interesting article

Post Reply New Topic

http://cbs2.com/health/autism.children.autistic.2.1033601.html

don't know if everyone saw this.

Fascinating that he can't remember, I heard that lots of time now.

I displayed autistic behaviour as a baby and I remember every bit about my autism which is the key to my non-developmental-caused small and huge improvements.

Maybe there's something completely different going on in those kids which would be just interesting because it must be something real mysterious.

I might have misunderstood the article but to me it sounds like they think autism is like a cold, there is no cure but you can "lose" it.

they don't understand the biology yet.

That's easy...child is misdiagnosed. lost language from truama or some other unidentified reason. There will be plenty of false positives now that autism is out there and in the news. A cure? Highly doubtful. Just take a look at someone with autism who is nonverbal and will require assistance for self care and living. What kind of cure would have helped this person? None.

Do kids with down syndrome get cured? Of course not. Why do we think we can cure the anomolies of the brain with our discrete trials and odd treatments?

It sickens me that doctors try to experiement with our most vulnerable who have no voice. All they can do is shut down, refuse to move, engage in rocking or humming, or worse hurt themselves. I have one word for it- intolerance.

I've witnessed autistic kids undergo discrete trial,get rewarded with M&M's and praise as if they were dogs learning tricks, and then there are the angry words or disappointment if they don't do it right. The term shaping is used. It's too technical. If the child is content working with a particular object, fine. If he wants to carry around an odd item to class, so be it. If he wants to spin an object , so what? Who are we to "draw" them back into our world? Don't they have a choice? If he wants to draw for most of the day, fine. If the swing calms the child for a couple of hours, fine. Why do we try to fit them into curriculum and train them to be a particualr way, to transition into our daily routines? What about respect for their way?

Maybe with some kids who have the IQ and learning power, we can improve the outcome, train or program the child how to perform in class, but the natural tendency will be engrained. This is my thought on it. Take or leave it. We are naturally inclined to be who we are. Parents spend thousands of dollars seeking some cure. Deb. Fein doesn't help matters with her "cure" research.

It all has to do with how they define autism. There are some individuals who, while fulfilling the criteria for Autistic Disorder in early childhood, improve enough to the point they may no longer make the cutoffs later on. But the flaw of the research this article is based off of is the assumption that the criteria are FLAWLESS and in no need of improvement. And as long as the criteria are behavioral and there's no biomarker for dx, the criteria will always be in need of improvement because behavior is always variable even within a smaller population.

Like you said, they don't understand the biology well enough yet. Although I'm involved with some research that's coming closer, work both on the neuroanatomy of autism and developing a workable biomarker. But as for the neuroanatomy, you can't tell for certain until you're doing a postmortem on the person, so...

In my experience, autism is autism, even if the behavior eventually is too "light" for the behavioral criteria to include. It's not a black or white type of label: it's an extreme end of the total human spectrum. However, the research the article is referring to is treating it as though there's some definitive crisp line between autism and the rest of the human population, and there doesn't seem to be.

Now the more INTERESTING question isn't whether this IS and ISN'T autism, but why some people continue to express a more severe phenotype and why others eventually express less and less severe phenotypes.

It's just silly to argue "Autism or not?" because it's not an answerable question.