Archives for the month of: July, 2009

Unrequited Love

July 31, 2009 //
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The new independent film Adam portrays, in many ways, a typical New York love story. Two young, good-looking people meet in the laundry room of their brownstone apartment building. They frolic under the moon in Central Park, dine at abrasively loud restaurants, and endure awkward parent introductions.

The setup is utterly conventional — except that the handsome, quiet and quirky male lead, Adam, has Asperger’s syndrome.

I had the pleasure of catching a sneak preview of Adam on Monday night; it will be rolled out to theatres across the country over the next few weeks. The movie will no doubt receive critical nods for the refined direction by Max Mayer and engrossing performances by Hugh Dancy, who plays Adam, and Rose Byrne, who plays his lover, Beth.

But Adam is bound to stir up controversy among the autism advocacy community for its provocative central question: Can people with autism truly fall in love?

Read more at…

SFARI, July 2009.

Categories 2009, Art and Music, Autism, Blogging, Health and Medicine, SFARI

Baby Sibs Surprises

July 24, 2009 //
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One of the fastest-growing subfields of autism research is the rigorous characterization of ‘baby sibs’, the younger siblings of kids with autism.

Because autism runs in families, a good number of these brothers and sisters will eventually be diagnosed with it, too. So, the idea is that studying the sibs during infancy and early development will help researchers learn more about the elusive early signs of disorder.

So far, though, this work is showing that the earliest signs of autism may not emerge as early as once thought. In fact, baby sibs studies are uprooting several of the tightly held beliefs about the nature of autism, including the hypothesis that it stems from a fundamentally social deficit.

These “surprises, contradictions and discrepancies” took center stage in the latest review of baby sibs research, published earlier this month by Sally Rogers of the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute.

Read more at…

SFARI, July 2009.

Categories 2009, Autism, Blogging, Health and Medicine, SFARI

A Blurry Vision

July 17, 2009 //
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In January, a controversial report claimed that people with autism have ‘eagle-eye’ vision. Now, four scientists have published rebuttals to that study, citing major flaws in the way the experiment was carried out.

In the original paper, Emma Ashwin used a computer program to measure how well people with autism can see super-small pictures. Controlled experiments of this kind hadn’t been done before, but there are many anecdotal stories of people with autism noticing tiny details of a scene (sometimes at the expense of seeing the ‘big picture’).

Ashwin’s experiment, published in Biological Psychiatry, found that adults with autism have off-the-charts scores of visual acuity: 2.79 — meaning they can resolve images at 2.79 times the distance of average adults — compared with 1.44 for the control group. She suggested that this super vision may stem from an unusually large number of densely packed eye cells.

These numbers are striking, but might be meaningless.

Read more at…

SFARI, July 2009.

Categories 2009, Autism, Blogging, Brain Science, Health and Medicine, SFARI

Busy Summer for the NIH

July 10, 2009 //
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Nearly five months into his term, on Wednesday President Obama finally nominated a new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH): famed geneticist Francis Collins.

The announcement came the day after the NIH released new guidelines encouraging research based on human embryonic stem cells.

Both announcements are critically important, especially given our growing dependence on the government for research support. The NIH is one of the world’s largest scientific funding agencies, and its director is responsible for managing 27 institutes, 18,000 employees and a $31 billion annual budget. The agency also oversees the 10-year, $800 million ‘strategic plan’ for autism research.

Read more at…

SFARI, July 2009.

Categories 2009, Autism, Blogging, Health and Medicine, SFARI
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