http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/07/rise_in_number_of_children_dia.html
I thought you guys would like this read.
I thought you guys would like this read.
chap, thorn, or Meg
- Thread starter LadyT
- Start date
Thorn
Member
Thanks, T! That was interesting and brought out a number of important issues. Certainly awareness that this is a bona fide disorder will make parents more conscious (sometimes too conscious) of looking for possible symptoms. This occurs with every disease.
This awareness certainly will lead to an increase in diagnoses. The difficult part now is to try to partition the recognition/diagnostic increases from any possible increases in incidence. That is so confounded by the first factor that it might be impossible to separate the two meaningfully.
More recent findings suggest that at least among some children there may be a genetic vulnerability that reacts to a catalyst such as the increased immune response occasioned by a vaccine. I think it's critically important to determine the difference here because the implications are enormous. If it's the immune response then any illness or infection that would trigger the immune system might cause the same effect. The challenge would be how to avoid that or somehow divert it. If it isn't the immune response itself, then the alternative culprit among those children would be the vaccine itself, or some component of the vaccine. Thimerosol is no longer used, but something else in the vehicle (solution that carries the vaccine itself) may react and act as the catalyst.
The hardest part of this is that autism takes so many forms that it really can't be pinned down; perhaps it would be wisest, as seems to be the direction this is heading, to partition the descriptions and consider them, once they have been well described and defined, as separate disorders altogether. That would greatly simplify efforts to determine causative factors and, ultimately, treatment.
Really? I hadn't heard that before? You mean like subsets of autism or something entirely different all together?
Thorn
Member
Yes. At present, everything falls under the umbrella, "autism spectrum disorder", from high-functioning (and usually highly intelligent) Asperger's syndrome to the completely incommunicative and low- or almost non-functioning subset that most lay people understand as autism, and which too many people, including clinicians, misidentified as mental retardation. I'd guess that most autistic people fall somewhere in between.
I was talking today with someone at work who said that when she was a child (she's now in her sixties) she was sent home with report cards and notes that described her as "slow" or "inattentive", and that her mother sometimes even called her stupid. She's not; far from it. When her own son was 12 he (and she, together!) were more correctly diagnosed with dyslexia. That's far from stupidity, it's just a perceptual problem that can be overcome with special training. My own Ph.D. supervisor was dyslexic and he was highly regarded in our field all around the world. It hurts me to learn how much potential has been wasted, and how much emotional pain people have suffered, simply because their conditions were never recognized for what they were and no help was available. I think that the new recognition that the various types of autism are now receiving can only help.
That's true. I also think that parents need to be better educated in how important diet is in their child's behaviour and developmental learning. I had no idea that autism could actually be improved with the help of a strict diet.