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This inclusion of substantially different disorders, with wildly different challenges, in one "spectrum" of disorders implies that the very serious challenges of persons with Autistic Disorder who lack a fundamental understanding of the world, who have very limited abstract thought and who have very little in the way of communication skills are somehow fundamentally similar to persons with good to excellent facilities in all these crucial areas of life.

Research is resulting in more and more people describing autism in the plural as autism disorders with different causes and different possible treatments.

It is time for the DSM to get realistic about the Autism "Spectrum".

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.

Causes There's no known cause of childhood disintegrative disorder, also known as Heller's syndrome. Most experts agree that there's likely a genetic basis for autism spectrum disorders. The theory is that an abnormal gene is switched on in the early stages of development, before birth, and that this gene affects other genes that coordinate a child's brain development.

It is now politically incorrect to refer to anyone as mentally retarded. The polite and proper term to use now is intellectually disabled. Either way there is very little mention of the fact that many persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnoses are severely intellectually challenged. In the world's autism communities there are many who perceive it as an insult to mention the existence of the intellectually disabled autistic population.

some well known autism researchers work hard at showing the world how intelligent autistic persons really are, even those who cannot demonstrate that intelligence with any obvious ability to communicate or function in the real world.

The mere mention of the existence of low functioning autistic persons with serious intellectual challenges is forbidden.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) tend to stare at people's mouths rather than their eyes. Now, an NIH-funded study in 2-year-olds with the social deficit disorder suggests why they might find mouths so attractive: lip-sync—the exact match of lip motion and speech sound.

Such audiovisual synchrony preoccupied toddlers who have autism, while their unaffected peers focused on socially meaningful movements of the human body, such as gestures and facial expressions.

"Typically developing children pay special attention to human movement from very early in life, within days of being born. But in children with autism, even as old as two years, we saw no evidence of this," explained Ami Klin, Ph.D., of the Yale Child Study Center, who led the research. "Toddlers with autism are missing rich social information imparted by these cues, and this is likely to adversely affect the course of their development."

. As posited by Henry and Kamila Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, suggests that the fundamental problem in autism-spectrum disorders is not a social deficiency, but rather an hypersensitivity to experience, which includes an overwhelming fear response.

“There are those who say autistic people don’t feel enough,” says Kamila Markram. “We’re saying exactly the opposite: They feel too much.” Virtually all people with ASD report various types of oversensitivity and intense fear

“I think most people with ASD feel emotional empathy and care about the welfare of others very deeply.”

The authors found that 11% of the typically developing children and 31% of the ASD had a documented visual impairment (myopia, astigmatism, etc). This difference was statistically significant. That is, children with ASD were significantly more likely than typically developing children to have these conditions. Children with autism also displayed significantly poorer visual acuity (but within normal limits), and lower convergence. Convergence refers to the process by which the eyes move towards each other to maintain focus on approaching or close-range objects.

The findings of reduced visual acuity in children with autism when compared to typically developing children contradict previous studies that have shown enhanced visual acuity in autism. This brings us to a major limitation of this study that was correctly noted by the authors.

Limited convergence therefore would be associated with more limited depth perception. I find this intriguing because the neuropsychological profile of children with high functioning autism is often very similar to what is observed in kids with non-verbal learning disabilities (including relative weaknesses in motor-visual functioning). In addition, many parents with children with ASD report that their kids have trouble with sports and other physical activities. I thus wonder how much the reduced convergence observed in ASD may affect the motor-visual functioning in autism.