Autism & Ability

Eric Chessen

For children with autism, learning new skills is often made more difficult because of sensory processing issues. There may be too much noise in the next room for Jill to concentrate on the directions, or Marcos may not be able to look at numbers on a computer screen and relate them to those on a page of homework. It all has to do with contingencies. Success in anything doesn’t just happen.

Contingencies are “if-then” relationships. All individuals with autism have some level of difficulty with contingencies. The most obvious are social contingencies, but cognitive “if-then’s” are just as important to consider. Does Ricky make the connection between Mom saying “Press down on the pedal” and the action of his foot applying pressure downward? If not, his mom can say it over and over again, and both can grow frustrated in the process.

Some of my athletes are nonverbal, but understand just about everything that is said. Others are verbal to an extent, but have enormous difficulty attending to or following verbal instructions.

It is absolutely critical to ask the following questions:

1. Is the individual a more auditory or a more visual learner?
2. Has he/she had prior experience with the words I am using right now?
3. Is he/she motivated to perform this particular activity? (Does he/she like it?)
4. If not, what would be motivating?

I call these the “PAC” abilities and they are the foundation of my assessment and programming method, the PAC Profile (www.PACProfile.com). If Rachel is having difficulty riding her bike, is it because she cannot do it, won’t do it, or some other reason?

How do we assess what is going on without drawing incorrect or unproductive conclusions? Saying she is “lazy” does not give us much help. How do you “un-lazy” somebody? Do you snap your fingers and all of a sudden they decide that they will do something? Not the kids I’ve worked with, and probably not yours either. That’s why it is so important to assess abilities first.

Alex was 11 and his mother contacted me specifically to work on bike riding skills. Dad had attempted several times to teach him, but wound up screaming at Alex instead because Alex was not learning quickly enough. If you are reading this now, stand up quick and learn to ride a unicycle while juggling. In the event that you do not master this in a week I will personally call up to berate you. Oh, and you need to be having FUN While you do it. Doesn’t sound to reinforcing, does it? Alex wanted to ride his bike; he just didn’t want to be yelled at while learning. I thought that was reasonable enough.

Signs Your Child Could Have Autism

The CDC says that one in 88 children has autism. Could your child be one of them?

By MIRIAM WEINER |  USnews.com

With the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reporting that one in every 88 children has autism—up from one in 156 in 2002—you might be wondering how to recognize the signs and symptoms of the developmental disorder.

While it's not clear what's driving the uptick in prevalence, and the precise causes of autism are still unknown, experts are calling for earlier diagnosis. "We have to get this down to 18 months of age to truly have the greatest impact," says Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC. Doctors have gotten better at identifying autism symptoms in younger children—four is the average age of diagnosis—but "four years old is still too late," he says. Frieden stresses that the earlier a child is identified with autism, the more likely it is that behavioral intervention will make the disability more manageable. Parents may be able to spot symptoms of autism before a child's first birthday, says Coleen Boyle, who heads up the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. "Parents know their child best, but if they do have concerns, the important thing is not to wait [to seek help]," she says. Susan Hyman, who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics subcommittee on autism, strongly recommends having children screened by a child development specialist at 18, 24, and 30 months.

Global Autism Awareness:

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So how can you tell? If your little boy or girl isn't hitting developmental milestones laid out by the CDC, don't hesitate to talk to your paediatrician.

At Nine Months to One Year
At this age, your child should be moving up in his ability to communicate. Simple "oohs" and "ahhs" are typically replaced by a wider variety of sounds, and maybe even words like "mama." Slower speech development isn't necessarily cause for concern, though. As your child nears his first birthday, his eyes are the most notable red flag. At nine months your baby should be able to make eye contact, and even recognize familiar faces and emotive expressions. Children with autism struggle to maintain eye contact and often cannot mimic facial expressions like smiles or frowns.

At 18 Months >>

At Two Years >>

At Four Years >>


To learn more about picking up signs of autism, visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website.

Boom in autistic students prompts new Montgomery school centers

Winston Churchill High School in Potomac is one of the Montgomery County schools that will house an autism resource center. (Examiner file photo)

Montgomery County Public Schools is planning to open autism centers at three high schools in the new school year, as the district grapples with a fivefold increase in the number of students diagnosed with autism over the last decade.

In the 2000-2001 school year, 266 students on the autism spectrum enrolled in MCPS. By 2010-2011, that number had jumped to 1,642, as autism became better diagnosed thanks to its federal classification as a disability and more awareness of the disorder's symptoms. In the past year, MCPS added 179 students with autism, including at least 62 who moved into Montgomery County with the diagnosis, said Chrisandra Richardson, associate superintendent for the Office of Special Education and Student Services.

The picture is further complicated by the number of autistic students from diverse backgrounds who may not speak English, in addition to their cognitive disability, school officials... READ MORE >>

lgartner@washingtonexaminer.com

Lisa Gartner
Examiner Staff Writer - education  |  The Washington Examiner

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The Challenges of Treating Autism

Dr. Joseph Donnelly at the Orange office of For OC Kids Neurodevelopmental Center, which he hopes to expand with a multimillion dollar grant. (Photo by Amy DePaul)

Orange County’s leading autism center has an opportunity for a large injection of cash supplied in part by the Children & Families Commission of Orange County.

But there’s a hitch: the money comes in the form of a matching grant. And though the amount could be for as high as $7 million, it’s available only if a private donor steps forward with an initial outlay.

The funding would be used to expand the For OC Kids Neurodevelopmental Center in Orange into a regional or even national venue for clinical care, education and research.

In Orange County, which by some estimates has the highest rate of autism statewide, For OC Kids is the rare autism center that accepts public insurance for low-income families, such as Medi-Cal or Healthy Families, said center director Dr. Joseph Donnelly.

Donnelly discussed autism in Orange County with Voice of OC recently, weighing in on whether autism has been over-diagnosed, the failure of a new law to secure autism coverage for poor families, the link between autism and vaccines, and how he hopes to expand his center:

Can you give some background on your center, For OC Kids?

For OC kids Neurodevelopment Center started with a grant from the Commission and began seeing children in 2001. In the first 10 years we provided new evaluations and consultations to over 7000 children. We’ve seen over 21,000 follow-up visits. We’ve provided medical evaluations by pediatric neurologists and developmental-behavioral pediatricians. With some variation according to funding, we’ve had psychologists, speech and language pathologists and family support people. Mainly we do evaluation, diagnosis and try to support families to get the services they need to help children. READ MORE >>

-- Interview by AMY DePAUL

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♥ Thought for the Day ♥

Have a great weekend everyone!

❤ LIKE if you LOVE someone with Autism! ❤

❤ MY SON IS MY HERO ❤

❤  LIKE if you LOVE someone with Autism!  ❤

Is Autism an “Epidemic” or Are We Just Noticing More People Who Have It?

Emily Willingham (Twitter, Google+, blog) is a science writer and compulsive biologist whose work has appeared at Slate, Grist, Scientific American Guest Blog, and Double X Science, among others. She is science editor at the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism and author of  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to College Biology.

Even though autism is now widely discussed in the media and society at large, the public and some experts alike are still stymied be a couple of the big, basic questions about the disorder: What is autism, and how do we identify—and count—it? A close look shows that the unknowns involved in both of these questions suffice to explain the reported autism boom. The disorder hasn’t actually become much more common—we’ve just developed better and more accurate ways of looking for it.

In March the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the newly measured autism prevalences for 8-year-olds in the United States, and headlines roared about a “1 in 88 autism epidemic.” The fear-mongering has led some enterprising folk to latch onto our nation’s growing chemophobia and link the rise in autism to “toxins” or other alleged insults, and some to sell their research, books, and “cures.” On the other hand, some researchers say that what we’re really seeing is likely the upshot of more awareness about autism and ever-shifting diagnostic categories and criteria.

Leo Kanner first described autism almost 70 years ago, in 1944. Before that, autism didn’t exist as far as clinicians were concerned, and its official prevalence was, therefore, zero. There were, obviously, people with autism, but they were simply considered insane. Kanner himself noted in a 1965 paper that after he identified this entity, “almost overnight, the country seemed to be populated by a multitude of autistic children,” a trend that became noticeable in other countries, too, he said.

In 1951, Kanner wrote, the “great question” became whether or not to continue to roll autism into schizophrenia diagnoses, where it had been previously tucked away, or to consider it as a separate entity. But by 1953, one autism expert was warning about the “abuse of the diagnosis of autism” because it “threatens to become a fashion.” Sixty years later, plenty of people are still asserting that autism is just a popular diagnosis du jour (along with ADHD), that parents and doctors use to explain plain-old bad behavior.

Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism sometimes known as “little professor syndrome,” is in the same we-didn’t-see-it-before-and-now-we-do situation. In 1981, noted autism researcher Lorna Wing translated and revivified Hans Asperger’s 1944 paper describing this syndrome as separate from Kanner’s autistic disorder, although Wing herself argued that the two were part of a borderless continuum. Thus, prior to 1981, Asperger’s wasn’t a diagnosis, in spite of having been identified almost 40 years earlier. Again, the official prevalence was zero before its adoption by the medical community.

And so, here we are today, with two diagnoses that didn’t exist 70 years ago (plus a third, even newer one:PDD-NOS) even though the people with the conditions did. The CDC’s new data say that in the United States, 1 in 88 eight-year-olds fits the criteria for one of these three, up from 1 in 110 for its 2006 estimate. Is that change the result of an increase in some dastardly environmental “toxin,” as some argue? Or is it because of diagnostic changes and reassignments, as happened when autism left the schizophrenia umbrella?

To most experts in autism and autism epidemiology, the biggest factors accounting for the boost in autism prevalence are the shifting definitions and increased awareness about the disorder. Several decades after the introduction of autism as a diagnosis, researchers have reported that professionals are still engaging in “diagnostic substitution”: moving people from one diagnostic category, such as “mental retardation” or “language impairment,” to the autism category. For instance, in one recent study, researchers at UCLA re-examined a population of 489 children who’d been living in Utah in the 1980s. Their first results, reported in 1990, identified 108 kids in the study population who received a classification of “challenged” (what we consider today to be “intellectually disabled”) but who were not diagnosed as autistic. When the investigators went back and applied today’s autism diagnostic criteria to the same 108 children, they found that 64 of them would have received an autism diagnosis today, along with their diagnosis of intellectual disability.

Further evidence of this shift comes from developmental neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop and colleagues, who completed a study involving re-evaluation of adults who’d been identified in childhood as having a developmental language disorder rather than autism. Using two diagnostic tools to evaluate them today, Bishops’ group found that a fifth of these adults met the criteria for an autism spectrum diagnosis when they previously had not been recognized as autistic.

Another strong argument against the specter of an emergent autism epidemic is that prevalence of the disorder is notably similar from country to country and between generations. A 2011 UK study of a large adult population found a consistent prevalence of 1% among adults, “similar to that found in (UK) children” and about where the rates are now among US children. In other words, they found as many adults as there were children walking around with autism, suggesting stable rates across generations—at least, when people bother to look at adults. And back in 1996, Lorna Wing (the autism expert who’d translated Asperger’s seminal paper) tentatively estimated an autism spectrum disorder prevalence of 0.91% [PDF] based on studies of children born between 1956 and 1983, close to the 1% that keeps... READ MORE >>

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Autistic teen's world unveiled in new book

'Carly's Voice: Breaking Through Autism' 

Video: CBC News

A new book tells the story of an autistic Toronto teenager who was born without the ability to speak out loud, who lived for years having her voice unknown to the world until she began to convey her thoughts through a computer.

Carly Fleischmann was just two years old when she was diagnosed with severe autism.

Doctors told her family that she would never speak or develop intellectually.

But when she was 10 years old, Carly proved them wrong.

She typed out words on a computer, telling her therapists that her teeth hurt. It was the start of a new conversation between Carly and the world around her.

At 17, Carly Fleischmann has a blog and a Twitter account with thousands of followers. She is now a published author as well.In the years that followed, Carly kept on writing. She now has a blog, as well as thousands of followers on Facebook and Twitter.

Her father, Arthur Fleischmann, said that every time he reads some of Carly’s writing, he learns something.

“I find that when she writes it's like a little bit of a gift because each time I see something that she writes, I learn a little bit more, I get a little bit more insight into my daughter,” he said in a recent interview with CBC News.

At 17, Carly attends a public high school and enrolls in gifted classes.

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Book 3 years in the making

She and her dad have spent many weekends over the past three years working on a book about her life, which has just been released.

The book, Carly's Voice: Breaking Through Autism, goes into all of the ups and downs of Carly’s life. It blends their two voices together, showing readers what is like to live with autism and

♥ Thought for the Day ♥

Problem Feeders

Parents can become overwhelmed and frightened when their child refuses to eat. Many struggle at mealtime, hoping to find a way for their child to eat and drink without resistance. To best address these challenges, we need to discern if the child is a problem feeder, learn why they are not eating, and provide avenues for parents to get professional and medical guidance, if necessary.

Some signs and symptoms of problem feeding are: eating fewer than 20 different foods, taking too long to eat (generally over 45 minutes).

Some signs and symptoms of problem feeding are:

• eating fewer than 20 different foods
• taking too long to eat (generally over 45 minutes)
• refusing food
• vomiting, gagging, or choking when eating
• inappropriate behaviors surrounding mealtime (e.g., hitting, kicking, throwing food)
• refusing entire categories of food textures or food groups
• tantrums when presented with new foods
• refusing to eat a once-favorite food and never reinstating that item back into his food inventory
• medical complications leading to poor growth

While eating fewer than twenty different foods or taking longer than 45 minutes to eat can be signs of feeding problems – these are not uncommon behaviors for a child with autism; typically, additional symptoms are present with problem feeders. For example, if a child ate fewer than 20 foods and took a long time to eat but was generally happy and not gagging or crying at meals, then the child may not be a problem feeder. And, as Julie points out in her article, many children with limited diets...
<<Read Full Article >>

♥ Thought for the Day ♥

Autism in the News

Today, 3:00 AM

A research team led by Seattle Children's Research Institute has discovered new gene mutations associated with markedly enlarged brain size, or megalencephaly. Mutations in three genes, AKT3, PIK3R2 and PIK3CA, were also found to be associated with a constellation of disorders including cancer, hydrocephalus, epilepsy, autism, vascular anomalies and skin growth disorders...  Read more…

Probing The Roots Of Depression By Tracking Serotonin Regulation At A New Level

Friday, 4:00 AM

In a process akin to belling an infinitesimal cat, scientists have managed to tag a protein that regulates the neurotransmitter serotonin with tiny fluorescent beads, allowing them to track the movements of single molecules for the first time...  Read more…

Detecting The Early Signs Of Autism In Infant Brains

Friday, 3:00 AM

A new study shows significant differences in brain development in high-risk infants who develop autism starting as early as age 6 months. The findings published in the American Journal of Psychiatry reveal that this abnormal brain development may be detected before the appearance of autism symptoms in an infant's first year of life. Autism is typically diagnosed around the age of 2 or 3...  Read more…

Potential Diagnostic Test For Autism Suggested By Computer Analysis Of EEG Patterns

Wednesday, 4:00 AM

Widely available EEG testing can distinguish children with autism from neurotypical children as early as age 2, finds a study from Boston Children's Hospital. The study is the largest, most rigorous study to date to investigate EEGs as a potential diagnostic tool for autism, and offers hope for an earlier, more definitive test. Researchers Frank H...  Read more…

New EEG Test To Diagnose Children With Autism

Jun 26, 3:00 PM

BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine carries an article this week with new research showing the possibility of identifying children with autism using an EEG test. EEG, or Electroencephalography, records electrical activity in the brain, using an array of electrodes attached to the scalp...  Read more…

EEG Test To Identify Autism In Children

Jun 26, 4:00 AM

The number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has recently increased to one in 100. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine demonstrates that EEG can distinguish between children with autism and neurotypical controls...  Read more…

Hormonal Response Is Stronger In People With Williams Syndrome, Shedding Light On The Biological Underpinnings Of Social Disorders

Jun 25, 4:00 AM

The hormone oxytocin - often referred to as the "trust" hormone or "love hormone" for its role in stimulating emotional responses - plays an important role in Williams syndrome (WS), according to a study published in PLoS One...  Read more…

Functional Links Between Autism And Genes Explained

Jun 24, 3:00 AM

A pioneering report of genome-wide gene expression in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) finds genetic changes that help explain why one person has an ASD and another does not. The study, published by Cell Press in The American Journal of Human Genetics, pinpoints ASD risk factors by comparing changes in gene expression with DNA mutation data in the same individuals...  Read more…

Study Uncovers New Tools For Targeting Genes Linked To Autism

Jun 24, 3:00 AM

UCLA researchers have combined two tools - gene expression and the use of peripheral blood - to expand scientists' arsenal of methods for pinpointing genes that play a role in autism. Published in the online edition of the American Journal of Human Genetics, the findings could help scientists zero in on genes that offer future therapeutic targets for the disorder...  Read more…