Neurology Diagnostics

Archive for the ‘Autism’ Category

Autism treatment at home differs significantly from care strategies employed by schools and excursions. Through the appropriate care tactics, it is entirely possible to make being at home more than comfortable for everyone. Parents with autistic children ought to begin implementing strategies around the home early in order for their child to begin learning valuable life skills.

Reinforced Learning

Autistic children could learn skills in a therapist’s office that may get lost by the time they get home. This can be attributed to environmental inconsistencies in the between the office and home. An effective way of adapting skills learnt out of the home is through reinforcement and consistency. If a child learns a skill with a teacher or therapist, such as sign language, parents should use the same skill when at home, which not only helps reinforce and prevent skills from being forgotten, but it will also make the task consistent between the two different settings.

Make a Schedule

Keeping a schedule for the entire day is a key to successfully taking care of an individual with autism, particularly at home where schedules are more relaxed than in school or therapy. Create a schedule from the time your child gets up to the time they go to bed. Once completed, always stick to the schedule. Meal and play times should always fall at the same time, remaining the same throughout weekends, holidays and summer break – although days without school should have a schedule convenient for the whole family. Such scheduling helps keep disruptive behaviour to a minimum.

Learning Non-verbal Cues

Many autistic individuals use non-verbal cues as often if not more than verbal cues to communicate. Ensure that you watch for signals such as hand gestures/facial expressions that show common needs, such as hunger or sleepiness. Learning these cues will require constant and keen observation.

Pay Attention to Sensory Sensitivities

Sensitivity to particular stimulation can be a huge contributor towards disruptive behaviour in an autistic child. At home, parents can minimise the sensitivities that may result in irritation or misbehaviour whilst maximising the calming sensory stimulus. As each child is unique, you will need to things that trigger tantrums or poor behaviour such as noises, colours, tastes or smells. Make sure to pay attention to things that calm or soothe, then incorporate the calming stimulus into your home environment.

Making the Home Safe

As autism can often result in self-injury through tantrums or poor behaviour, it is important for the family to take special care and provide a safe environment in the home. Where possible, move breakable objects to an inaccessible area and put safety locks on all cabinets. Also make sure to minimise furniture with sharp edges.

To Conclude

Taking the necessary steps to provide a safe and calm environment with a thorough and consistent schedule can result in a happier life for those with autism.

The largest genetic study of people with autism to date found that many patients have their own pattern of genetic mutations, which is not necessarily inherited from their parents.

The results published in the journal Nature help confirm the strong role of genes in autism and also suggest that small genetic disruptions may begin in the eggs and sperm of the parents.

“Our research strongly indicates that these rare genetic variations are important and represent a significant portion of the genetic basis of autism,” said Tony Monaco of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University, who helped lead the study.
“By identifying the genetic causes of autism, we hope in the future to improve the diagnosis and treatment of this condition, which can affect children and their families very seriously,” he told reporters.
Stephen Scherer, Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, said the results could “lead to a paradigm shift in relation to compression of the roots of autism.” Scientists from 60 research centers in 12 countries worked for three years in the Autism Genome Project.
The disease is a complex and mysterious brain disorder that is often diagnosed in the early years of life. It is characterized by difficulties in social interaction, communication and understanding of emotions and behaviors of others. Autism disorders are diagnosed in one in every 110 U.S. children, affecting four times more boys than girls. In Britain, about 133,500 children suffer from the disease, according to the National Autistic Society.
Genome Project studied the genes of 996 people with the disease and 1,287 healthy, all of European descent. The team found that people with autism tended to have more landslides and duplications of whole portions of DNA. These absences or insertions are called copy number variants and can disrupt the functioning of genes.
Single mutation
Autistic people have, on average, 19 percent of these genetic changes, compared with those who did not have the condition. The team also found that each case had a different set of disturbances, although some of the affected genes have similar functions.
“Here is where it gets tricky, each child had a different disturbance in a different gene,” said Dr. Stanley Nelson of the University of California Los Angeles. Daniel Geschwind, also of UCLA, said the results suggest that “during the formation of eggs and sperm of parents tiny genetic errors may occur,” and these variations are copied into the child’s DNA.
“The autistic boy is the first in his family to have that option. His parents did not have it,” he said. The results support an emerging consensus within the scientific community indicating that autism is caused in part by “rare variants” or genetic changes found in less than 1 percent of the general population. What the study does not answer is how genetic changes occur. The environment can alter genes, and some studies linked the age of parents with autism.

The use of MRI has uncovered three distinct patterns of brain activity in autism.

A group of researchers at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven (USA) has identified a pattern of brain activity that may characterize genetic vulnerability associated with the development of autism spectrum disorders. The results of their work, which was coordinated by Kevin A. Pelphrey, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By using MRI, the authors have analyzed the brains of autistic children and siblings of those affected do not have the disease. The analysis was done as they watched animations that mimic the biological motion. Compared with the control group, Pelphrey and his team observed three distinct neural signatures.

Offset the risk

The first refers to a reduced brain activity in regions that autistic children and siblings had in common and that explains the brain disrrupciones to the disease. The second is a similarly reduced activity in regions linked only to the affected children, which provides neuroendofenotipos linked to genomic complexity and heterogeneity of the disease. The third point to increased activity in areas related only unaffected siblings. Read the rest of this entry »

A qualitative impairment in social interaction seen sometimes in the first months of life by a lack of contact with the parents, especially the mother. Many children with autism, the mother does not stretch out her arms to be lifted. They smile back if they are smiled at and take to the parents to not have adequate eye contact. Nevertheless, autistic children are just as strong an emotional bond with her mother and non-autistic children and have as much compassion as non-autistic children.  This compares to a strong Object-oriented, often with a certain type of objects is limited. Your attention is directed to a few things, such as faucets, door handles, joints between slabs or graph paper, they attract like magic, so that everything else passes them. They often find objects in one other foreign object, such as the parts of a toy train by size and color, or their only interest in a toy car is to turn the wheels constantly.

In addition to categorizing subdivisions of autism in several, are clearly delimited from each species are the

• Autism spectrum or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This is a concept of a smooth transition between the different forms, one in particular in the growing English-speaking point of view of such a continuum of different forms. Represented approximately by Tony Attwood, who justified his view with the possibility of transitions in individual cases. For example there are autistic people that meet the diagnostic criteria of Asperger’s syndrome, the abnormalities in early childhood, however, corresponded to the diagnosis of Kanner’s syndrome. Moreover, it is doubtful whether one based on theoretical models of intelligence IQ measurement or an arbitrary maximum age limit for the language used for the distinction.

Published a study by a significant proportion of ICD-10 were diagnosed with infantile autism or atypical autism diagnosed according to people with Asperger Gillberg diagnostic criteria.

• A clinical autism spectrum diagnosis by doctors or psychologists usually placed under the condition that a person suffers in several areas of life. A person may well be autistic, but because of their situation in life, talent and / or support of education, training, employers, friends, partners or other forms of support to cope well enough to get no clinical diagnosis. In this case, such a person may receive a diagnosis, if, after a possible loss of aid leads to an anomaly, so that doctors and therapists can justify a clinical diagnosis.
• The question of whether it is in autism or autism spectrum disorders a category or a dimension is unclear. There is literature on subclinical forms of autism, a chapter about “Autistic Echos” in the book “The shadow syndrome: Neurobiology and mild forms of mental disorders”. In research, the concept of a ‘Broad Autism Phenotypes examines’, such as autistic traits from parents of autistic children.
• Some other official (ICD-10/DSM-IV) and unofficial (not in ICD-10/DSM-IV) diagnoses are examined in relation to autism, such as Hyperlexia, nonverbal learning disability, dyspraxia, sensory integration disorder or linguistic-pragmatic disorder . The issue of these as a separate diagnosis, or rather as part of a broader autism spectrum may be seen is unclear.

• The typical autism does not meet all diagnostic criteria of infantile autism and does not show until after the third year of life. As a subtype of autism but he is differential diagnosis for Asperger syndrome defined.

• The Asperger Syndrome (obsolete even autistic psychopathy and schizoid disorder of childhood), especially with a date of her age-appropriate language (according to the ICD-10 and DSM-IV criteria for a diagnosis – after a while Gillberg & Gillberg delayed language development a possible diagnostic criterion represents) and a correct from a formal point of view of language. People with Asperger syndrome are often clumsy motor.

To form the circle of pervasive developmental disorders according to classification of the diagnostic manuals ICD-10 are in addition to autistic disorder (in the strict sense) but also the

• Rett syndrome and Heller’s syndrome (disintegrative psychosis of childhood) that have similar symptoms, but differ in the course of autism. In Rett syndrome is now also a characteristic of this genetic alteration detected.

The early childhood autism, Kanner’s syndrome and, most striking feature in addition to the behavioral abnormalities: due to the early occurrence of severely impaired speech, motor impairment only other disabilities, often hindered spiritually. Depending on the intellectual capacity of early childhood autism is further subdivided in Low, Intermediate and High Functioning Autism (LFA, IFA and HFA). As LFA in the English area of early childhood autism associated with mental retardation, referred to as HFA those with normal or above-average intelligence level. The distinction between HFA and Asperger’s syndrome following is not clear why the terms are sometimes also used synonymously.

Leo Kanner (Lit: Kanner 1943) and Hans Asperger (ref: Asperger 1938) took the notion – independently – on and described a special kind of disorder you distinguish this people with schizophrenia to withdraw active in their affairs, of those who live from birth in a state of inner solitude. This expanded the meaning of the term “autism”.

Kanner took the term “autism” narrow, which corresponded broadly to the so-called infantile autism today (hence: Kanner’s syndrome). His view gained international recognition and became the basis for further autism research. The publications, however Asperger described “autism” were somewhat different and at first received little international. This was the one taking place simultaneously at the Second World War, partly because that Asperger published in German and it’s not translated into English texts for decades. Hans Asperger himself was called by him the syndrome described “autistic psychopathy”. The English psychologist Lorna Wing (Ref: Wing 1981) led her away in the 1980s and the name of an Asperger’s Syndrome. Only in the 1990s, Asperger’s international research reputation acquired in professional circles.

The interests of autistic people are usually limited to certain areas, but have some of them drawing on the area of their special interest extraordinary abilities, such as in mental arithmetic, in music or in the memory. This is called an “island of genius”; those who have are called savants. 50 percent of known Inselbegabten are autistic. You can not possibly wear alone, but may complete telephone books and encyclopedias to learn by heart, like Kim Peek, since the film “Rain Man” the best known of the Savants (but not autistic).