House Bill 273
By Richard | February 6, 2009
Autism Insurance Coverage Bill Introduced in Maryland House and Senate
AutismVotes.org
Annapolis, MD (January 29, 2009) - Today, Delegate Kirill Reznik and Senator Kathy Klausmeier, with the strong support of Attorney General Doug Gansler, introduced bills in the House and Senate to ensure that treatment for children with autism is covered by insurers.
The “Autism Insurance Coverage” bill will require that insurance companies provide coverage for the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders, medication, and Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy. ABA is a behavioral therapy which is accepted by most medical authorities as the most effective treatment for Autism. It is estimated that 1 in 142 children in Maryland have a disorder which falls on the Autism Spectrum. Similar versions of this bill have passed in States throughout the country including Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana and Texas. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Transporters
By Richard | January 15, 2009
DVD teach autistic kids what a smile means
HuffingtonPost.com
LONDON — It wasn’t until Jude met Jenny that the 3-year-old autistic boy understood what happy people look like.
Jenny, a green trolley car with a human face, had a furrowed brow when her wheel buckled and she got stuck on a track. But after being rescued by friends, she smiled broadly _ and that’s when something clicked for little Jude Baines.
“It was revelatory,” his mother, Caron Freeborn told AP Television News in Cambridge, England. Before watching the video, Jude didn’t understand what emotions were and never noticed the expressions on people’s faces, even those of his parents or younger brother.
Jenny’s adventures are part of a DVD for autistic children released this week in the United States called The Transporters.
The DVD teaches autistic children how to recognize emotions like happiness, anger and sadness through the exploits of vehicles including a train, a ferry, and a cable car.
It is the brainchild of Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. He also happens to be a cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen, the comedian behind the characters Ali G, the aspiring rapper, and Borat, the crass Kazakh reporter.
Baron-Cohen first became interested in autism in the 1980s while teaching autistic children. “Why should social interaction be so difficult for a child who has very good skills in other areas like memory or an attention to detail?” he wondered. MORE
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Simon Baron-Cohen on Autism
By Richard | January 15, 2009
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen: Autism is not cancer
CommunityCare.co.uk
Cambridge University’s autism research centre published a study this week which identified a link between testosterone levels in pregnant women and autistic traits in their children. Its director, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, discusses the pros and cons of prenatal screening for the condition.
Research into the biomedical causes of autism spectrum conditions is moving forward at a tremendous pace, with new genes being associated with autism almost every month, and with a strong drive by scientists to find biological markers, perhaps to improve diagnosis, and to understand causes.
On the BBC health website recently, I flagged up the need for the autism community (parents and professionals and those with the diagnosis) to be thinking ahead about how such research might be used, rather than just leaving it to the scientists.
Our research at the autism research centre (ARC) in Cambridge does focus on understanding possible biological causal factors but is not motivated by a desire to develop a prenatal test for screening. It is simply to increase our knowledge of how autism comes about.
It is unfortunate that sometimes the popular press seizes on the opportunity to discuss such basic research into causes in terms of its implications for prenatal screening. This happened in the Guardian with our research into foetal testosterone, for example, despite the fact that the research we conducted was not a prenatal screening study and did not study diagnosed autism. (Both were errors in how the research was reported).
However, we must realize that as science uncovers possible causes, this information may be picked up by drug companies or other researchers and used in ways that the original team did not envisage.
If there was a prenatal test for autism (and there isn’t one at present and there may not be one for several years), this could have one clear benefit, which is to bring forward the age at which diagnosis is possible, from the current average age of three years old. Knowing antenatally that your child might develop autism could mean that families could prepare, that proper support could be put in place, and that psychological therapies could be started at an earlier point (even from birth).
If there was a prenatal test for autism, there might be some disadvantages:
1. There might be eugenic selection against foetuses who might develop autism, and this is a form of discrimination against those who are not neurotypical.
2. Some parents might opt for a termination because they think their child will not have a good quality of life, even though the child may in fact make a good adaptation and/or society could adapt to them.
3. The genes for autism may be linked to the genes for talent (and by talent I don’t just mean the musically or artistically or mathematically gifted, but even in those with apparent learning difficulties there may be an excellent memory, or excellent attention to detail and patterns, or an excellent ability to focus attention for long periods, or acute sensory hyper-sensitivity), such that eradicating the genes for autism may also eradicate the genes for these talents. Read the rest of this entry »
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Defending Vaccines
By Richard | January 14, 2009
Book Is Rallying Resistance to the Antivaccine Crusade
New York Times
A new book defending vaccines, written by a doctor infuriated at the claim that they cause autism, is galvanizing a backlash against the antivaccine movement in the United States.
But there will be no book tour for the doctor, Paul A. Offit, author of “Autism’s False Prophets.” He has had too many death threats.
“I’ll speak at a conference, say, to nurses,” he said. “But I wouldn’t go into a bookstore and sign books. It can get nasty. There are parents who really believe that vaccines hurt their children, and to them, I’m incredibly evil. They hate me.”
Dr. Offit, a pediatrician, is a mild, funny and somewhat rumpled 57-year-old. The chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, he is also the co-inventor of a vaccine against rotavirus, a diarrheal disease that kills 60,000 children a year in poor countries.
“When Jonas Salk invented polio vaccine, he was a hero — and I’m a terrorist?” he jokes, referring to a placard denouncing him at a recent demonstration by antivaccine activists outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
In recent years, the debate over vaccines and autism, which began in fear and confusion, has hardened into anger. As Dr. Offit’s book details, numerous studies of thimerosal, measles virus and other alleged autism triggers in vaccines have been conducted, and hundreds of children with diagnoses of autism have undergone what he considers sham treatments and been “cured.” Both sides insist that the medical evidence backs them.
As a result, “a few years ago this ceased to be a civil scientific discourse and became about crucifying individuals,” said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, chief of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic, who says he has had threats against his children. “Paul is a lightning rod, a figure who goes charging into the fray.”
Those backing Dr. Offit say he was forced into the role. Opponents of vaccines have held rallies, appeared on talk shows like “Oprah” and “Imus in the Morning,” been the heroes of made-for-TV movies and found a celebrity spokeswoman in Jenny McCarthy, the actress and former Playboy model who has an autistic son. Meanwhile, the response from public health officials has been muted and couched in dull scientific jargon.
“If the surgeon general or the secretary of health or the head of the C.D.C. would come out and make a really strong statement on this, I think the whole thing would go away,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute, who has a severely autistic daughter whose disease, he argues, is genetic. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Vaccines | 1 Comment »
Some Fruit Fly Research Is Good!
By Richard | December 18, 2008
Possible Clues To Root Of Epilepsy, Autism, Schizophrenia
ScienceDaily (Dec. 17, 2008) — Rice University researchers have found a potential clue to the roots of epilepsy, autism, schizophrenia and other neurological disorders.
While studying the peripheral nerves of the Drosophila, aka the fruit fly, Rice doctoral student Eric Howlett discovered an unanticipated connection between glutamate – an amino acid and neurotransmitter in much of the food we eat – and phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K), an enzyme that, Howlett found, regulates the activity of neurons.
Howlett and his colleagues, graduate student Curtis Chun-Jen Lin, research technician William Lavery and Michael Stern, a professor of biochemistry and cell biology, discovered that negative feedback mediated by PI3K regulates the excitability of neurons, an issue in a number of ailments that include neurofibromatosis, and that a mutation in a glutamate receptor gene common to both the fruit fly and humans has the ability to disrupt that regulatory mechanism.
Howlett found the Drosophila’s metabotropic glutamate receptor (DmGluRA) gene, when mutated, increased the excitability of the neuron by preventing PI3K from doing its job.
The study is the culmination of four years of work that built upon research by Marie-Laure Parmentier and her team at the University of Montpelier, France, to connect glutamate to regulatory functions in the fruit fly.
“As science often goes, we didn’t set out with this hypothesis,” said Howlett, who began the project on funding obtained by Stern from the Department of Defense to study neurofibromatosis. “This all came about as a control for a completely different experiment, and we said, ‘Wow, this is some interesting stuff.’”
What he saw was that the overexpression of PI3K in motor neurons had a dramatic effect. “I noticed under the scope that these nerves were really big, and electrophysiologically, they were really slow. That wasn’t what I expected, and it set me on a path of trying to find out what was going on.”
Howlett’s breakthrough was identifying the negative feedback loop that acts to maintain neuronal excitability at normal levels. “What we found was that glutamate, which is released due to neuronal activity, feeds back onto metabotropic glutamate receptors on the same neurons that released it in the first place. This leads to the activation of PI3K and ultimately to the dampening of the amount of glutamate that is released.” Without that regulation, he said, things inside the cell can go terribly wrong.
“He put his heart and soul into this,” said Stern of Howlett’s exploration of the neuronal chain. “He was working on PI3K because that has a key role in neurofibromatosis. The Department of Defense is very interested in how PI3K is regulated in the nervous system because of its role in tumor formation.”
Discovering the negative feedback loop that keeps neurons stable was key, said Stern, but not the end of the investigation. “We know that glutamate activates mGluR and PI3K, but we don’t know how,” he said. “There are almost certainly a number of intermediates that remain to be identified, and we have several candidates we’re looking into.
“We’re finding a mechanistic link among these molecules that hadn’t been previously appreciated,” Stern said.
“Obviously the next step would be to test whether these same molecules are playing similar roles in mammalian neurons,” said Howlett, who will leave Rice in the spring to pursue postdoctoral cancer research at Virginia Commonwealth University. A native Houstonian, he earned his bachelor’s in biology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
Howlett said mGluRs had already been targeted in possible treatments for schizophrenia, epilepsy and other “excitability” diseases, so it’s not a stretch to think his research could lead to even more strategies in treating neurological ailments.
“Actually, all of the molecules involved in our model have been implicated in one way or another with neurological diseases, but no one has been able to link them together into a coherent explanation of the diseases,” he said. “Our model provides a novel framework that could really go a long way toward doing that.”
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Toys!
By Richard | December 7, 2008
Toy Ideas for Kids and Tweens with Autism
Bonnie Sayers | BellaOnline
My kids are older now at twelve and thirteen, so not really considered children and more like tweens/teenagers. Mine are boys so I tend to locate items suitable for the male population. Some of these are products on my wish list, while others they would have liked if these were around when they were younger.
Dokedo Putty My older son Nicholas loves playing with this scented play putty. He makes animal creatures with them, mixes up the colors for larger creations. They are easy to shape and get back into the container. There has not been any issue with the putty sticking to his fingers or furniture. Nicholas tends to wash his hands fairly often and no complaints about this product. It is fun for travelling to keep occupied in car, train or plane and great to place in stocking and give to classmates as Year-end gifts.
Snap Bags are found at the Sensory Integration section at Toys for Autism website. I am considering getting these for my nonverbal son Matthew. You can throw and link them together. What caught my attention was the recommendation that “They create a calming presence when all six are attached and used as a shoulder or lap weight. ” This would work well at the classroom once the New Year starts.
Dino Claw Stilts at Sensory Comfort looks like something Nicholas would have enjoyed when he was younger. He even confirmed this when he saw it on the computer screen. He is still interested in Dinosaurs and the neon green color is neat. This does require adult supervision and recommended for kids over the age of five.
Puzzles were a big hit with Nicholas several years ago. He could put together 100 piece puzzles with little effort. Matthew was interested in the foam puzzles. Especially Mine has a limited assortment of puzzles, but good to start off with.
Skoodlez I came across these cute stuffed animals and had to save it on my computer. They are available for $14.99 at Macy’s. This is a good gift idea for the kid that is traveling or wants something unusual on their bed to cuddle with. I like the flapjack duck and the cat. I have a feeling our cat would like them too.
The following are products I have on my wishlist at Amazon. Some might be purchased for the holiday season and others for birthdays and other times.
The Sensory Belt is an item I would like to try at school for my nonverbal son Matthew. The large size is good for bigger kids. They have available a smaller size for elementary age children. MORE
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Autism and the Environment 101
By Richard | December 5, 2008
Carin Yavorcik | Autism Society of America
The Autism Society of America is pleased to announce the release of its newest online course, “Autism and the Environment 101.” Sponsored by the John Merck Fund, this introductory-level course was designed to give individuals with autism spectrum disorders, parents, other family members, physicians, educators or anyone affected by autism a general overview of the links between environmental toxins and autism.
“It is our hope that by developing balanced information and resources we can help people think through their options more effectively and with greater support,” said ASA President & CEO Lee Grossman.
The rates of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have risen sharply in the last decade, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in 2007 that one in 150 children will be diagnosed with an ASD. Scientists suspect that an increasing amount of environmental triggers coupled with genetic vulnerability could explain the dramatic increases in the rates of ASD around the world.
“Autism and the Environment 101” examines some of the toxins present in our changing environment, their effect on our bodies, the rapidly rising rates of ASD and the role of the government in regulating chemicals. It also discusses what we can do everyday to protect ourselves and our children. Written in conversational language free of jargon, the online course is accessible to anyone, and takes approximately 45 minutes to complete. Read the rest of this entry »
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Autistic Teens
By Richard | November 30, 2008
MELISSA FAY GREENE | New York Times
On a typical Monday morning at an atypical high school, teenage boys yanked open the glass doors to the First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga. Half-awake, iPod wires curling from their ears, their backpacks unbuckled and their jeans baggy, the guys headed for the elevator. Arriving at Morning Meeting in the third-floor conference room, Stephen, his face hidden under long black bangs, dropped into a chair, sprawled across the table and went back to sleep. The Community School, or T.C.S., is a small private school for teenage boys with autism or related disorders. Sleep disturbances are common in this student body of 10, so a boy’s staggering need for sleep is respected. Nick Boswell, a tall fellow with thick sideburns, arrived and began his usual pacing along the windows that overlook the church parking lot and baseball diamond. Edwick, with spiky brown hair and a few black whiskers, tumbled backward with a splat into a beanbag chair on the floor.
“O.K., guys, let’s talk about your spring schedules,” said Dave Nelson, the 45-year-old founding director. He wore a green polo shirt, cargo shorts and sneakers and had a buzz haircut and an open, suntanned face. After his son Graham, 19, was given a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (A.S.D.) as a young child, Nelson left the business world and went into teaching and clinical and counseling work. On that Monday, he was instantly interrupted.
“I had a very bad night!” Edwick yelled from the floor. “Nightmares all night!”
“What was disturbing you, Edwick?” Nelson asked.
“What do you think?” Edwick cried in exasperation. “It’s St. Patrick’s Day!”
“What’s upsetting about that?” Nelson asked.
Edwick dropped his shoulders to relay how tiring it was to have to explain every little thing. “Leprechauns,” he yelled.
“Oh,” Nelson said. “I thought maybe it was the tornado that hit downtown on Friday night.”
“No, not the tornado!” Edwick yelled. MORE
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Illinois Expected To Pass Autism Bill
By Richard | November 30, 2008
Illinois autism bill would mandate insurance coverage of $36,000 a year
Monique Garcia and Ray Long | Chicago Tribune
Insurance companies would be required to cover autism diagnosis and treatment up to $36,000 a year under legislation sent to the governor Thursday.
The action marks a victory for advocates who say early intervention and therapy is key to helping children with autism gain communication and social skills.
Under the proposal, which Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s office said he plans to sign, insurance companies would be required to cover treatment until a patient turns 21. About 4,500 families across the state will qualify for coverage.
Lawmakers said it’s needed for families struggling with the emotional and financial tolls of autism.
“Some of these families [are] mortgaging their homes, they’re living with relatives, they’re accumulating a lot of debt,” said Senate sponsor James DeLeo (D-Chicago). “People have filed for bankruptcy in order to finance the medical services for children with autism.”
While the measure passed the House this week without opposition, some in the Senate argued against it because big employers, which usually choose to self-insure and fall under less restrictive federal guidelines, would be excluded. Others worried the mandate would raise costs for small employers who may cancel coverage. MORE
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By Richard | November 18, 2008
My Son Was Autistic. Is He Still?
Jayne Lytel | Special to The Washington Post
Paging through 176 MRI scans of my 9-year-old’s brain on my home computer, I discovered a button that let me play them as a movie. Gray swirls burst onto the screen, dissolving into one another and revealing a new set of patterns. Beams of light faded in and out, some curving and traveling around the different regions of his brain. I saw the squiggly folds of his cerebral cortex, the gray matter that is the center of human intelligence.
These scans, the most intimate pictures I had ever seen of my son, Leo, may help researchers understand what’s going on in his head — and relieve him of a diagnosis that I have devoted several years to helping him overcome.
Leo, identified as No. C1059, underwent the scans as part of a research study at the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. He was thrilled to earn $200 for taking part. I smiled along with him, because I could remember the days when he had a limited range of emotions, and pride was not one of them.
The study is examining 35 children, ranging in age from 8 to 17, who once had an autism-spectrum diagnosis but no longer do. Leo was invited to participate based on how I had described changes in his behavior and communication skills since he was given an autism diagnosis seven years ago. It is one of several studies underway to clarify the experiences of a growing number of children who are apparently emerging from autism and its related disorders to function almost indistinguishably from their peers; it aims to reveal whether it is indeed possible to recover from autism.
According to many experts, recovery from an autism spectrum disorder — a pervasive impairment in thinking, feeling, language development and the ability to relate to others that affects one child out of every 150 in the United States — is real. But the meaning of recovery differs from researcher to researcher as much as it does from parent to parent.
I know what recovery means for me: to have a conversation with Leo, especially about love and friendship, and to see him play a team sport. When Leo asked to join his school’s soccer team this fall, I thought back to the distressing days when he ran aimlessly around the back yard, clueless about the purpose of the two goals I had set up. Read the rest of this entry »
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