When our son Charlie was diagnosed with autism in 1999, we were informed that he had a developmental disorder. The head of the team at the Child Development Center of the Minneapolis Children’s Hospital was a psychologist and nodding, if quite disinterested, acknowledgement was given to the new theories about autism we were hearing about, mostly from Bernard Rimland’s Autism Research Institute. Autism was described as a biomedical disorder rather than a psychological one.
During the past seven-plus years since Charlie was diagnosed with autism, we have instead referred to autism as neurological, neurodevelopmental, neurobiological and this biology-centered change in autism nomenclature is reflective of the rise in research into the biology of autism. The latest installment in UPI’s PedMed series is Autism research shifts to biology. Recent research by David Amaral of the M.I.N.D. Institute that might lead to the development of a blood test to find out if a newborn is autistic is referred to as “quite a coup, considering no biological test exists for identifying the disorder at any age, and only half the children now are diagnosed before kindergarten, most of them between their second and fourth birthdays.”
“Finding a biological sign — or ‘biomarker’ — that can be detected at birth is a major goal of the M.I.N.D. Institute as it could allow doctors to initiate treatment or perhaps even prevent the disorder early in a child’s life,” Amaral said.
He and colleagues have found striking differences in disease-fighting immune cells, proteins and certain small molecules in the blood of autistic children that one day just might do the trick, Amaral said.
The idea is if vulnerable youngsters could be pinpointed in the delivery room and the environmental trigger of that susceptibility identified, it would be possible to keep the two apart — and keep the disorder at bay, researchers explained.
Amaral is also quoted as saying that it would behoove us to focus more on investigating the immune factors in autism and Wasowicz suggests that this focus has arisen in no small part from the efforts of parent advocates “who have seen their autistic children through food allergies, digestive problems and intractable infections.”
The mention of being able one day to “prevent the disorder”—to detect autism at an early stage of a child’s life and keep it “at bay”—raises the toughest questions. Should the decision of having an autistic child be left just to parents new to parenthood, let alone to autism? Based on our society’s understanding of autism right now, what choices might such new-to-autism parents make? And what kinds of education of the general public do we need to undertake right now to help them make the best-informed decision—-a decision that they will have to live with for their lifetimes, and the lifetime of their child?
John; Iwrote about this before on another board. I said at that time that if you took the hair and tested if for LEAD and ARSENIC you may tell where the child could fall on the from mild to severe. I said this should done when the child was 2 years old, but after thinking it over that is to late because I think the baby comes out of the womb the fate of the child was all ready predetermine but the hair at that time might tell you if the child might all ready have autism be for the vaccinations. But I don”T see that happening because that is not where the money is. The money in in the gene theories.
My partner teaches in a mainstream school but does sometimes have autistic children in the class.
She found severely autistic children to be extremely hard to deal with. One particular child could be quite violent and previous teachers had nervous breakdowns and gone off with stress as a result of the child. For my partner it got to the point of having nightmares about the child killing her – at which point she took time off.
Severely autistic children are very difficult to deal with and unlikely to fit well in to society as an adult. So if something can be done that helps reduce the symptoms I think this is all for the good.
And if a test can determine if a child will be autistic and level of severity then that’s good too. Gives people the choice.
[...] Everyday we hear the call for more research into autism and, specifically, for more scientific research about autism—what it is, what causes it, what kinds of treatments have yet to be discovered and developed. In yesterday’s post on recent research into the biology of autism, an autism mother commented: I want mainstream researchers to find out everything they can, because that’s the only way we can stop the quacks. [...]
When you read the same number on 20 different sites with a fairly vague google search ( “Down Syndrome Abortion”) you get the idea it’s accurate. Especially sites from the DS associations to Medline. If I were pulling a number out of my ass I would have guessed 83 or something.
And yes, we WILL be extinct. If you didnt see it, AutismWeeps is sending their godawful murder video to Sundance. Now lots of RICH people will think we need to die too! MORE FUNDING!
You’re looking at your last generation of autistic people, because the majority of the people willing to stand up and say this isn’t right ARE autistic people, and they have already made us NON persons.
I would indeed like to know as much as possible about autism; nonetheless, when one reads statements to the effect of wanting to develop treatments to “prevent the disorder,” I think it good to pause and consider the implications and the motivations behind scientific research.
Kassiane, I don’t know where the 90% number comes from, but even in a rich country such as the U.S. it is only a minority of women that receive full prenatal care and seek genetic testing.
Even though I’m pro-choice, I’m not sure if I would ever have the courage to abort a child. For most women, once you find out you’re pregnant, you form a bond with that baby and it’s going to be really hard to terminate a pregnancy no matter what the genetic testing says. Other women would never abort because of their religious orientation.
In other words, autism will never be extinct. It is not a disease that can be prevented with a vaccine, like polio. It is a genetic trait that people are born with, and has been in our DNAs forever.
So I don’t think the best way of appealing to the public for more knowledge about autistic people is to frown at scientific research that will ultimately help the whole world to know more about autism.
I want mainstream researchers to find out everything they can, because that’s the only way we can stop the quacks.
I think these sorts of questions point to the need for educating “the general public” as best we can about autism is, that it is not a terribly tragedy, devastating, etc., though it is not easy—-and that we have to give ourselves the chance to see what this will be.
an ‘ethics’ issue. There again, knowledge is power. Is it any different from having the standard genetic testing for the dodgey old parent past 35? It’s how you act on the information that really counts.
90% of babies who test positive for Down Syndrome are aborted.
People think people with Down’s are HAPPY and fun loving and easy to be around.
Now think about the autism press. We’d be extinct because of the way people percieve us.
I think parents will not always run and terminate their pregnancies if they find out their fetus might have autism in the future. Right now doctors can tell if a baby will have Down Syndrome or spina bifida as early as 13 weeks, and that didn’t mean the end of the Down population, even on families that received the news before birth. I personally know two women that learned their children were Down early in the pregnancy and thought it was a good thing because it prepared them psychologically and gave them time to seek information and love that baby the way she was, even before she was born.
I think that fighting the stigma against people with autism doesn’t equal being afraid of the advances of science in its ability to see what genes are involved and if there’s any possibility to prevent the disorder in the future. Even when this is in place, autism will continue to exist, just like people are still having babies when their families have strong history of depression or diabetes… Many parents that already have autistic kids and know how high the probability is to have a second, third, fourth autistic child, are still having more babies.