Finally, someone stepped up to uplift People with Autism

Source: http://www.emaxhealth.com/1506/autistic-persons-have-strong-abilities-are-underestimated

Autistic Persons Have Strong Abilities That Are Underestimated

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Submitted by Denise Reynolds RD on 2011-11-07

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Dr. Laurent Mottron MD PhD at the University of Montreal’s Centre for Excellence in Pervasive Development Disorders stresses that we must stop considering autistic individuals as “deficient” and that we must focus on their qualities and abilities that may sometimes exceed those who do not have the condition. Those with ASD’s generally have exceptional abilities in reasoning, problem-solving, and high-level abstraction.

Dr. Mottron, in an article written for the journal Nature, says “Recent data and my own personal experience suggest it’s time to start thinking of autism as an advantage in some spheres, not a cross to bear.” In fact, a separate article, published in PLoS ONE, suggests that when the appropriate test is used, autistic patients, including those with Asperger’s syndrome, have underestimated scores in several realms of intelligence.

When using a test called Raven’s Progressive Matrices, scores for those with Asperger’s are much higher than when evaluated using standard testing, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). The test, offered in three forms based on participant ability, is a non-verbal multiple choice developed by John C. Raven in 1936. In each item, the subject is asked to identify the missing element that completes a pattern. The focus of the test is visual problem solving and, in particular, visual similarity and analogy.

Study co-author Michelle Dawson, who herself is autistic, says that “while we know autistics process information atypically, very little thought has gone into how to fairly assess their abilities.” Those taking the Raven test have more consistent scores in the “high intelligence” range than when taking the Wechsler test. In comparison, normally developed children had the same results regardless of the test taken.

Dawson said that measurable strengths in autistic spectrum individuals are not “isolated islets of abilities” as previously thought, but are in fact representative of autistics’ intellectual abilities. This in turn raises questions about how to provide autistics with the kinds of information they can process well.

Dr. Mottron strongly supports a better understanding of the needs of the autistic person, and a focus on their strengths rather than disability, in order to bring these persons back into “the human community.” He laments that many autistics end up working repetitive, menial jobs despite their intelligence and aptitude. “They need opportunities…to make much more significant contributions to society.”

Primary Source:
Soulieres I, Dawson M, Mottron L, et al. “The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence II: What About Asperger Syndrome?” PLoSOne, 6(9): e25372. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025372

Additional Sources:
Nature Network: Michelle Dawson
Kunda M, McGreggor K, Goel A. “Addressing the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test of ‘General’ Intelligence”, Georgia Institute of Technology
Association for Psychological Science (2007, August 3). The Matrix Of Autism. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 7, 2011.

Another abuse of a student with autism in FL

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/09/29/40152.htm

No evidence that most autism treatments work Popular drugs have no hard science behind them; intense behavior therapies may help a bit

(Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42385056/ns/health-childrens_health/t/no-evidence-most-autism-treatments-work/#.Tn72RNR375A)

When it comes to treating autism, there are still more questions than answers.

That’s the message from a series of reviews published today in the journal Pediatrics, in which researchers analyzed past studies on the effectiveness of medication or behavioral and developmental therapies in kids with autism spectrum disorders.

Parents, doctors, and even entire school systems are “routinely put in the position of having to make decisions about what the most appropriate services will be” for kids with autism, said Zachary Warren, one of the researchers, in an interview with Reuters Health.

“What we would really hope for is an evidence base where you could make those decisions based on what we know about how particular children respond to particular interventions,” said Warren, who runs an autism clinic at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

But for most treatment options, there is not convincing evidence that they actually help kids get better, Warren said.

Close to 1 percent of children in the United States have an autism spectrum disorder, which includes both autism and Asperger’s syndrome. People with these conditions have difficulty interacting with and understanding the emotions of others, and they often engage in repetitive behaviors.

Most children with autism are treated with behavioral therapy starting at a young age, and many will try multiple kinds of therapy or medications as they get older.

For their reviews, Warren and his colleagues collected data from all studies done in the last decade on the effectiveness of a range of medications and therapies in reducing symptoms of autism.

In their most convincing finding, the authors determined that secretin – a hormone otherwise used to treat stomach ulcers -- is not an effective treatment for kids with autism. Excitement about the drug started in the late 1990’s, when very limited evidence suggested it might promote social skills in kids with autism – but after more thorough research, it’s clear that’s not the case, Warren said.

That conclusion was based on 7 past studies that found the drug did not improve language or reasoning skills or any other autism symptoms.

The researchers found there was not enough evidence to determine whether anti-depressants such as Prozac and Celexa or the stimulant drug Ritalin might help kids with autism.

There is some evidence showing that both Risperdal and Abilify might help cut down on kids’ repetitive behaviors. But because both drugs may cause side effects such as uncontrolled muscle tremors and drowsiness, the authors said they should only be used in kids who are very impaired because of their autism.

Dr. Bryan King, the director of Seattle Children’s Autism Center, said that as many as 70 percent of kids with autism are treated with some kind of medication.

“The real take-home message for me…. is the striking disparity between the treatments that we use and the number of children that are receiving them, and the strength of the evidence that we have in support of these practices,” said King, who was not involved in the current study.

It is “hard to reconcile” the popularity of these drugs with the lack of information about their effectiveness, he told Reuters Health, but not having enough evidence isn’t the same thing as saying the drugs don’t work.

Warren and his colleagues concluded that intensive behavioral therapy or behavioral treatment started in very young kids has helped some of them improve reasoning and language skills, as well as their ability to interact with others. It’s hard to know which kids will benefit from those therapies, however.

“Some (behavioral) interventions can show some pretty dramatic changes,” Warren said. “At the same time, understanding which specific treatments are going to be best for specific (kids) – we’re not quite there.”

King said it was time to “redouble our efforts” to gain more conclusive evidence on possible treatment options.

The research “just really highlights that we urgently need new treatments and better treatments, in addition to refining our understanding of how available treatments work for specific individuals and specific families,” Warren concluded.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/autism-risks-siblings-higher-thought-040220577.html

Autism risks for siblings are higher than thought

By LINDSEY TANNER - AP Medical Writer | AP – 4 hrs ago

CHICAGO (AP) — A new study suggests nearly one in five children with an autistic older sibling will develop the disorder too — a rate much higher than previously thought.

Researchers followed 664 infants who had at least one older brother or sister with autism. Overall, 132 infants or about 19 percent ended up with an autism diagnosis, too, by their third birthdays. Previous smaller or less diverse studies reported a prevalence of between 3 percent and 14 percent.

"We were all a bit surprised and taken aback about how high it is," said lead author Sally Ozonoff, a psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor with the Mind Institute at the University of California at Davis.

The highest rates were in infants who had at least two older siblings with autism — 32 percent of them also developed autism. Also, among boys with autistic siblings — 26 percent developed autism versus 9 percent of girls. Autism is already known to be more common in boys.

The study involved 12 U.S. and Canadian sites and was published online Monday in Pediatrics. Earlier studies were more local or involved fewer sites.

Ozonoff said parents of autistic children often ask her, "How likely am I to have another child" with autism? She said her study provides a more up-to-date answer.

However, Ozonoff noted that 80 percent of siblings studied did not develop autism, and that the prevalence rate was an average. It may be different for each family, depending on other risk factors they may face.

Autism has no known cause but experts believe that genetics and external influences are involved. Research is examining whether these could include infections, pollution and other non-inherited problems. Ozonoff noted that siblings often are exposed to similar outside influences, which could partly explain the study results.

Infants in the study were enrolled before they showed any signs of autism, such as poor eye contact and little social interaction.

The study is an important addition to autism research and "has critical implications for families who are deciding whether they'll have another child," said Catherine Lord, director of the Institute for Brain Development at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Lord was not involved in the study.

Kathleen Lanese of Kings Park, N.Y., says having one son with autism didn't make her think twice about trying to have another child, even though she knew there was a chance the second would be affected, too.

"We wanted another child and we were going to take whoever we got," said Lanese, who was not involved in the study. Still, when her younger son was a baby, she says she "watched him like a hawk" for autism signs. He was diagnosed with autism at 16 months, earlier than her older boy.

Ozonoff said the study should prompt families and their children's doctors to be vigilant with infants whose older siblings have autism. Early diagnosis is important because experts say behavioral treatment has the best chance of working if started early.

"Pediatricians need to listen and make a very focused plan for how to monitor those things, rather than taking a wait-and-see attitude" toward children with autistic siblings, Ozonoff said.

Alycia Halladay, a research director at the advocacy group Autism Speaks, said the study provides a more robust, accurate prevalence estimate than previous studies, and strengthens the idea that family history is a risk factor.

Her group, the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institute for Health Research are among those who paid for the study.

___

Online:

American Academy of Pediatrics: http://www.aap.org

National Institutes of Health: http://health.nih.gov/topic/Autism

____

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

As he grows older - dropping on the floor

AX is the oldest of the three sibling. He turned 10 years old. It seems like it was only yesterday. He is 10 years old and strong. He is getting stronger day by day. I thought that somehow or eventually, things will change. I am still hoping for a change or shall I say, adaption to the environment. There are times that I can not wait for something that will suddenly come on his way. He is a beautiful boy, very kind and patient. He has a big heart. He, however, can be so focused that the world around him has to stop to give space to his ticks. For more than a year now, he has been continuously so enthused in flushing toilets, washing his hands in the sink after using the bathroom when he really did not use it at all, rushing to a closed door and trying to find the key to it and removing the scuffs on the floor. He was not like this at all before. He had some obsessive compulsive mannerisms but will eventually fade away and replaced by a new one. This time, he became so tied up with something for a long time. He persists for as long as he can. He fights people as long as he does what "needs" to be done according to him.

Today, we visited Target. We have not gone to this store for a long time. We have Walmart where we can buy affordable items. It was a happy moment at first. His father asked him to count the neatly arranged fingers. Indeed, he counted. He knows that people have 10 fingers. Hence, we asked him to count the fingers of his father properly by pointing to the well-arranged fingers. He counted 9 fingers only. He was flabbergasted and went white with fear or puzzlement. He looked at the fingers of his father anew. He counted with his eyes. We began giggling when we saw that he was so deliriously quizzed to the max why his father has 9 fingers only. He grabbed the hands of his father and tried to look at the palm. His father tried to dissuade him. Later on, he grabbed the hands of his father. There he saw that his father stealthily kept the missing finger. AX was now smiling. He realized that somehow, he was tricked. He laughed with all of us.

We continued our shopping for food. We turned to furniture corner and I was looking at the tall chairs like the ones we have. In an instant, AX looked down and saw something that looks like dirt or stain on the shiny floor. He reached for it. I saw him and told him to stand up and must not remove scuffs on the floor. He reached down again and I tried my best not for him to do these awkward things. I do not want him doing these things because they make him look stupid. Removing scuffs on the floor is not healthy for him because later on when he finds that his hands are dirty, he will lick his hands/fingers. Another reason, it takes away the precious time when he should be doing more productive tasks to help him talk. He can think and he knows right from wrong. Yet, he has this big obsession that he has to remove scuffs on the floor.

We had like more than 5-minute struggle for him to get up because he let himself fall on the floor time after time. He was hitting us while fighting to get to his obsessive task. People who were shopping, I noticed, were looking at us like we were hurting him. It was an insane struggle in the first place but we can not let him do things that are counterproductive to his health and sanity. Removing scuffs on the floor is a counterproductive task.

In the end, his father was able to raise him up and moved him away. All the while, his younger sister and brother were looking at us. They know that AX was not doing something good. His brother was telling him that the floor is dirty. Yet, AX kicked, hit, fell on the floor, turned around on the floor, screamed, cried, pushed us just to reach the scuffs that he wanted to remove. He did not listen at all to us nor to his younger brother.

We left the area and paid for our groceries.

This reminds me, what else should we do in order to break him from this counterproductive habit. He is growing older and stronger. One day, we will not be able to maneuver him like we did today after a struggle. It is hard. It is frustrating. He is our child and as much as possible we want him to act normally. Why? In this world, many people are harsh. You are judged on what you do and not on what you can do. He has so many productive tasks on his hands yet removing scuffs on the floor is beyond that. We can not let him do that no matter what people will say. It is not safe for him.

Distinctive patterns of brain activity?

Children with autism have distinctive patterns of brain activity

Researchers say they have identified a unique 'signature' of autism in the brains of children with the condition

• 
  

• Alok Jha, science correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 November 2010 20.00 GMT
• Article history



Children with autism had reduced activity in specific brain regions. Photograph: Corbis

The pattern of brain activity in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is markedly different from that of children without the condition, according to a new brain-imaging study.

The work, which shows that ASD has a "signature" in the brain, may lead to a better understanding of which parts of the brain the condition interferes with and how some people, despite having a high genetic risk of developing the condition, manage to compensate for its effects.

ASD is a genetically influenced condition that affects the development of children's brains, with symptoms that include difficulties with social communication, interaction and imagination.

Hundreds of genes may contribute to the condition and scientists believe that individual cases of ASD could correspond to different patterns of genetic variation, which could lead to measurable differences in the way that the brains of autistic children function.

Dr Martha Kaiser and Professor Kevin Pelphrey of Yale University led a team of researchers that explored this idea by studying how children's brains responded to videos of people moving around them.

"As intrinsically social creatures, humans typically exhibit robust visual sensitivity to other people's movements," they write today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This is well illustrated by the discovery that point-light displays (ie videos created by placing lights on the major joints of a person and filming them moving in the dark), although relatively impoverished stimuli, contain sufficient information to identify the kind of motion being produced (eg walking, dancing, reaching) as well as the identity of the agent."

Previous research found that two-year-olds with autism did not turn to face point-light displays of "biological motion".

In their study, Kaiser and Pelphrey placed 62 children aged from 4 to 17 years old into functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners and monitored their brain activity as they watched a point-light display of biological motion and another of scrambled dots.

In the group, 25 children had ASD, 20 were the siblings of children with ASD but did not display any symptoms themselves, and the remainder were "typically developing" children.

The researchers identified three signatures of brain activity that corresponded to the different children's responses to the point-light displays.

Relative to the other groups, there was reduced activity in specific brain regions in children with ASD when they were watching biological motion compared with scrambled motion.

These included the right amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, areas which other research has identifed as having changed activity in adults with ASD.

The researchers found additional brain regions that showed reduced activity in both the siblings group and the ASD group, relative to the typically developing group.

They interpreted this result as a reflection of the underlying genetic vulnerability that the siblings group might have to ASD.

The scientists also found what they called "compensatory activity" in the siblings group – brain regions that were working harder than normal and might be helping the children overcome their increased genetic risk of ASD.

These included the right posterior temporal sulcus and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which have been implicated in social perception and social cognition.

"These regions might reflect the absence of additional genetic or environmental factors that confer risk for ASD," the researchers wrote.

"Alternatively, they could represent a process through which brain function was altered over development to compensate for an increased genetic risk to develop ASD."

Dorothy Bishop, a professor of developmental neuropsychology at Oxford University, said: "This is a potentially interesting study that looks for brain markers of underlying abnormality in children with autism in response to viewing dot patterns that indicate biological motion."

But she added: "More controversially, the authors also propose that other brain regions are under-responsive to biological motion in siblings of children with autism, as well as in those with autism.

"Yet other regions are reported to be overactive in the siblings, and this is interpreted as compensatory activity.

"Since these siblings had no subclinical symptoms of autism, and were selected to have no other relatives with any autistic features, they are unlikely to constitute a group with strong genetic risk for autism, and so this aspect of the results is puzzling and it would be important to replicate it in another sample."

The researchers themselves admitted that further studies would be needed to determine the precise functions of the "compensatory" brain activity that they had identified.

But if confirmed, they said, these could "represent important targets for treatments and provide a measure of the effectiveness of intervention, as well as a better understanding of the mechanisms through which successful treatments function".

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/15/children-autism-patterns-brain-activity

IQ and academic performance for students with autism

IQ scores can't predict academic performances of autistic kids

2010-11-18 16:40:00

A new research has revealed that many children with autism spectrum disorders are academically more capable than their IQ scores would suggest. In a study by researchers at the University of Washington, 90 percent of autistic children showed a discrepancy between their IQ score and their performance on reading, spelling and math tests. "Academic achievement is a potential source of self-worth and source of feeling of mastery that people may not have realized is available to children with autism," said Annette Estes, research assistant professor at the UW's Autism Center. Thirty students with autism spectrum disorders, aged 9, were considered for their study. IQ scores in the general population reliably predict academic performance - as measured by standardized tests for word reading, spelling and basic number skills. But results of the study showed something else. "What we found was astounding: 27 out of the 30 children - that's 90 percent - had discrepancies between their IQ score and scores on at least one of the academic achievement tests," Estes said. "Some scored higher and some scored lower than what their IQ score would predict," she added. The discrepancies were especially profound in spelling and word reading, the researchers report. They also found a link between social skills and academic ability in school. Specifically, children who had higher social skills at age 6, including introducing themselves to others and a willingness to compromise and cooperate, had better word reading skills at age 9. Estes said that future study would concentrate on whether or not these trends hold true in the classroom. The study is published online in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. (ANI)

Source: http://sify.com/news/iq-scores-can-t-predict-academic-performances-of-autistic-kids-news-international-klsqEqahacd.html