“If we are able to detect signs of autism within the first year of life, parents will be able to immediately implement an early intervention plan, which has already been shown to significantly improve the prognosis of children with autism,” said psychology PhD student and researcher Danielle Robson. Robson said the assessment tool included a questionnaire for parents, along with a structured play session to score the children on their responses to a number of specific tasks.

“During each session I assess a range of behaviours, including those that previous retrospective research has suggested are impaired in infants who later develop autism, such as eye contact, social and joint attention, sensory motor behaviours and temperament,” she said. “I also assess overall development, parental concern and closely monitor the infant’s behaviour.”

A group of 40 children, including 25 considered at risk because they had older siblings with autism, were taking part in the study at Flinders. The study included an evaluation when they were as young as two weeks old, and assessments every two months during the next 18 months.

Follow-up reviews would also be performed at 24 and 36 months. “So far I have identified at least six babies who are displaying behaviours or patterns of development that are of concern and may be indicative of autism,” Ms Robson said. “All of these infants are under 12 months of age, which is far younger than the current detection age of between 18 months to three years. “This is very promising and suggests that autism may be able to be detected during infancy - much earlier than is currently occurring.”

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Scientists went on to say that only a small amount of the genes that are affected were lost forever. Most were only unable to turn themselves on properly. Because of this certain medications could help to jump start the genes and help children to develop properly. Tests should help them to discover - which treatment will help the children who are affected by putting them through various rich environments that will help their brain to develop normally.

“Improvements in diagnosis are ongoing,” said Prof Christopher Walsh at Children’s Hospital, Boston. “We are early in the process of trying to arrange trials of medications that are already approved for other purposes that might ameliorate the abnormal patterns of gene expression. We have only just started thinking about the things we could do.”

However, they still do have a long way to go before they learn all of the facts that are needed to find the right treatments. They still need to isolate all of the affected genes and why they are the only ones that cause autism.

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Catherine Lord – the UMACC director – says that she believes infants can be encouraged to seek out such feedback, cementing a routine that could help as they learn to navigate the world. “The idea is can you prevent some things from going awry if you catch them early enough?” Lord said.

This is the third grant that has been given to them to help discover a treatment that could help impact a child at a young age and to prevent autism. Children who have autism have a difficulty with communication and social skills and can cause them to have repetitive behavior. Some children are able to function on their own quite well while others need constant and lifelong attention.

While no one has yet discovered a cure Stephanie Harlan – the director of the Autism Connections program at the nonprofit human service agency the Judson Center – believes that they have the ability to discover the results they need with the right resources.

Her son was diagnosed with the disorder at 2 1/2 years old. He has been in occupational therapy and social skills therapy, takes medication and is on a special diet. Now 9, he no longer meets the criteria for autism, Harlan said. “Everyone has different theories of why it has worked for some kids and not for others,” she said of intervention. “All I know is we got the right combination of treatments, and it has worked.”

Researcher Diane Chugani, a professor of pediatrics and radiology at the WSU School of Medicine, says autistic children may not produce enough serotonin, a neurotransmitter that helps a young brain develop.
Chugani said autistic children were treated with a drug similar to serotonin in an earlier study she did, and many improved their social interactions and reduced repetitive motor actions.

Dr. Eileen Donovan, medical director at the Detroit Institute for Children, which serves disabled children, said the grants will greatly increase the odds of unraveling the mysteries about the disorder. “This is somewhat an uncharted area,” she said.

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“What’s important about this study is that now we can distinguish between a group of siblings with autism from a group with no autism — at nine months and 12 months,” says Rutherford. “I can do this in 10 minutes, and it is objective, meaning that the only measure is eye direction; it’s not influenced by a clinician’s report or by intuition. Nobody’s been able to distinguish between these groups at so early an age.”

For now the earliest that autism can be spotted is the age of 2 or in some places not until they are 3 or 4. Rutherford and other researchers agree that we can help more children if we are able to catch it early in their life.

“There is an urgent need for a quick, reliable and objective screening tool to aid in diagnosing autism much earlier than is presently possible,” she says. “Developing a tool for the early detection of autism would have profound effects on people with autism, their parents, family members, and future generations of those at risk of developing autism.”

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According to The New York Times parents feel that they have the right to millions of dollars – but believe that even this will not make up for the fact that their children cannot interact or communicate with other people socially.

Thimerosal was removed from routine childhood vaccines by 2001, despite a raft of studies that found it was not linked to autism. Yet, that hasn’t stopped parents, looking at government warnings about the risk of mercury exposure from eating fish during pregnancy and early childhood, from believing the neurotoxin could play a role. There are now approximately 1 in 150 children with an autism spectrum disorder.

Oddly enough the trial came only two months after a special Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation court gave compensation to the parents of a Georgia girl with autism. It was believed that she was affected by vaccinations.

“The experiences of two 10-year-old boys from Portland, Ore., are at the center of the latest hearing,” the Times reports. “The boys, William Mead and Jordan King, were developing normally until they were vaccinated, said Thomas Powers, a lawyer representing them. But a buildup of mercury in their brains from vaccines containing thimerosal led the boys to regress, Mr. Powers contended.”

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“Our research shows that mothers and fathers diagnosed with schizophrenia were about twice as likely to have a child diagnosed with autism,” said Julie Daniels of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who worked on the study. “We also saw higher rates of depression and personality disorders among mothers, but not fathers,” she said in a statement.

Researchers who were led by Julie Daniels studied 1,237 medical records of children in Sweden who were born between the years of 1977 and 2003 and were diagnosed with autism before they were 10. They were compared with families of nearly 31,000 children who did not have autism.

“This study might help us pinpoint some more genetic ties to more cases [of autism],” added Daniels.

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Parents and supporters of children with autism rallied at the Capitol last week. They want the Legislature to pass bills that would require insurers to cover some autism therapies, screenings and diagnosis.

Most of the bills in the package have not passed either the House or the Senate. A few related bills have passed the House. The bills have drawn some opposition from those who say more mandated insurance coverage would raise the cost of health care plans for Michigan businesses and residents.

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The Welsh Assembly Government said the autistic spectrum disorder strategic action plan will help the estimated 30,000 people that are either directly or indirectly affected by autism in Wales. Hugh Morgan, the chief executive of Autism Cymru, has been appointed as the plan’s implementation manager. Each of Wales’ 22 councils has also been told it must identify the needs of people with autism and services this year.
Gwenda Thomas, deputy minister for social services, said: “An increasing number of people are being diagnosed with autism in Wales and there is a need to improve the provision that is available for children, young people and adults with autism spectrum disorder.

“It’s crucial that people with autism have every opportunity to fulfil their potential, which is why the Assembly Government has committed to having a strategic action plan in place which addresses the needs of all ages, touches on all agencies and involves individuals and their families and carers in the decision- making process.” Mr Morgan said: “In Wales there has been a desperate need to take a consistent approach to establishing support for people with autism, and their families, wherever they should live.

“The establishment of the strategic action plan for autism is an innovative and significant step forward and I am pleased to see that the Assembly Government is making a firm financial commitment to its implementation over the first few years. “The message is now clear, this is an opportunity not to be wasted and therefore all groups representing autism in the public and independent sectors must now all work together to implement the strategy, so that it makes a genuine, positive and long-lasting impact.”

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The finding is startlingly similar to new research on autism. Since April 2 is the first-ever World Autism Awareness Day, it’s a good time to ponder what this odd conjunction says about building human brains—and, perhaps, how to fix them. Tolstoy famously wrote that happy families are all alike, but that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist who heads the National Institute of Mental Health, calls the new understanding that disorders like schizophrenia and autism have unique origins in each person a “Tolstoy moment” in mental health.

Until very recently, the theory on diseases like these that run in families has been that people who get the disorders have the same genetic mutations. Scientists have spent years looking for a “schizophrenia gene” and an “autism gene,” but the search has been frustrating. They have ID’d genes that make people susceptible to the disorders, but none of those genes are shared by enough people that they have proved useful for diagnosis or treatment. Given that, it’s no wonder that activists in the autism and schizophrenia communities lose patience with scientists’ fixation on genes and accuse them of slighting research on possible environmental causes.

In the past few years, scientists have started looking for disease genes in a totally different way. Using a new technique called whole-genome scanning to browse almost all of a person’s DNA, researchers compared family members and other people with and without the disease, looking for shared patterns. They found that 15 percent of people with schizophrenia had rare deletions or duplications in their DNA, compared with 5 percent of people in the general population. The difference was even more pronounced in children with early-onset schizophrenia: 20 percent had mutations. “They’re not random,” says Insel. “They tend to cluster around genes that are important for brain development.”

But the big surprise is that the variations differ so much from one person to the next. Each person, in other words, becomes schizophrenic in his or her own way. (There were similarities within families, however. In a group of children with early-onset schizophrenia, more than half of the children had inherited the genetic mutations from a parent.) This notion of a “personalized” disease—that there are many ways to end up with schizophrenia—is also, increasingly, how researchers are thinking about autism.

At first glance, autism and schizophrenia seem to have little in common. Autism shows up in early childhood and is characterized by problems with social interactions and communications, including understanding nonverbal cues or the inability to talk. Schizophrenia, by contrast, usually doesn’t manifest itself until early adulthood. Its symptoms can include hallucinations and delusions but also what are called “negative symptoms”: lack of emotion, inappropriate social skills, and impaired thinking. Both disorders can be disabling, and for each there is no known cause and no cure.

But Judith Rapoport, chief of the child psychology branch at the National Institute of Mental Health and one of the researchers, sees a similarity. She’s spent the past three decades studying how children’s brain development is affected by disorders like schizophrenia. The brains of children with early-onset schizophrenia are much larger than normal in the first few years of life, for instance. Children with autism also have an unusual amount of brain growth before age 3. In this new work, she and her colleagues found that two places where variations in genes tended to cluster in people with schizophrenia were also more common in people with autism. “We’re very excited about the link to autism,” Rapoport says. “You have to see these as risk factors, very intriguing ones.”

Rapoport is convinced that there are more genetic links between schizophrenia and autism, and the researchers are now going through their data with a finer comb, looking for more correlations—and, perhaps, stronger clues as to where the brain’s path goes so grievously astray. There’s no insta-cure here, alas. But having a clearer view of what the genes are up to makes it more likely that genetic diagnoses and treatments could someday be created. It also could help move the debate from arguing over whether there are environmental triggers for autism to finding them and coming up with ways to protect people who are genetically susceptible.

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Autism has been receiving lots of press of late, most of it contentious, and the debates as to its causes are divisive and painful to listen to. I’m glad I sat down to watch it, though, as this movie proved to be none of those things.

The documentary presented, through penetrating interviews with autistic children and their parents, a picture of the lives of these children and their families as they worked towards creating and performing a piece of musical theater. One of the children’s mothers runs a workshop called the Miracle Project, through which she attempts to provide autistic children with the opportunity to perform, and also to belong to a community.

This is all well and good, of course, but why did I feel the need to write about the film? As I said previously, many public discussions about autism are divisive. Watching this film, however, I felt that anyone who had ever felt like an outsider could identify with some of the people being interviewed. Anyone who had ever been seriously depressed, or bullied, or felt out of sync, could find a touchstone with some points of this film.

And as crude as it sounds, I felt like Autism managed to put a human face on autism, and I don’t think I’m too far off imagining that this was exactly what individuals with autism could benefit from–a society that better understands them.

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