Unlike healthy children of the same age, toddlers with autism show no preference for scenes of a purely social nature — such as the waving arms and cooing noises of an adult playing ‘peek-a-boo’ — compared with the same scenes shown upside down.
Children with autism instead pay more attention to scenes in which large movements are perfectly synchronized with loud noises, such as the pronounced hand claps of a ‘pat-a-cake’ game, the study found.
Read more at…
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) yesterday committed $60 million from the stimulus package to fund research goals for autism laid out in the first federal ‘strategic plan’ for autism research. That plan, published 5 March, and crafted by a federal advisory panel over the past year, recommends 40 research studies with a projected cost of $800 million over the next decade.
In passing the Combating Autism Act in December 2006, Congress charged the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) — comprising 13 federal and 6 public members — with creating a strategic plan to help the Secretary of Health and Human Services set priorities for autism research. The IACC solicited input for this plan from both scientific experts and parent advocates, whose prerogatives were frequently in conflict.
The final plan recommends studying how autism affects people throughout life — from sequencing more than 50 candidate genes and identifying at least five environmental risk factors to studying the cost-effectiveness of services that aid adults with autism.
Read more at…
Researchers from the University of Utah surveyed 41 adults with autism — 38 of whom are Mormons — who had participated in a large prevalence study of the disorder in the 1980s, when they were children. The researchers asked the participants, now about 32 years old, how they fare in their daily life: Do they live with their parents? Are they employed? Do they drive?
The answers are mixed: About half of the 41 participants have part- or full-time jobs, 11 have higher intelligence quotients (IQs) than they did as children, 6 live on their own, and 3 are married with children. At the same time, 25 suffer from anxiety or mood disorders, 8 have lower IQs, and 18 have never dated.
Read more at…
Now there’s a new culprit to add to the list: toxoplasmosis.
At least, that’s the hypothesis of one English research team. Glenn McConkey and his colleagues at the University of Leeds say that the tiny Toxoplasma gondii — a microorganism commonly found on unwashed vegetables and undercooked meat — may be able to infect the brain and ultimately cause schizophrenia.
Read more at…
The new approach may be particularly useful for researchers who propose that autism is a consequence of poor temporal coordination among brain regions.
“The which brain areas, the where, has been a powerful focus” of research on autism and other psychiatric diseases, says Scott Kelso, professor of complex systems and brain sciences at Florida Atlantic University. “But if you don’t have a theory of how things are coordinated in time, you’re going to be missing something very essential.”
Read more at…
