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Tero Toivanen

Top Autism Facts - Top Autism Facts - 2 views

autism.about.com/...topfacts.htm

autism facts list article

shared by Tero Toivanen on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • 1. Autism Is a 'Spectrum' Disorder
  • it is possible to be bright, verbal, and autistic as well as mentally retarded, non-verbal and autistic.
  • 2. Asperger Syndrome is a High Functioning Form of Autism
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The only significant difference between AS and High Functioning Autism is that people with AS usually develop speech right on time while people with autism usually have speech delays.
  • 3. People With Autism Are Different from One Another
  • 4. There Are Dozens of Treatments for Autism - But No 'Cure'
  • 5. There Are Many Theories on the Cause of Autism, But No Consensus
  • 6. People Don't Grow Out of Autism
  • 7. Families Coping with Autism Need Help and Support
  • 8. There's No 'Best School' for a Child with Autism
  • Even in an ideal world, "including" a child with autism in a typical class may not be the best choice. Decisions about autistic education are generally made by a team made up of parents, teachers, administrators and therapists who know the child well.
  • 9. There Are Many Unfounded Myths About Autism
  • Since every person with autism is different, however, such "always" and "never" statements simply don't hold water.
  • 10. Autistic People Have Many Strengths and Abilities
  • They are also ideal candidates for many types of careers.
  • Tero Toivanen on 22 Feb 10
     
    This brief, pithy article provides the bare bones basics for a quick read - along with links to more in-depth information for those who want to know.
Tero Toivanen

Genes implicated in twins' autism | The Autism News - 1 views

www.theautismnews.com/...nes-implicated-in-twins-autism

autism genetics genes twins research diagnoses environment

shared by Tero Toivanen on 05 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Researchers have known for years that when one identical twin has autism, the other is also likely to be diagnosed with it – evidence that autism likely has a genetic component.
  • Researchers at Kennedy Krieger Institute studied 277 pairs of twins and found that when one identical twin had the disorder, the other developed it 88 percent of the time; for fraternal twins, that figure was 31 percent.
  • Despite this progress in unlocking the mysteries of autism, scientists have simply confirmed that there are likely numerous genetic links to autism.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Each discovery explains just a tiny fraction of autism’s causes. Researchers think the great majority – 90 percent – of autism cases have a genetic cause, but they’ve found fewer than 10 percent of the triggers.
  • researchers have found about 50 genes so far that might be tied to autism, which explain very few cases, he said.
  • Autism isn’t one disease; it’s too individual to locate just one genetic cause. It’s not like cystic fibrosis, a disorder for which researchers have identified one gene – and tests to diagnose it.
  • autism researchers envision that a wide variety of gene defects are responsible for the symptoms collectively known as autism spectrum disorders. The disabilities, different in each child, range from the mild Asperger syndrome to more severe impairments in social interaction and communication.
  • “It’s going to take some work before we understand the true causes of autism,” he said. “We need to make much more headway to ever have enough understanding so that patient management and therapies can be improved.”
  • None of the new findings explains why more children are being diagnosed with autism. Genes, said Goldstein, tell only part of the story.
  • “The idea is there is an environmental interaction with the genetic component,” he said.
  • Autism may be inherited to some degree, but even twin studies show that not all sets of identical twins have autism. And when they do, they don’t always have the same severity of the disorder
  • That connection between genes and the environment, called epigenetics, might explain these distinctions
  • Tero Toivanen on 05 Jan 10
     
    Researchers have known for years that when one identical twin has autism, the other is also likely to be diagnosed with it - evidence that autism likely has a genetic component.
Tero Toivanen

New Year, New Decade Resolutions for the Autism Community - 0 views

autism.about.com/...s-for-the-autism-community.htm

autism research diagnosis subgroups treatment therapy

shared by Tero Toivanen on 01 Jan 10 - Cached
  • parents leaving their offices with an autism spectrum diagnosis for their child will have a clear plan of action for getting their child the help they need, where and when they need it.
  • Researchers will develop a better understanding of autistic subgroups, so that it will become possible to recommend appropriate treatments and therapies based on individuals' symptoms, challenges and strengths.
  • Less time, money, energy and angst will go into confrontation, and more time, money, energy and love will go into autism-related volunteerism, mentoring, program development, and other positive activities.
  • Tero Toivanen on 01 Jan 10
     
    Less time, money, energy and angst will go into confrontation, and more time, money, energy and love will go into autism-related volunteerism, mentoring, program development, and other positive activities.
Tero Toivanen

Facing Autism in New Brunswick: Intellectual Disability Acceptance in the Autism Community - 0 views

autisminnb.blogspot.com/...-disability-acceptance-in.html

autism autism spectrum intellectually disabled cognitively impaired ASD Asperger's Syndrome

shared by Tero Toivanen on 03 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Tero Toivanen on 03 Jan 10
     
    In this blog says: approximately 75-80% of persons with Autistic Disorder are intellectually disabled or cognitively impaired.
Tero Toivanen

Children with autistic traits remain undiagnosed - 3 views

www.physorg.com/news188483574.html

autsim diagnosis

shared by Tero Toivanen on 22 Mar 10 - Cached
  • However, the undiagnosed children were not deemed eligible for extra support at school or by specialized health services.
  • study also shows that there is a gender bias in diagnosing children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders - boys are more likely to receive a diagnosis than girls, even when they display equally severe symptoms.
  • Tero Toivanen on 22 Mar 10
     
    There are still many children who have autistic traits that are never diagnosed clinically
Tero Toivanen

Non-Verbal Autistics: Why No Words? - 1 views

autism.about.com/...bal-autistics-why-no-words.htm

autism non-verbal autistics Lisa Jo Rudy speak words apraxia echolalia

shared by Tero Toivanen on 10 May 10 - Cached
  • To be honest, I had assumed that those people who do not speak - but DO communicate - have physical issues with forming words.  After all, I reasoned, if a person wants to communicate but doesn't speak, it must be because speech is just too difficult. But it turns out that I may be wrong.  In fact, according to a top researcher in autism and communication (Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg, PhD of Boston University), "...the short answer is that we really don't know why some children with ASD don't learn to speak at all."
    • Tero Toivanen
      Tero Toivanen on 10 May 10
       
      This is the big question!
Tero Toivanen

Affordable Computer and Internet-based Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) Prog... - 5 views

autismspectrumdirectory.wordpress.com/...havioral-analysis-aba-programs

autism special education special needs ASD:teaching ASD:educators research ABA Applied Behavioral Analysis

shared by Tero Toivanen on 31 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Tero Toivanen on 31 Dec 10
     
    COMPUTER AND INTERNET-BASED APPLIED BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS (ABA) PROGRAMS
Tero Toivanen

Magnetic stimulation helps researchers trigger responses in autistic brain - The Boston... - 0 views

www.boston.com/...er_responses_in_autistic_brain

autsim Asperger Syndrome transcranial magnetic stimulation neuroscience

shared by Tero Toivanen on 09 Jun 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • Tero Toivanen on 09 Jun 09
     
    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.
Tero Toivanen

Autism Blog - » Blog Archive » Is there an autism epidemic - the latest science - 0 views

leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/?p=2023

autism epidemic Eric Fombonne autism-epidemic epidemiology omnibus experts science

shared by Tero Toivanen on 26 Mar 09 - Cached
  • 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.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Pervasive Developmental Disorders, including Autistic Disorder, Asperger Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder.
  • For autistic disorder, Fombonne says: The correlation between prevalence and year of publication was statistically significant and studies with prevalenceover 7/10,000 were all published since 1987. These findings point towards an increase in prevalence estimates in the last 15-20 years.
  • recent autism surveys have consistently identified smaller numbers of children with AS than those with autism within the same survey.
  • We therefore used for subsequent calculations an estimate of 6/10,000 for AS, recognizing the strong limitations of available data on AS.
  • How much lower is difficult to establish from existing data, but a ratio of 3 or 4 to 1 would appear an acceptable,
  • Eight studies provided data on childhood disintegrative disorder (CDD). Prevalence estimates ranged from 0 to 9.2/100,000.
  • Current evidence does not strongly support the hypothesis of a secular increase in the incidence of autism but power todetect time trends is seriously limited in existing datasets.
  • The upper-bound limit of the associated confidence interval (4.0/100,000) indicates that CDD is a very rare condition, with about 1 case to occur for every 103 cases of autistic disorder.
  • Whilst it is clear that prevalence estimates have gone up over time, this increase most likely represents changes in the concepts, definitions, service availability and awareness of autistic-spectrum disorders in both the lay and professional public.
  • The possibility that a true change in the underlying incidence has contributed to higher prevalence figures remains, however, to be adequately tested.
Tero Toivanen

Developmental regression in children with an autism spectrum disorder identified by a p... - 0 views

aut.sagepub.com/...357

autism early development regression

shared by Tero Toivanen on 18 Jun 09 - Cached
  • Tero Toivanen on 18 Jun 09
     
    These data indicate that some children with ASD experience a loss of skills in the first few years of life and may have a unique symptom profile.
Tero Toivanen

The link between autism and extraordinary ability | Genius locus | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...displaystory.cfm

autism savant extraordinary ability

shared by Tero Toivanen on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music.
  • Francesca Happé of King’s College, London, is one of them. As she observes, obsessional interests and repetitive behaviours would allow someone to practice, albeit inadvertently, whichever skill they were obsessed by. Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.
  • Simon Baron-Cohen, a doyen of the field who works at Cambridge University, draws similar conclusions. He suggests the secret of becoming a savant is “hyper-systematising and hyper-attention to detail”. But he adds sensory hypersensitivity to the list. His team have shown one example of this using what is known as the Freiburg visual acuity and contrast test, which asks people to identify the gap in a letter “c” presented in four different orientations. Those on the autistic spectrum do significantly better at this than do neurotypicals. That might help explain Dr Happé’s observations about coins and raindrops.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The upshot of these differences is that the columns in an autistic brain seem to be more connected than normal with their close neighbours, and less connected with their distant ones. Though it is an interpretative stretch, that pattern of connection might reduce a person’s ability to generalise (since disparate data are less easily integrated) and increase his ability to concentrate (by drawing together similar inputs).
  • Dr Snyder argues that savant skills are latent in everyone, but that access to them is inhibited in non-savants by other neurological processes. He is able to remove this inhibition using a technique called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation.
  • Tero Toivanen on 24 Apr 09
     
    A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King's College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that some of the symptoms associated with autism, including poor communication skills and an obsession with detail, are also exhibited by many creative types, particularly in the fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting.
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