Autism Teachers

The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are among the most widely used drugs for autism treatment, even though the effectiveness to date has been questionable. A new study published in the June issue of Archives of General Psychiatry reports that, not only are SSRIs ineffective, they may actually cause unintended side effects.

At the conclusion of the trial, nearly one-third (32.9%) of the patients receiving citalopram showed improvement in symptoms, but this was not significantly different from the 34.2% of patients who showed symptom improvement with placebo. Further, patients receiving citalopram were more likely to experience side effects, including nightmares, increased energy level, impulsiveness, decreased concentration, hyperactivity, diarrhea, insomnia, and dry skin than patients receiving placebo.

These results suggest that nonverbal children have specifically impaired imitation and pointing skills.

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.

Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have proposed a sweeping new theory of autism that suggests that the brains of people with autism are structurally normal but dysregulated, meaning symptoms of the disorder might be reversible.

The central tenet of the theory, published in the March issue of Brain Research Reviews, is that autism is a developmental disorder caused by impaired regulation of the locus coeruleus, a bundle of neurons in the brain stem that processes sensory signals from all areas of the body.

The new theory stems from decades of anecdotal observations that some autistic children seem to improve when they have a fever, only to regress when the fever ebbs.

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.

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.

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.

For example, Smith et al16 studied 10 individuals with autism specifically to investigate the effects of facilitator influence and level of assistance on the results of FC. Each subject had six sessions, two with no help, two with partial assistance, and two with full assistance. Results showed that there were no cases of correct responses from the subject unless the facilitator knew the correct response. In addition, numerous responses were typed by the subjects to stimuli that were shown only to the facilitator, and not the subject. Similar results have been found by Regal et al17 and Eberlin et al.1

One complication of the use of FC has been the allegation of abuse, particularly sexual abuse, that has been obtained from individuals through the use of FC against third persons. This has generated adverse publicity and caused severely negative consequences for families who may be unsure of the validity of the allegations. Because of legal mandates regarding reports of child abuse, this becomes a critical issue for teachers and pediatricians alike, who may find the credibility of the report highly questionable but are obligated to fulfill their legal responsibilities. Margolin20 notes that although more than 50 such allegations have resulted in legal proceedings, most have terminated before trial. The ethical dilemmas posed by FC for practitioners have been reviewed by Jacobson et al.8

It is important for the pediatrician to obtain current data on both AIT and FC as they become available. Until further information is available, the use of these treatments does not appear warranted at this time, except within research protocols.