Links for Keyword: Autism

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Low birthweight 'linked to autism', says US study

Babies born weighing less than 4lb (1.8kg) could be more prone to developing autism than children born at normal weight, a study suggests. Writing in Pediatrics journal, US researchers followed 862 New Jersey children born at a low birthweight from birth to the age of 21. Some 5% were diagnosed with autism, compared to 1% of the general population. But experts say more research is needed to confirm and understand the link. Links between low birthweight and a range of motor and cognitive problems have been well established by previous research. But the researchers say this is the first study to establish that these children may also have a greater risk of developing autism spectrum disorders. The babies in the study were born between September 1984 and July 1987 in three counties in New Jersey. They all weighed between 0.5kg and 2kg or a maximum of about 4.4lb. At the age of 16, 623 children were screened for risk of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Of the 117 who were found to be positive in that screening, 70 were assessed again at age 21. BBC © 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15915 - Posted: 10.17.2011

'Autistic' mice created – and treated

by Chelsea Whyte A new strain of mice engineered to lack a gene with links to autism displays many of the hallmarks of the condition. It also responds to a drug in the same way as people with autism, which might open the way to new therapies for such people. It's not the first mouse strain to have symptoms of autism, and previous ones have already been useful models for studying the condition. Daniel Geschwind at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues tried a fresh approach, however. Rather than simply examining existing strains to identify mice with autistic-like behaviour, they engineered mice to lack a gene called Cntnap2, which had already been implicated in autism. Cntnap2 is the largest gene on the genome, clocking in at 2.5 million bases, and is responsible for regulating brain circuits involved in language and speech. Geschwind was initially sceptical that the modified mice would display the behaviour typical of autism in humans, because the neural pathways in the two species are thought to be fairly different. "One has to be cautious," he says. "What is an autistic mouse going to look like?" Surprisingly, he says, it turns out to be a lot like a human with autism. "Knockout" mice lacking the gene were less vocal than their genetically unaltered littermates, and less social as well. They also showed repetitive behaviour such as grooming which was "wild almost to the point of self-injury", says Geschwind. These three symptoms are the ones normally used to diagnose autism in humans. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Autistic and Seeking a Place in an Adult World

By AMY HARMON MONTCLAIR, N.J. — For weeks, Justin Canha, a high school student with autism, a love of cartoons and a gift for drawing, had rehearsed for the job interview at a local animation studio. As planned, he arrived that morning with a portfolio of his comic strips and charcoal sketches, some of which were sold through a Chelsea gallery. Kate Stanton-Paule, the teacher who had set up the meeting, accompanied him. But his first words upon entering the office were, like most things involving Justin, not in the script. “Hello, everybody,” he announced, loud enough to be heard behind the company president’s door. “This is going to be my new job, and you are going to be my new friends.” As the employees exchanged nervous glances that morning in January 2010, Ms. Stanton-Paule, the coordinator of a new kind of “transition to adulthood” program for special education students at Montclair High School, wondered if they were all in over their heads. Justin, who barely spoke until he was 10, falls roughly in the middle of the spectrum of social impairments that characterize autism, which affects nearly one in 100 American children. He talks to himself in public, has had occasional angry outbursts, avoids eye contact and rarely deviates from his favorite subject, animation. His unabashed expression of emotion and quirky sense of humor endear him to teachers, therapists and relatives. Yet at 20, he had never made a true friend. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Vaccines given a clean bill of health

Erika Check Hayden Vaccines are largely safe, and do not cause autism or diabetes, the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) said in a report issued today. This conclusion followed a review of more than 1,000 published research studies. "We looked very hard and found very little evidence of serious adverse harms from vaccines," says Ellen Wright Clayton, chairwoman of the reporting committee and director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. "The message I would want parents to have is one of reassurance." The report, commissioned in 2009 by the US Health Resources and Services Administration, covers the eight vaccines that comprise the majority of claims filed with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which compensates people for adverse health effects from any of 11 vaccines. The eight vaccines under review were those for chickenpox; influenza; hepatitis B; human papillomavirus; diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP); measles, mumps and rubella (MMR); hepatitis A; and meningococcal disease. According to the report, evidence "convincingly supports a causal relationship" for only 14 specific adverse effects, including a range of infections associated with the chickenpox vaccine; brain inflammation and fever-induced seizures related to the MMR vaccine; allergic reactions to six of the vaccines and fainting or local inflammation caused by injection of any of them. The report noted that many of the more serious events, such as those linked to the chickenpox and MMR vaccines, only occur in children with weakened immune systems. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Empathy enhanced by magnetic stimulation of the brain

by Linda Geddes KENZO LOW could always look people in the eyes, but it hurt. "I felt a piercing intrusive sensation, like they were threatening me," he says. All that changed when he had a non-invasive form of brain stimulation. The idea was to see if it would alter any of his Asperger's symptoms. Several months afterwards, he noticed a positive change in the way he interacted with his aunt: "I could look at her the entire time she spoke to me without flinching or cringing inside." Low is one of a handful of people participating in the first clinical trials to test whether transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) might boost social skills in people with autism spectrum disorders. As well as gaining insight into how an autistic person's brain functions, it is beginning to look as if certain facets of ASD might be treatable - assuming of course that a person wants such intervention. Early results suggest that empathy and social functioning improve when a small area at the front of the brain is stimulated, while ability to communicate and concentration appear to be boosted when TMS is used to suppress activity in a different region of the brain. "We're not proposing that this is likely to be a cure," says Paul Fitzgerald of the Monash Alfred Psychiatry Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia, who is leading the research that Low has been participating in. "But even if we only get short-term benefits, or they only occur in a small percentage of patients, it is really one of the first demonstrations that we can do something at a biological level that might be therapeutic." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 15720 - Posted: 08.25.2011

Chance of having more than one autistic child higher than thought

By Genevra Pittman Siblings of kids with autism have a higher risk of being diagnosed with the disorder than previously believed, suggests a new study. The analysis of more than 600 three-year-olds with an older autistic sibling found that almost one in five of them had an autism spectrum disorder, which includes Asperger’s syndrome and similar conditions. That suggests pediatricians need to keep an extra eye on those siblings, even as toddlers -- because early interventions with therapy and extra support might help keep their symptoms to a minimum, researchers said. “We know that the brain at young ages is more amenable to change,” said study author Wendy Stone, of the University of Washington Autism Center in Seattle. “When children are showing signs (of autism) even before the diagnosis is official, we need to start thinking about, how can we help parents within the course of their everyday activities to promote their child’s social and emotional development?” she told Reuters Health. The findings, she said, also show that autism rates -- now estimated at about one in every 110 U.S. kids -- probably aren’t going to decrease anytime soon. Previous studies estimated that between 3 and 14 percent of autistic kids’ younger siblings also had the condition. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters

‘Environment’ Poses a Knotty Challenge in Autism

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. Parents of children with autism often ask pediatricians like me about the cause of the condition, and parents-to-be often ask what they can do to reduce the risk. But although there is more research in this area than ever before, it sometimes feels as if it’s getting harder, not easier, to provide answers that do justice to the evidence and also offer practical guidance. Recent research has taught us more about the complexity of the genetics of autism, but the evidence also has suggested an important role for environmental exposures. It has become a very complicated picture: Genes matter, but we usually can’t tell how. Environmental exposures matter, but we usually don’t know which. In July, a study of autism in twins was published online in Archives of General Psychiatry. Researchers looked at almost 200 sets of twins in California. In each pair, one twin was autistic. The study sought to determine how likely the second twin was to have some form of autism. If autism was highly heritable, identical twins should have been far more likely to both have autism than fraternal twins. But the researchers found that fraternal twins were unexpectedly likely to both have autism. The implication is that something in their common gestational or early childhood experience may have contributed to this similarity. “The data definitely did surprise me,” said Dr. Joachim Hallmayer, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. “I expected the fraternal twin rates to be lower than what we found.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

One problem, many paths: Autism’s many genetic players may act through common networks

By Laura Sanders Though the diagnostic code scrawled on a doctor’s chart might suggest otherwise, each person who lives with an autism spectrum disorder has a very private disease. An avalanche of new genetic data shows clearly that there is no single culprit in autism. Each case stems from a unique jumble of genetic and environmental triggers, which makes figuring out one clear cause for every person’s disorder impossible. This news may sound grim, but it contains a glimmer of hope. By uncovering huge numbers of genetic aberrations, scientists say, they have the opportunity to begin piecing together all of the disparate threads weaving through autism to find the commonalities. A suite of new studies have identified numerous genetic changes that may have a role in the disorder, some of which could help scientists understand why boys are more vulnerable than girls, for instance. And some of the genes affected by these changes appear to be players in common networks of molecular activity in the brain. New work shows that many genetic changes impair nerve cell communication. Understanding this process and finding other common cellular activities that go awry may lead to powerful ways to combat autism, regardless of what caused it. “Parents and families have been tremendously patient,” says child psychiatrist and geneticist Matthew State of the Yale University School of Medicine. “They’ve been promised a lot by geneticists for a long time, and it’s been tougher than any of us expected to deliver.” But the flood of studies in the last few months reflects tremendous progress, he says. “These are all, in their own way, making a chink in the armor.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Environment blamed for autism

By Tina Hesman Saey A study of twins in California downgrades the role genes play in autism, but the work doesn’t hold water with some autism researchers. Previous studies indicated that autism spectrum disorders are due mainly to genes. But the new study suggests that environment — including conditions in the womb, age of parents and other factors — may account for a greater fraction of the risk of developing autism spectrum disorders. Other studies estimated genetic heritability of autism to be as high as 90 percent, meaning that genetic factors account for the vast majority of variables contributing to the development of autism. But the new study suggests that genetic heritability accounts for just 37 percent of variation in risk of classical autism and 38 percent of other autism spectrum disorders, such as Asperger syndrome. Shared environmental factors are responsible for 55 percent of autism and 58 percent of autism spectrum disorders, researchers report online July 4 in the Archives of General Psychiatry. “People are, more and more, recognizing that autism is a complex disorder that would be hard to explain with genes alone,” says study coauthor Joachim Hallmayer, a psychiatric geneticist at Stanford University. But some researchers question whether the new estimates accurately reflect the contributions of genes and environment to autism. “When somebody gets a totally different answer from what anyone else has seen, you need to see it a few more times before you believe it,” says Susan Folstein, a child psychiatrist at the University of Miami whose 1977 twin study found that autism has a large genetic component. Before that study, autism was often blamed on bad parenting and cold, withdrawn “refrigerator mothers.” Folstein fears that the new study will cause a resurgence in that attitude. “We just lost the battle again. It’s all the mother’s fault,” she says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

New Study Implicates Environmental Factors in Autism

By LAURIE TARKAN A new study of twins suggests that environmental factors, including conditions in the womb, may be at least as important as genes in causing autism. The researchers did not say which environmental influences might be at work. But other experts said the new study, released online on Monday, marked an important shift in thinking about the causes of autism, which is now thought to affect at least 1 percent of the population in the developed world. “This is a very significant study because it confirms that genetic factors are involved in the cause of the disorder,” said Dr. Peter Szatmari, a leading autism researcher who is the head of child psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at McMaster University in Ontario. “But it shifts the focus to the possibility that environmental factors could also be really important.” As recently as a few decades ago, psychiatrists thought autism was caused by a lack of maternal warmth. And while that notion has been discarded in favor of genetic explanations, there has been growing acceptance that genes do not tell the whole story, in part because autism rates appear to have increased far faster than our genes can evolve. “I think we now understand that both genetic and environmental factors have to be taken seriously,” said Dr. Joachim Hallmayer, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford and the lead author of the new study, which is to be published in the November issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Brain out of sync in toddlers with autism

Ferris Jabr, reporter Toddlers with autism are more likely to have brain regions that are out of sync. The discovery could help doctors to diagnose the disorder at an earlier age. Coordination of brainwaves is thought to help different areas of the brain communicate effectively with one another. To see whether abnormal synchronisation may occur in autism, Ilan Dinstein at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot in Israel, and colleagues, analysed the brain activity of 72 toddlers as they slept inside functional MRI scanners. The toddlers, who were aged between 1 and 3-and-a-half years old, were classed as either "normally developing", or diagnosed as having delayed language skills or autism. Dinstein's team aggregated data from several different scanning sessions, zeroing in on brain regions that previous studies have shown are synchronised in typically developing children such as the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) - linked with language comprehension and attention - and the superior temporal gyrus (STG) - involved in auditory processing. Such regions remain synchronised even in the complete absence of external stimuli during rest or sleep. Abnormal synchronisation appeared in significantly more autistic children than the other two groups. Using this data, the researchers were then able to reverse engineer the results to try to predict whether a child has autism based solely on synchronised brain activity. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Childhood autism spikes in geek heartlands

by Andy Coghlan Childhood autism is two to four times as common in Eindhoven, the centre of the Dutch information technology industry, as it is in two comparably sized Dutch cities with far fewer IT employees. The result supports the suggestion that people who work in hi-tech engineering and computing industries, which demand the kinds of systemising and analytical skills often seen in people with autism, are more likely to have autistic children too. Rising autism has also been seen in regions such as Silicon Valley, California. But the Dutch study claims to be the first to directly ask whether concentrations of IT workers mean more children with autism too. Researchers analysed data on autism prevalence on 62,000 schoolchildren in three Dutch cities, each with populations of around quarter a million. In Eindhoven, where 30 per cent of all jobs are in IT and computing industries, there were 229 cases of autism-spectrum disorders per 10,000 school-age children. This was more than double the corresponding figure of 84 in Haarlem and four times the figure of 57 in Utrecht. Each city has half as many IT jobs as Eindhoven. By contrast, all three cities had the same prevalence of two other childhood psychiatric conditions unrelated to autism, namely attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyspraxia. "These figures are pretty striking," says Rosa Hoekstra of the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Patterns: Prenatal Vitamins May Ward Off Autism

By RONI CARYN RABIN Scientists have identified an unexpected factor that may play a significant role in the development of autism: prenatal vitamins. A new study reports that mothers of children with autism and autism spectrum disorders were significantly less likely than mothers of children without autism to have taken prenatal vitamins three months before conception and in the first month of pregnancy. The finding, published in the July issue of the journal Epidemiology, suggests that taking vitamins in this period may help prevent these disorders, reducing the risk by some 40 percent. Researchers recruited children through a California project, the Childhood Autism Risks From Genetics and Environment Study, or Charge, enrolling 288 children with autism and 144 with autism spectrum disorders, and compared them with 278 children who were developing normally. Blood was drawn for genomic analysis, and mothers were asked about their consumption of vitamins before and during pregnancy. In mothers and children with gene variants that affect folate metabolism, not taking prenatal vitamins before conception was associated with an up to sevenfold increase in the risk of autism, the researchers found. Prenatal vitamins are rich in folate. “Taking prenatal vitamin supplements even before conception is a concrete step concerned parents can take,” said Dr. Irva Hertz-Picciotto, the study’s senior author and principal investigator of the Charge study. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of Internal States
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 15425 - Posted: 06.14.2011

Are chemicals contributing to autism rise?

By Karen Weintraub, Globe Correspondent Could household chemicals be causing an increase in autism? The evidence isn’t cut and dried, but a coalition of environmental and health advocates said yesterday that it’s suggestive enough for people to worry. Shoppers can’t possibly avoid all potentially dangerous chemicals on their own -- questions have been raised about chemicals found in canned foods, clothing, furniture, cleaning products, pesticides, air pollution, cosmetics, toys and baby items. So, the government must do more to regulate them, the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families group said. “We need chemical policy that protects our most vulnerable citizens,” said Donna Ferullo, director of program research at the Autism Society, a parent advocacy group. The Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition called for an overhaul of the three-decades-old federal law that regulates chemical safety, called the Toxic Substances Control Act. Earlier this year, Senator Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ, introduced legislation to modify the law, though the odds of passing major chemical industry reform in an election year are slim. Chemical industry consultant Neal Langerman said he agrees that it’s time to overhaul the 1976 law -- not because of autism concerns, but because it doesn’t reflect current realities. The law was written, he said, at a time when scientists thought low-level exposure to most chemicals was safe. Now, Langerman said, we realize “we are more sensitive to these low levels than we thought we were.” And we’re also less willing today to believe companies and government when they say -- but don’t prove -- that products are safe. “That’s a significant change in our society,” said Langerman, also an officer with the American Chemical Society, a professional group for chemists. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Genetics offers more hints about autism

By Laura Sanders A plethora of genetic changes contributes to autism spectrum disorders, three new studies find. The new genetic data illustrate why researchers have struggled to find a single cause for the baffling suite of developmental and behavioral conditions, and may help point the way to a unifying process underlying them. The studies also begin to explain why autism spectrum disorders are more common in boys than girls. Though the specific genetic changes identified by a trio of papers in the June 9 Neuron account for only 5 to 8 percent of autism cases, what they reveal about the biology of autism may have much wider implications. “I think we’re still scratching the surface,” says Steve Scherer of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, who wasn’t involved in the studies. “But we’re getting there, and I think these are very important papers.” Two of the studies examined DNA samples taken from carefully screened families, a cohort called the Simons Simplex Collection. Each family included two unaffected parents and one high-functioning child diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. For most families, an unaffected sibling was also included. By studying genetic changes in unaffected family members, the researchers could find abnormalities — specifically, duplications and deletions of DNA called copy number variations — that were not passed down from parents but arose spontaneously in the genomes of affected children. “What was surprising is how unique each of the variants is,” says geneticist Huda Zoghbi of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “This really speaks to the immense heterogeneity of autism. We suspected it, but these data show it clearly.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Autism blurs distinctions between brain regions

Autism blurs the molecular differences that normally distinguish different brain regions, a new study suggests. Among more than 500 genes that are normally expressed at significantly different levels in the front versus the lower middle part of the brain’s outer mantle, or cortex, only 8 showed such differences in brains of people with autism, say researchers funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. "Such blurring of normally differentiated brain tissue suggests strikingly less specialization across these brain areas in people with autism," explained Daniel Geschwind, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, Los Angeles, a grantee of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health. "It likely reflects a defect in the pattern of early brain development." Graph displaying genetic differences of autism A module of co-expressed genes that code for neurons and their connections tend to be under-expressed in many individuals with autism (red), compared to controls (gray). He and his colleagues published their study online May 26, 2011 in the journal Nature. The research was based on postmortem comparisons of brains of people with the disorder and healthy controls. In fetal development, different mixes of genes turn on in different parts of the brain to create distinct tissues that perform specialized functions. The new study suggests that the pattern regulating this gene expression goes awry in the cortex in autism, impairing key brain functions.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Nervous System and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development; Chapter 2: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 15394 - Posted: 06.04.2011

Clues to autism's roots from brain study

By Laura Sanders Though autism and related disorders vary widely from person to person, certain brain changes may be at the root of the disorder. Changes in genes important for brain-cell development and function contribute to the poorly understood disorder, a study published online May 25 in Nature shows. Finding genetic contributors to the multifaceted disease might help scientists design better ways to treat it. “For us to be able to develop specific therapies that treat the cause, you have to understand the genetics,” says pediatrician and autism researcher Hakon Hakonarson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In the study, a team led by Daniel Geschwind of UCLA analyzed post-mortem tissue from the brains of 19 people with autism and 17 without. Patterns of gene activity differed in the two types of brains, as measured by levels of RNA molecules, which shuttle information from DNA to the protein factories in cells. In the healthy brains, hundreds of genes behaved differently depending whether they were found in the frontal or the temporal region of the brain. But in the autistic brains, only a handful of genes acted differently in the two areas. This lack of distinction may be set on course very early in a child’s life, Geschwind says. Many of the genes identified by the research are important for brain development and behavior. What’s more, the changes in the autism spectrum disorder brains were very similar to each other. “It looks like there’s a common pathology in autism, which is a surprising thing,” Geschwind says. “In spite of having many different causes, there’s some shared convergence.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Research Uncovers Raised Rate of Autism

By CLAUDIA WALLIS An ambitious six-year effort to gauge the rate of childhood autism in a middle-class South Korean city has yielded a figure that stunned experts and is likely to influence the way the disorder’s prevalence is measured around the world, scientists reported on Monday. The figure, 2.6 percent of all children aged 7 to 12 in the Ilsan district of the city of Goyang, is more than twice the rate usually reported in the developed world. Even that rate, about 1 percent, has been climbing rapidly in recent years — from 0.6 percent in the United States in 2007, for example. But experts said the findings did not mean that the actual numbers of children with autism were rising, simply that the study was more comprehensive than previous ones. “This is a very impressive study,” said Lisa Croen, director of the autism research program at Kaiser-Permanente Northern California, who was not connected with the new report. “They did a careful job and in a part of the world where autism has not been well documented in the past.” For the study, which is being published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers from the Yale Child Study Center, George Washington University and other leading institutions sought to screen every child aged 7 to 12 in Ilsan, a community of 488,590, about the size of Staten Island. By contrast, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and most other research groups measure autism prevalence by examining and verifying records of existing cases kept by health care and special education agencies. That approach may leave out many children whose parents and schools have never sought a diagnosis. © 2011 The New York Times Company

A Child Regresses. Is Autism to Blame?

By THE NEW YORK TIMES If a young child suddenly stops speaking, is autism to blame? That is among the questions recently posed by readers of the Consults blog. Here, Dr. Fred Volkmar, director of the Yale Child Study Center, explores the issue of regression in children and the diagnosis of autism. For more information on autism, see the additional responses in “Ask the Experts About Autism,” and The Times Health Guide: Autism. The issue of loss of skills, or regression, in children with autism is an interesting and complicated area. Dr. Leo Kanner, a pioneer of child psychiatry, had first described autism as a congenital condition that children are born with. Fairly shortly thereafter, though, some clinicians noted that about 20 percent of the time, parents said that a child would seem to develop normally but then lose skills. Subsequent work has generally confirmed this figure, more or less, but for several reasons, we still don’t understand the phenomenon or its significance. For one thing, the earliest signs of autism can be somewhat subtle. These signs become more numerous as children get past their first birthday. That’s one reason that screening tests for autism focus on children ages 18 to 24 months, when there are more things to look for. In addition, parents can vary tremendously in how sophisticated they are as observers. Studies suggest that if you use parents’ reports about their children as the primary way to classify regression, results can be unreliable. A few years ago, a medical student worked with me and went over hundreds of cases of children with autism and other problems, looking for parents’ reports of regression, but also looking at reports of early milestones and other possible early warning signs. The number of cases of regression were about what we expected, but there were several interesting findings. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Checklist could spot children with autism earlier

By Rob Stein, Pediatricians could diagnose children with autism earlier by asking parents to fill out a simple, five-minute checklist when they take their babies in for their first-year checkups, according to research released Thursday. The federally funded study involving more than 10,000 infants found that the questionnaire appeared to identify about half of children who eventually would be diagnosed with the brain disorder. Early diagnosis would allow doctors to treat children with autism sooner, when therapy appears to be much more effective. By allowing scientists to study children with autism when they are younger, it could also provide crucial new insights into the disease’s causes, further dispelling discredited theories about vaccines and other supposed risk factors, as well as leading to better ways to diagnose and treat the disorder. “This study is enormously important from the practical standpoint of helping families out,” said Karen Pierce of the University of California at San Diego, who led the research. “And from a scientific standpoint, it is undeniably important because for the first time you can study autism before the full-blown symptoms come on line.” More than 36,000 children are diagnosed each year in the United States with autism spectrum disorder, a condition marked by social, communication and behavioral problems. Most are not identified until about age 5. Researchers have been trying to find the signs in younger children in order to start intensive therapy sooner and try to minimize abnormal behaviors.

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