t speak for others - maybe they do want to rid themselves of their condition. But as for the parents and individuals making the decision, think about it: do you honestly want a cure that is going to change the individual you are?

Professor James Flynn has incorporated an interesting sidebar into his book What is Intelligence? In it he lists his seven choices for Western civilization’s greatest minds: Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Newton, Gauss, and Einstein.

Hundreds of research teams, maybe even thousands by now, have so convinced themselves that intelligence must originate from inside our skulls, have so convinced themselves that only within networks of cranial neurons can be found the secrets to humanity’s growing mental capacity, that all have managed to overlook completely the far more plausible alternative—the one existing right before our very eyes.

It is time to reconsider that conventional wisdom, time to regard genius with a different set of eyes; for genius is not a function of greater intelligence, genius is the description of how intelligence grows.

Now a small but growing number of researchers see hope in a tool called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which lets scientists spark activity in specific areas of the brain and watch what happens to patients' behavior. The technology may illuminate some of the biology behind the disease, and some specialists speculate it may one day offer a treatment.

John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Transcranial magnetic stimulation "is fantastic for identifying brain regions that are essential for specific mental functions. . . . I think if we can start to use it more systematically with autism, one could hope we'd understand a lot more about what's going on."

Researchers at the Boston hospital's Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation used rapid, repetitive stimulation to simulate what happens in the brain when people learn a new task. Then they gave a single pulse of stimulation and measured minute muscle twitches that told them how long people's brains maintained connections formed by the initial stimulation.In people with no evidence of autism, changes lasted about 30 minutes, on average. But in people on the autism spectrum, the initial stimulation caused brain changes that lasted much longer - on average an hour and a half.

A flurry of research published earlier this year in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B paints a very different picture. It turns out that these skills are far more common than previously thought. They may even arise from traits found in the general population, implying that savants are not fundamentally different from the rest of us. What's more, these skills may only blossom after years of obsessive practice, raising the question of whether many more people might cultivate similar skills, if only they had the motivation.

One of the biggest clues to the origins of savant talent lies in the fact that savants are far more common within the autistic population than among people with other mental difficulties.

Previously, about 1 in 10 people with autism were thought to have a special ability but in April, Patricia Howlin at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London found a much higher figure in the autistic adults she surveyed for savant skills or an exceptional cognitive ability.

What this means is that there is likely to be a complex set of many factors that contribute to ASD - not one single cause.

The same exact situation is true for other entities, like schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder (ADD).

One difference, however, is that schizophrenia and ADD likely represent changes to particular parts of the brain, while autism is likely due to changes in the global architecture of the brain.

Low levels of a stress hormone may be responsible for the obsession with routine and dislike for new experiences common in children with a certain type of autism.

The body produces cortisol, among other hormones, in stressful situations. Cortisol increases blood pressure and blood sugar levels, among other duties, to signal the body's need to adapt to changes occurring around it.

People with Asperger syndrome notably have very repetitive or narrow patterns of thought and behavior, such as being obsessed with either a single object or topic. Though tending to become experts in this limited domain, they have otherwise very limited social skills, according to the study.

A new paper from Eric Fombonne is in electronic print at the journal Pediatric Research.

The title is ‘Epidemiology of pervasive developmental disorders’

Combining all these categories together Fombonne presents a prevalence of 60-70/10,000.