by Melissa Healy An extra shot of testosterone, it seems, makes a man act like an animal. You know the type: one of those male birds that unfurls some of its most spectacular feathers when the ladies are around, or the buck who uses his crown of antlers to advertise his virility. In short, an animal prone to making showy displays of his power, beauty or wealth to win mates, gain allies and intimidate competitors. But for humans — American men, at least — new research suggests that this testosterone-driven display of prowess finds its expression in a preference for status goods. Whether it’s in his choice of top-shelf alcohol at the club, the watch on his wrist or the clothes he wears, a man under the influence of the male sex hormone is going to reach for the product that says to potential mates (and to competitors for those mates), “U can’t touch this.” This pursuit of status in the choice of manufactured goods is called “positional consumption.” It’s been a hot topic among evolutionary psychologists and now is finding its way into the study of marketing. Researchers from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania gave a supply of gel to 243 men, ages 18 to 55, and asked them to rub it all over their upper body. Some of the gels contained testosterone, others a placebo. Then the researchers asked the subjects to look at pictures and descriptions of five pairs of items — including watches, jeans and jackets — and judge which ones they preferred. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25210 - Posted: 07.16.2018

By Vikram K. Jaswal and Nameera Akhtar One of the most widely held beliefs about autistic people — that they are not interested in other people — is almost certainly wrong. Our understanding of autism has changed quite a bit over the past century, but this particular belief has been remarkably persistent. Seventy-five years ago, the first published account of autism described its subjects as “happiest when left alone” and “impervious to people.” Even now, a National Institutes of Health fact sheet suggests that autistic people are “indifferent to social engagement,” and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims that some “might not be interested in other people at all.” There is no question that autistic people can seem as though they are not interested in others. They may not make eye contact or they may repeat lines from movies that don’t seem relevant in the moment. They may flap their hands or rock their bodies in ways that other people find off-putting. But just because someone appears socially uninterested does not mean that he or she is. As we point out in a paper published last month in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, many autistic people say they are very interested in, and in some cases desperate for, social connection. They experience loneliness, say they want friends and even prefer two-player games to one-player games. As the autistic author Naoki Higashida writes, “I can’t believe that anyone born as a human being really wants to be left all on their own, not really,” adding, “The truth is, we’d love to be with other people.” So why do autistic people act in ways that make it appear they want to be left alone? Autism is a neurological condition that affects how people perceive, think and move. Autistic people say that some of their apparently unsociable behaviors result from these neurological characteristics. Paradoxically, they may behave in these ways when they are trying to engage with other people. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25209 - Posted: 07.16.2018

By Jeré Longman Researchers have found flaws in some of the data that track and field officials used to formulate regulations for the complicated cases of Caster Semenya of South Africa, the two-time Olympic champion at 800 meters, and other female athletes with naturally elevated testosterone levels. Three independent researchers said they believed the mistakes called into question the validity of a 2017 study commissioned by track and field’s world governing body, the International Federation of Athletics Associations, or I.A.A.F., according to interviews and a paper written by the researchers and provided to The New York Times. The 2017 study was used to help devise regulations that could require some runners to undergo medical treatment to lower their hormone levels to remain eligible for the sport’s most prominent international competitions, like the Summer Games. The researchers have called for a retraction of the study, published last year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. The study served as an underpinning for rules, scheduled to be enacted in November, which would establish permitted testosterone levels for athletes participating in women’s events from 400 meters to the mile. “They cannot use this study as an excuse or a reason for setting a testosterone level because the data they have presented is not solid,” one of the independent researchers, Erik Boye of Norway, said Thursday. The I.A.A.F. has updated its research, which was published last week, again in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. “The I.A.A.F. will not be seeking a retraction of the 2017 study,” the governing body said in a statement on Thursday. “The conclusions remain the same.” But the statement did little to dampen criticism by the independent researchers. The I.A.A.F. seems “bound to lose” an intended challenge by Semenya to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, a kind of Supreme Court for international athletics, said Boye, a cancer researcher and an antidoping expert. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 25200 - Posted: 07.13.2018

By Rachel Zamzow, The brains of children with autism fold differently than those of their typical peers, two new studies suggest. But whether they are unusually smooth or convoluted depends on location and age. Certain regions of the brain’s outer layer, the cerebral cortex, are more intricately folded in school-age children and adolescents with autism than they are in controls, according to one of the studies. In young people, this folding difference may be the most obvious structural feature of the autism brain, says Ralph-Axel Müller, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who led the study. Their brains don’t tend to show overall differences in brain volume or surface area, for example. “It seems like [brain folding] is actually a rather sensitive anatomical metric,” he says. By contrast, preschoolers with autism do not show exaggerated folding unless they have enlarged brains, according to a second study. And one brain region is atypically smooth in preschoolers with autism. Together, the studies add to evidence that folding follows a different developmental path in autism brains than in controls. “That is fascinating,” says Greg Wallace, assistant professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in either study. “Having autism is going to affect developmental trajectories of all kinds of things, including cortical structure,” he says. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Brain imaging
Link ID: 25190 - Posted: 07.10.2018

NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Dr. Randi Hutter Epstein about her new book Aroused, which tells the story of the scientific quest to understand human hormones. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: What do sleep, sex, insulin, mood and hunger have in common? Well, they're all controlled by hormones. But just a century ago, the power of our chemical messengers was barely understood. A new book by Dr. Randi Hutter Epstein called "Aroused" tells the stories of the scientists who work to explore and explain our hormones. Dr. Epstein joins us now from our New York bureau. Welcome to the program. RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN: Thanks for having me. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The book is organized around stories from key moments in hormone research. And I have to say, many of the studies they were doing in the early days were pretty gruesome. EPSTEIN: When we say study, we tend now to think of the randomised clinical controlled trial. You know, you have one sample here. You compare it to another. When they were doing studies, they were doing sort of weird experiments on people and dogs and all kind of things. So there was Harvey Cushing. He was one of the first people to talk about that pituitary tumors can really muck you up and like send a lot of hormones awry. But here's what he tried to do that didn't work out that's kind of a wacky experiment. He had a 48-year-old man that had a pituitary tumor that was making him have double vision and headaches and other endocrine issues. And Harvey Cushing thought, what if we take a nice, healthy pituitary of a baby that just died if there is a newborn that didn't make it and just implant that in this old man, and then we just revive him and he'd be back to normal. Newspapers got a hold of it, as media tends to do. And there were wonderful headlines like baby brain, you know, broken brain fixed by baby. And it went wild in terms of, wow, we can now cure broken, old brains. And, spoiler alert, let's just say that we don't replace baby pituitary glands into grownups when they have pituitary tumors anymore.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 25168 - Posted: 07.03.2018

Erika Engelhaupt The first scientific experiment on hormones took an approach that sounds unscientific: lopping off roosters’ testicles. It was 1848, and Dr. Arnold Berthold castrated two of his backyard roosters. The cocks’ red combs faded and shrank, and the birds stopped chasing hens. Then things got really weird. The doctor castrated two more roosters and implanted a testicle from each into the other’s abdomen. As Randi Hutter Epstein writes in a new book, each rooster “had nothing between his drumsticks but a lone testicle in his gut — yet he turned back into a full-fledged hen-chaser, red comb and all.” It was the first glimpse that certain body parts must produce internal secretions, as hormones were first known, and that these substances — and not just nerves — were important to the body’s control systems. Today, we know that hormones are chemical messengers shaping everything from sex and development to sleep, stress, mood, metabolism and behavior. Yet few of us know much about these powerful substances coursing through our bodies. That ignorance makes Aroused — titled for the Greek meaning of the word hormone — an invaluable guide. Epstein, a medical writer and M.D., tells the history of hormone research from that first rooster experiment, but cleverly moves back and forth through time, avoiding any hint of dry recitation. She explores the scientists who discovered and deciphered the effects of important hormones, as well as the personal stories of how people’s lives have been profoundly changed by these chemicals. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 25141 - Posted: 06.26.2018

By Seth Mnookin In February 1981, a British psychiatrist named Lorna Wing published an academic paper highlighting a 1944 clinical account of “autistic psychopathy” by a recently deceased Austrian physician named Hans Asperger. It wasn’t an obvious piece of work to single out: As Wing acknowledged, Asperger’s study had received almost no attention from English-language researchers in the decades since publication. That was about to change. Wing argued that the disorder that Asperger had described was a unique syndrome, distinct from autism, and should be considered as one of “a wider group of conditions which have, in common, impairment of development of social interaction, communication and imagination.” Wing, whose daughter had been diagnosed with autism in the 1950s, understood from her own experience that this was a disorder with multiple gradations, which affected people across the full spectrum of intellectual abilities. But this was a radical notion: At the time, one of the dominant paradigms for understanding autism was that the condition was caused by “refrigerator mothers” — emotionally frigid women who were not warm enough to nurture developing children. It’s impossible to know why Wing chose to ground her report in Asperger’s rather flimsy research — his paper, after all, had referenced just four patients — rather than relying solely on her own, significantly more impressive work. (It is worth pointing out that then, as now, virtually all eponymous psychiatric conditions were named after men.) Whatever her motivation, Wing’s efforts were successful: “Asperger’s syndrome,” the term she proposed, soon entered the clinical vernacular. By the 1990s, it was recognized around the world as an accepted diagnosis — and autism was no longer viewed as a singular condition. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25140 - Posted: 06.26.2018

By Sarah DeWeerdt, The Research on Autism and Development (RAD) Laboratory is located in a Tetris-like maze of brown wooden buildings, not far from the main campus of the University of California, San Diego. The lab itself is a nondescript warren of small beige rooms. But everything else about it is extraordinary. The first clue is a T-shirt one of the lab’s young interns wears on this sunny day in April, featuring the RAD Lab’s motto: “We play mind games.” One of the newer recruits, 20-year-old Naseem Baramki-Azar, sports a “Super Mario Bros.” shirt. A half-dozen other lab members huddle around computer screens displaying none of the usual fare of charts or spreadsheets: Instead, they’re hard at work making cartoon moles pop out of molehills, or fat spaceships careen toward the top of a computer screen. The lab’s director, Jeanne Townsend, and associate director, Leanne Chukoskie, periodically poke their heads in to check on the progress. The two women, a generation apart, are a study in contrasts. Townsend is reserved, with dark-framed square glasses; Chukoskie is a fast-talker with a California blond ponytail. But they finish each other’s sentences when they talk about their quest: to develop video games that can help children with autism. The project has stretched the two neuroscientists in unfamiliar directions. “I find myself doing a lot of computer science these days,” Chukoskie says. They are also fledgling entrepreneurs. Last year, they launched a startup, BrainLeap Technologies, also based in San Diego. That step, Chukoskie says, filled her with a mix of unenthusiastic “eh” and dread-filled “ugh.” Despite their discomfort, these two scientists are part of a growing cadre braving video-game development in search of novel therapies for autism. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25132 - Posted: 06.23.2018

By Jessica Wright, Spectrum o Young people with autism have more psychiatric and medical conditions than do their typical peers or those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a new study suggests. The early onset of these problems suggests they do not stem solely from a lifetime of poor healthcare, says lead researcher Lisa Croen, director of the Autism Research Program at Kaiser Permanente, a managed healthcare provider based in California. “One possible explanation is that there’s something physiologic or genetic that’s underlying not only what falls into the definition of autism, but also physical health and, more broadly, mental health,” she says. Some of the problems in young people with autism, such as obesity, may be related to poor diet, medication use and limited physical activity, says Alice Kuo, associate professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. Several studies have documented the co-occurrence of psychiatric and medical conditions in people with autism. Croen’s team published a similar analysis in 2015 of adults with autism aged 18 to 74. (The oldest control was 92.) © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25100 - Posted: 06.18.2018

By Hannah Furfaro, Spectrum Boys with autism have smaller heads, are shorter and weigh less at birth than their typical peers do—but all that changes by age 3, a new study suggests. The new work is among the first to link autism to rapid skeletal growth. “Mapping physical growth as well as growth in head circumference is really important because it implicates a lot of other mechanisms that might be involved, not just the brain,” says Cheryl Dissanayake, professor of developmental psychology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who co-led the work. Advertisement The findings hint that children with autism are smaller in utero, but their growth then accelerates: They catch up and surpass typical children in height and head size between birth and age 3. The results from the new study contrast with those from a 2014 report that found no difference in the rate of head or body growth between infants at risk for autism and controls. But many other studies have found differences in head size in children and adolescents with autism. “It’s now quite clear that growth dysregulation is a key and important phenomenon in autism,” says Eric Courchesne, co-director of the Autism Center of Excellence at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the research. Growth spurt: The researchers reviewed growth charts for 135 boys with autism and 74 typical boys who live in Victoria, Australia. (They excluded children taking medications that affect growth and those born prematurely.) © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25078 - Posted: 06.11.2018

Aimee Cunningham American kids with food allergies are more than twice as likely to have autism spectrum disorder as kids without, a study of national health data finds. The population-based finding adds to experimental evidence that there may be a connection between false steps or overreactions by the immune system and the neurodevelopmental disorder. Researchers looked only for an association between allergies and autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, among a total of 199,520 children ages 3 to 17 surveyed from 1997 to 2016 as part of the U.S. National Health Interview Survey. The study was not designed to discover what may be behind the link. The team found that, out of 1,868 children with autism, 216 had a food allergy — or about 11 percent. By comparison, only about 4 percent of children without autism had a food allergy, the researchers report online June 8 in JAMA Network Open. Kids with autism were also more likely to have respiratory or skin allergies like eczema than kids without autism. The number of children with autism has more than doubled since 2000, to a prevalence of 16.8 per 1,000 kids. Meanwhile, the number of kids with food allergies rose from 3.4 percent in 1997–1999 to 5.1 percent in 2009–2011. It is unknown whether developing food allergies may contribute to the development of autism, or vice versa, or if something else is causing both, says study coauthor and epidemiologist Wei Bao of the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health in Iowa City. “The causes of ASD remain unclear,” he says. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Autism; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25072 - Posted: 06.09.2018

/ By Michael Schulson Biswaroop Roy Chowdhury is an Indian engineer with, he says, an honorary Ph.D. in diabetes science from Alliance International University, a school in Zambia that bears many of the hallmarks of an online scam. He runs a small nutrition clinic near Delhi. Two months ago, Chowdhury posted a brief video on YouTube arguing that HIV is not real, and that anti-retroviral medication actually causes AIDS. He offered to inject himself with the blood of someone who had tested positive. Within weeks, the video had more than 380,000 views on YouTube. Tens of thousands more people watched on Facebook. Most of the viewers appear to be in India, where some 60,000 people die of HIV-related causes each year. After the March video, Chowdhury kept on posting. Follow-up videos on HIV racked up hundreds of thousands more hits. He also distributed copies of an ebook titled “HIV-AIDS: The Greatest Lie of 21st Century.” When I spoke with Chowdhury by phone last month, he claimed that 700 people had gotten in touch to say they had gone off their HIV medications. The actual number, he added, might be even higher. “We don’t know what people are doing on their own. I can only tell you about the people who report to us,” he said. Chowdhury’s figures are impossible to verify, but his skills with digital media are apparent — as are the troubling questions they raise about the role of Silicon Valley platforms in spreading misinformation. Such concerns, of course, aren’t new: Over the past two years, consumers, lawmakers, and media integrity advocates in the United States and Europe have become increasingly alarmed at the speed with which incendiary, inaccurate, and often deliberately false content spreads on sites like Facebook and YouTube — the latter a Google subsidiary. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25065 - Posted: 06.07.2018

By Randi Hutter Epstein My son Jack was born in London a month before his due date. The pediatrician said he was fine and we could go home. A few minutes later another doctor came in and asked to draw blood to try to figure out why Jack was premature. I refused, because we had already been given the go-ahead to leave. I heard the doctor tell the nurses to mark in my medical record, “Mother refuses treatment for her son.” “I’m not refusing treatment! I’m refusing a needless test!” I said from my bed. To which she mumbled, “Write down, ‘Mother is hormonal.’” And so began my rant. I stormed out of my room, dressed only in my husband’s white T-shirt and nestling my 12-hour-old son to my chest, and hollered after the fleeing doctor, “I am not hormonal!” The truth is I was hormonal. I had just given birth, so my progesterone (the hormone that maintained my pregnancy) had plummeted and my oxytocin (the hormone that squeezed my uterus to get the baby out, got the milk flowing and fostered mother-baby bonding) had skyrocketed. But that’s not what the doctor meant when she used the word “hormonal.” She meant I was a woman going off the rails. In 1939, James E. King, the president of the American Association of Obstetricians, Gynecologists and Abdominal Surgeons, devoted part of his presidential address to hormones and women’s craziness, or as he called it, their “peculiarities” and “inconsistencies.” He said hormone therapy, which was brand new at the time, would not only treat conditions like menstrual irregularities and infertility but would also help women manage their emotions and make them prettier (estrogen would supposedly bring back aging women’s youthful splendor). Then he concluded with this snide remark: “Will she, as some timid souls fear, mentally and physically dominate and enslave us as we in the past enslaved her? Probably not; so long as she is controlled by her reproductive glands, she will remain basically the same lovable and gracious homemaker.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 25057 - Posted: 06.05.2018

By Jessica Wright | A new patent on variants in an autism gene is unlikely to hold up in court, some experts say, but may still hamper research. In December, LabCorp, a healthcare diagnostics company in Burlington, North Carolina, received a patent that appears to cover any test that can identify three variants in the gene HOMER1. The patent relates to the testing of these variants to signal an increase in autism risk in a child or fetus. But the patent might also allow LabCorp to charge a licensing fee to any scientists who wish to sequence HOMER1 in people who may have autism. The patent revives a debate that many scientists hoped was behind them. In 2013, in response to the controversy over a breast cancer gene patent, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that genes cannot be patented. “Gene patents restrict access to genetic tests; they restrict access to confirmatory testing and second opinions; they squelch sharing of data and they squelch research,” says James Evans, who headed a government advisory task force on the impact of gene patents. “That should be a settled issue, so it’s very depressing to see that at least in some people’s minds, it’s not.” Evans is professor of genetics and medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25043 - Posted: 06.01.2018

By Darold A. Treffert How many children have “autism”? Is that number increasing? Is there an “epidemic” of autism or have we merely been continually refining it, expanding it and moving the goalposts since it was first described by Leo Kanner in 1943? I met my first child with autism in 1959, almost 60 years ago. I had the good fortune to learn about autism firsthand from Kanner himself, when he was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin Medical School and I was a medical student there. Then, in 1962, I started a Children’s Unit at Winnebago Mental Health Institute in Wisconsin, on which almost all the children were autistic. That’s also the unit on which I met my first savant. The question of autism prevalence engaged me even then. In 1970, I carried out the first U.S. study of the epidemiology of infantile autism, published in Archives of General Psychiatry. Actually, autism was then most commonly diagnosed formally as childhood schizophrenia. At that time, the Wisconsin Department of Health and Human services provided me with a printout listing all patients age 12 and under seen for evaluation or treatment and given a diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia between fiscal 1962 and 1967 in 30 community mental health and child guidance clinics; four state and county mental hospitals; three colonies NOT REAL NAMES and training schools; and the children’s treatment center, children’s diagnostic center and university hospitals. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 25014 - Posted: 05.24.2018

By Simon Baron-Cohen, The Austrian paediatrician Hans Asperger has long been recognized as a pioneer in the study of autism. He was even seen as a hero, saving children with the condition from the Nazi killing programme by emphasizing their intelligence. However, it is now indisputable that Asperger collaborated in the murder of children with disabilities under the Third Reich. Historian Herwig Czech fully documented this in the April 2018 issue of Molecular Autism (a journal I co-edit; see H. Czech Mol. Autism 9, 29; 2018). Now, historian Edith Sheffer’s remarkable book Asperger’s Children builds on Czech’s study with her own original scholarship. She makes a compelling case that the foundational ideas of autism emerged in a society that strove for the opposite of neurodiversity. Advertisement These findings cast a shadow on the history of autism, already a long struggle towards accurate diagnosis, societal acceptance and support. The revelations are also causing debate among autistic people, their families, researchers and clinicians over whether the diagnostic label of Asperger’s syndrome should be abandoned. In 1981, psychiatrist Lorna Wing published the paper in Psychological Medicine that first brought Asperger’s clinical observations to the attention of the English-speaking medical world, and coined the term Asperger’s syndrome (L. Wing Psychol. Med. 11, 115–129; 1981). A decade later, in the book Autism and Asperger Syndrome (1991), developmental psychologist Uta Frith translated into English the 1944 treatise by Asperger in which he claimed to have discovered autism. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24989 - Posted: 05.18.2018

By Lina Zeldovich, You can draw a straight line from the initial descriptions of many conditions—claustrophobia, for example, or vertigo—to their diagnostic criteria. Not so with autism. Its history has taken a less direct path with several detours, according to Jeffrey Baker, professor of pediatrics and history at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Autism was originally described as a form of childhood schizophrenia and the result of cold parenting, then as a set of related developmental disorders, and finally as a spectrum condition with wide-ranging degrees of impairment. Along with these shifting views, its diagnostic criteria have changed as well. Here is how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the diagnostic manual used in the United States, has reflected our evolving understanding of autism. Why was autism initially considered a psychiatric condition? When Leo Kanner, an Austrian-American psychiatrist and physician, first described autism in 1943, he wrote about children with “extreme autistic aloneness,” “delayed echolalia” and an “anxiously obsessive desire for the maintenance of sameness.” He also noted that the children were often intelligent and some had extraordinary memory. As a result, Kanner viewed autism as a profound emotional disturbance that does not affect cognition. In keeping with his perspective, the second edition of the DSM, the DSM-II, published in 1952, defined autism as a psychiatric condition—a form of childhood schizophrenia marked by a detachment from reality. During the 1950s and 1960s, autism was thought to be rooted in cold and unemotional mothers, whom Bruno Bettelheim dubbed “refrigerator mothers.” © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24959 - Posted: 05.10.2018

By Simon Baron-Cohen Five years ago, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) established autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as an umbrella term when it published the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), the primary guide to taxonomy in psychiatry. In creating this single diagnostic category, the APA also removed the subgroup called Asperger syndrome that had been in place since 1994. At the 2018 annual meeting of the International Society for Autism Research (INSAR), there will be plenty of discussion about diagnostic terminology: Despite the many advantages of a single diagnostic category, scientists will be discussing whether, to achieve greater scientific or clinical progress, we need subtypes. The APA created a single diagnostic label of ASD to recognize the important concept of the spectrum, since the way autism is manifested is highly variable. All autistic individuals share core features, including social and communication difficulties, unusually narrow interests, a strong need for repetition and, often, sensory issues. Yet these core features vary enormously in how they are manifested, and in how disabling they are. This variability provides one meaning of the term spectrum, and the single diagnostic label ASD makes space for this considerable variability. The term spectrum also refers to the heterogeneity in autism. There are huge disparities in many areas, such as language development or IQ, and in the presence or absence of co-occurring medical conditions and disabilities. This heterogeneity is also part of what is meant by a spectrum. And some autistic people also have very evident talents. This is another sense of the term spectrum, and the single diagnostic label makes room for this source of diversity, too. © 2018 Scientific America

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24943 - Posted: 05.05.2018

By Andrew Joseph, Researchers have been left empty-handed so far in their quest to uncover some measurable biological signal that could be used to diagnose autism spectrum disorder, leaving clinicians to identify the condition just based on a child’s behavior. But on Wednesday, scientists reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine that a hormone that regulates blood pressure could be one of those signposts. They found that low concentrations of the molecule—called arginine vasopressin, or AVP—in the cerebrospinal fluid corresponded to autism-like social behavior in male monkeys, while a high AVP concentration signaled the most social animals. And they discovered similar results when looking at AVP concentrations in the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, of a small group of boys. “It’s really exciting work,” said Dr. Mollie Meffert, a molecular neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, who was not involved in the study. “One of the most interesting things is the finding that the vasopressin in the CSF correlates with sociality in the macaques and in autism with children.” Meffert said if vasopressin concentrations are confirmed to correspond to autism, they could perhaps be used to diagnose the condition and as a gauge to measure the effect of treatment candidates. And Karen Parker, the lead author of the study and associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, said that the hormone could become a drug target if future studies show boosting its levels can assuage the social impairments of autism spectrum disorder. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Autism; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 24942 - Posted: 05.05.2018

By Edith Sheffer Millions of people are identified with Asperger’s syndrome, as a diagnosis, an identity and even an adjective. Asperger’s name has permeated our culture—yet I believe we should no longer invoke it. Naming medical diagnoses after individuals is an honor, meant to recognize those who discover conditions and to commend their work. While there is a move toward descriptive diagnostic labels in medicine, certain eponyms have entered our everyday language and will likely endure. Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, for example. Hans Asperger, however, neither described Asperger syndrome as we understand it today nor merits commendation. I have spent seven years researching his past in Nazi Vienna, uncovering his complicity in the Nazi regime and its “euthanasia” program that murdered children considered to be disabled. Contrary to Asperger’s reputation as a resister in the Third Reich, he approved the transfer of dozens of children to Vienna's killing center, Spiegelgrund, where they perished. He publicly spoke—and published—about the need to send the most “difficult cases” to Spiegelgrund. He was also close colleagues with top euthanasia figures in Vienna, including Erwin Jekelius, the director of Spiegelgrund, who was engaged to Hitler’s sister. Nazi ideology shaped Asperger’s research. Children in the Third Reich were to display community spirit, being enthusiastic participants in collective activities such as the Hitler youth. In Germany in the 1930s, Nazi psychiatrists identified children whom they believed lacked social feeling, unable to join the national community. Asperger, in his early 30s, warned against classifying children, arguing that they should be regarded as individuals. But right after the Third Reich annexed Austria in 1938—and the purge of his Jewish and liberal associates from the University of Vienna—Asperger followed his senior colleagues in Nazi child psychiatry and introduced his own diagnosis of social detachment: “autistic psychopathy.” © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 24937 - Posted: 05.03.2018