Autism Teachers

Studies such as this point out the problems of using only behavioral criteria to make the diagnosis of autism. In this study, a multidisciplinary team consisting for child psychiatrists, child psychologists, and speech therapists were used to make the diagnosis. With no hubris intended, we think a neurologist should be included on every autism team. Understanding the specific neurological challenges a child faces can help much more than a more one-size-fits-all approach to intervention.

When we have assessed children with an autism or possible autism diagnosis, we have seen the same very wide clinical variation in terms of neurological exam - you would not treat a child with visual processing disorders with purely behavioral modification, nor a child with auditory and language processing problems with facial recognition training.

Historically, autism was first recognized as an entity by a psychiatrist, but as it becomes even more clear that the behavioral label subsumes many different neurological conditions, it's time for business-as-usual to come to an end.

. 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.”

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".

The changes influence genes which help form and maintain connections between brain cells.

The Nature study highlighted one common genetic variant which, if corrected would cut cases of autism by 15%.

Previously, other genetic variants have been linked to autism, but they are all relatively rare.

Leo Lytel was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. But by age 9 he had overcome the disorder. His progress is part of a growing body of research that suggests at least 10 percent of children with autism can "recover" from it - most of them after undergoing years of intensive behavioral therapy.

She presented research this week at an autism conference in Chicago that included 20 children who, according to rigorous analysis, got a correct diagnosis but years later were no longer considered autistic.

Skeptics question the phenomenon, but University of Connecticut psychology professor Deborah Fein is among those convinced it's real.

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.

reply from lead researcher Hakon Hakonarson:

The variant we detected at the 5p14 locus (common variant) has been present for a long time in the genome (most likely since man moved out of Africa) and this region is highly conserved between species which means that it is regulating gene expression and gene function (the CHD10 gene being the most critical one).

We know that the association is strongest in those individual who have the greatest abnormalities in social skills/interactions and those that show least interest in interactions; we have not detected any other characteristics yet, but we keep working on it.