Want info on possible cures for autism/AS?

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When i say an "increase in last 50 years" i'm referring to the results of tests of "fluid intelligence" showing higher numbers of people scoring higher at pattern recognition, inference drawing, finding meaning in confusion etc, NOT diagnosis of Aspergers ! Will go back and correct to make this clearer. It being absolutely the opposite of what i meant!!

Re: teachers; i think that so long as children are obliged to stay in classrooms how ever bored they are, and to listen, and keep quiet and be still when teacher is talking, and not be able to read or think or draw in peace whatever interests them, then however able and committed the teacher is won't make any difference; highly sensitive children will carry on copying this dynamic, of boring the pants off people, of not shutting up when people want you to, etc etc.
It has nothing to do with teachers "understanding" of "abnormal psychology", except in so far as they might have the empathy and humanity to let the children who want to, read, think, draw, sit quietly, run around, leave the class, not listen to the teacher, etc etc, do so.

Last edited by ouinon on 02 Jan 2008, 10:07 am, edited 2 times in total.

there is no cure, so just stop posting anyway. kthnksbye.

Spokane_Girl wrote:

Yes, it did occur to me that he might want to be cured. Which is why I said, if you aren't happy get therapy. Physical or mental, for whatever you're not happy about. If you have GI problems, see a Gastroenterologist. If you have an emotional or psychiatric issue see a psychiatrist.

My point was and continues to be, there is NO way to change your genetic structure. The only POSSIBLE way to do so, would be to introduce a NEW genetic structure into your body, and have it change you completely. It can not be done by current science. It may NEVER be done, but at best, we are a LONG way from even the beginnings of successful therapy at that level. Frankly, it's nothing but wishful thinking. Maybe my perspective's different because I'm old and HAVE been broken, they took out the broken part and fixed me. I'm still healing from the surgery. I'd LOVE for gene therapy to be real. I've just had a clear cell renal carcinoma removed and am facing tests every six months for the next five years to see twice a year if I'm going to friggin die soon, so yeah, gene therapy for cancer would be a BIG deal to me. It doesn't exist. And as long as the US has people running the government who don't believe in evolution but DO believe in the Easter Bunny, it isn't going to in this country anyway...

Maybe I just didn't state things clearly. I don't "hate" cure puppies... or NT's... nor do I hate blacks, asians, or anyone ELSE with a different genetic heritage than mine... I'm male and I don't hate women either... even though they have TWO of those pesky "X" chromosomes. Actually, I like women, but I confess to preferring ASPIE women. But I don't really care if those Aspie women are white, black or purple... The world needs NT's, and Aspie's... Goddess knows we need Aspie's... SOMEBODY'S got to clean up this mess!

There is no cure for AS/aspergers because they aren't real things.

What is real is motor skill disorders,( possibly the result of excessive immobility in infancy, etc), and (prob learned) social skill impairments when are not simply behaviours that society does not favour at the moment, and there are hypocrisies suggesting that a "normal" person can "naturally" empathise with someone whatever their class, sex, race, age, size ( which is quite obviously not true); but that if you can't empathise with own sex, race, age, class , you are disordered. And there are sensory integration difficulties, language development differences, etc etc.
Some of these real things can be sig ameliorated, even prevented, others made less disabling by changes in society etc.

But the only cure for the invention "Aspergers/Autism" is to stop believing in it . The extent and degree of genetic element in the carefully selected clusters of behaviour referred to as Autism/Aspergers is still so uncertain, so undefined, that still cannot say which " aspects" of AS are. They have lots of ideas, but nothing sure.
It is quite possible that the only inevitable genetic element of collection of behaviours known as Aspergers is what was known as introversion 75 years ago. High Sensitivity. The real problems/difficulties may in many cases be environmental. The point is that noone knows for sure. It is all hypothesis and therefore inappropriate to talk about it as if know what the genetically determined element, on its own, looks like.

Wrongplanet has an interesting position in the world of sites relating to Autism and Aspergers. Neither word appears in its name. I love the title; it is magic, evocative of radicals, of prophets crying in the wilderness, of artists and free thinkers, of detached observers etc. It is a brilliant name. And as such is a beautiful site, for people who are now being labelled disordered, or simply experiencing the increasing stigmatisation of solitary or slow or sensitive, or serious , of scholarly, and scrupulous. Of the healthily but scarily ( for society) disillusioned and unconvinced, of sceptics and questioners.

Do we have to say we believe in Aspergers to come here?

Sorry, re "there is no cure" there couldn't be. Can't cure a chimera.

Last edited by ouinon on 02 Jan 2008, 12:27 pm, edited 5 times in total.

I think you've been eating those mushrooms!



Which would make you... Ah! Space Rat! Space Rat!

Seriously though, you're right. I'll take most of my medical advice from a medical practitioner thanks... Or at least a really convincing Chinese herbalist.

Last edited by Unknown_Quantity on 02 Jan 2008, 11:30 am, edited 1 time in total.

why bother to put names to anything?

science is making advances on figuring out what's causing the symptoms but id oubt there'll ever be a magical pill to cure ppl currently with aspergers or any autism

So far as I know, science is yet to find a conclusive cause for Asperger's, besides a likely genetic component. Without knowing the cause, a cure is out of the question. Assuming genetics is the main component involved, the only ways I can see to cure Asperger's would be to sterilise all Aspie’s and/or use gene therapy to remove or change Aspie characteristics. Option one is referred to as Eugenics and is simply not ethical imo. Eugenics programs have been tried in the USA, Australia, and Nazi Germany (they're the only countries I'm aware of). The second option is not going to happen any time soon. As I said, scientists aren't sure if there is a genetic component at all, let alone the actually knowing the genes involved. If Asperger's does indeed have a genetic component, then it's arguable that it could be part of human evolution and shouldn't be something that we try to eliminate.

Realistically, the only way I can see to deal with the negative traits involved with Asperger's is to develop strategies to cope with them. For example, I have a sensitivity to noise and the way I found to deal with it is to block it out with noise of my own. If someone has the TV on and I'm trying to read, I'll put some music on which blocks out the noise that's causing a problem.

Personally, I do find the idea of a cure rather offensive. There are advantages that come with Asperger's as well as disadvantages and I believe the former outweighs the later (at least in my case). However, I can understand that some people who are further along the spectrum than myself would feel the need to get rid of the traits that make their lives difficult. A magical cure would look very tantalising. If one were ever developed, I wouldn't be opposed to others taking it on any ethical or personal grounds, but you'd need to bring the army to make me take it.

I don't like some of the stuff you're posting, but I just wanted to register my opinion that you're also being treated really nastily by some people regardless.

I don't understand the constant impulse to line up and take sides on everything a person says just because you don't like one thing they say. (It'd be different if you really were trolling or something, or if you had a long history of being really awful to people, but as far as I can tell you're not either of those.)

i dont personally want a cure but acknowledge some want it.

im doing research on the regulation of maturation of synapses involved with sensory issues and associative learning... it's thought that dysregulation of their maturation is involved in autism cause right when these synapses are maturing, is when autistic features start appearing in autistic ppl. your brain develops sequentially from the stem (back) to the forebrain (front), and if this maturation goes wrong at any of these diff points in time during development (thus in diff regions of the brain).. it could account for a lot of the variation observed in autism... flavors, if you will.

i dont think it's strictly a gene(s) that go wrong, so much as the regulation/dysregulation of their expression... this is why i think there's so much false positives... or at least conflicting results in finding mutant genes for autism. if it's strictly the regulation of expression that's wrong... you can have a perfectly functioning gene that just doesnt get to do it's job and when you look at the genome, you cant find anything wrong... they're startin to think there's a lot more to the "junk DNA" that "doesnt do anything"

is also why i doubt there will be prenatal screening for autism... though of course family history is a good indicator

Now that sounds interesting....

On a side note, what's your take on mirror neurons? If I understood that whole area correctly, the theory is Autistic's may have mirror neurons but ours either don't communicate with the brain area they do in NT's or they communicate poorly, resulting in the lack of social subliminal cues that NT's depend on.

I'm curious though, the premise that it may be an error in expression rather than the gene... How does that jibe with the inherited characteristics? My Grandmother was an Aspie, as was my father, both my brother's, several of their son's and both of my son's. Or is the premise the expression of the gene is what is inherited?

Yes, thank you for that ; is very interesting.
The brain carries on forming after birth, might almost be said to specialise/adapt in response to environmental triggers. Dr. Karl Reichelt's paper at the Awares Conference referred to studies like that which show that both diet and other environmental stimuli in first years can have an effect on the development of brain structure, by influencing gene expression or other mechanisms. It is very exciting stuff.

There are some things I am not sure they have covered in that, though:

1. There was once a study that claimed to show that when autistic people looked at faces, "object" areas of the brain lit up rather than "face" areas. However, it turned out the study had not controlled for whether autistic people were looking at faces or not. Has the mirror neuron stuff fully accounted for situations like that?

2. Were autistic people tested only in relation to non-autistic people's physical cues? And have non-autistic people's mirror neurons ever been tested in relation to autistic people's physical cues?

3. Were autistic people tested in relation to natural situations, or artificially-created ones?

4. Were autistic people being made to deal with something else at the same time as reading social cues? (For instance, if they were dealing with instructions or something else at that point, they wouldn't process anything else necessarily, social or non-social)? That has been a problem in other experiments, where autistic people were forced to process language at the same time as social cues, and where only autistic people with good receptive language were used in the experiments.

5. Have perceptual differences been taken into account? For instance, have autistic people been tested as to whether they were even perceiving the cues? (If they're not, then there's no way their brain could respond to them.)

6. How do they account for the fact that autistic people's perceptual differences from non-autistic people are always the same across social and non-social situations alike?

Those are all excellent questions, I'd love to see an answer to most or all of them, unfortunately I'm not a researcher. The only subjects I have here are my teenaged sons, and people tend to look at you funny if you experiment on your kids. Something to do with the wire cages, electroshock and food pellets, I guess.... go figure.

Actually, I would love to see questions like that answered, so if someone has some definitive answers with data I'd like to see it. One other thing did occur to me, and that was possibly our mirror neuron's don't react the same way, because NT's tend to focus on eyes, and we tend to focus on lips/mouths. I don't know that would make a difference, but I don't know that it wouldn't either.

As for artificial vs. real world... I think most of these studies used either a PET scanner or fMRI and I don't know that either would be portable enough to go into the "real world".

introns (junk DNA in between genes [exons]) are heritable too... though they change a lot more because they are not being selected for directly (the genes are)... so they arent anywhere nearly as conserved in the genome... and is why they were thought of as junk.

i did an evolutionary project on development and in the animals i worked with.... the introns changed A LOT. i have no idea how transient they are in people. might be hard to track.

Last edited by Sedaka on 02 Jan 2008, 2:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

keep in mind, whatever they do... both groups do get the same treatment... so at least the results are comparable. it's hard to do everything perfectly ideally.

though i do think it's a valid point to question what the autistics are looking at. you say look at a face and maybe autistics look at the mouth vs the eyes, like most would, i assume... that may be enough to elicit different responses. they should do an exp to look at that.

im not too sure on mirror neurons though... from what ive read.... it seems plausible. fMRIs are cool. we have one here in my uni... they want me to go in it. im scared to lol

to be more clear... there are probably little snips of sequence in the introns responsible for gene expression of the stable exons... but i think these small sequences are more mobile... meaning they can move around a lot more and still do their jobs... so due to the introns changing more often cause evolutionary pressure is just on the genes themselves (exons).... it's a lot harder to keep up with the requirements for the introns to function properly... hard to tell why they mess up when they do.

and it's not like they only do a couple things....... so many genes do so many things... there's just SO much we dont know.

crazy stuff.