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We do know that more than 26,000 kids a year are diagnosed with the disorder in the United States alone, and that between 150,000 and 300,000 of them will become adults in the next five to ten years.
Anticipating the unique needs of those rising numbers, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced Monday its plans to build a center specifically for treating adults with autism. The program will be financed thanks to a $29 million gift from the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation.
The new center will keep an electronic repository of patient data to help with future research studies, and will provide social workers to help adults with autism find jobs.
One of its more unusual goals is to teach doctors and nurses how to better interact with adults with the disorder, who may struggle to communicate their medical history, pain symptoms or dietary restrictions. A few people with autism complain that general doctors are stern, or even fearful of them, leading some to stick with their pediatrician well into adulthood.
There are only a couple of adult autism programs in the country, and the Mass. General effort will dwarf them in size and scope. I suspect — and hope — it will become a model for adult care at many other medical clinics.
…is that doctors routinely call for unnecessary medical procedures, particularly expensive imaging like CTs or MRIs. From a commentary in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine:
Between 1993 and 2001, the number of myocardial perfusion scans increased by more than 6% per year, with no justification for their use based on disease rates, health care disparities, or newly published, definitive randomized trials. Since 1992, the number of CT scans obtained has quadrupled. Physicians are referring their patients for so many imaging tests that as many as 2% of cancers may be attributable to radiation exposure during CT scanning.
As of today, I’ve been blogging (here and at my previous spot, Sequitur) for four years.
Because I started the summer before my writing graduate program, this blog is probably the best reflection I have of my location (from Baltimore to St. Louis to MI to San Diego to Brooklyn), career trajectory (from student to intern to weekend Chinatown tutor to cat-herder to freelance reporter to freelance editor) and the progress of my writing skills (from rambling to slightly less so). Still haven’t kicked the habit, apparently, of over-using parentheses.
Hooray!
Carl Zimmer’s got an interesting new column in Discover about brain cells called glia. Greek for ‘glue’, glia for a long time took a back seat to neurons, the brain cells that create and propagate electrical signals. Scientists first thought that glia’s function was simply to sustain neurons. Now, as Carl so nicely explains, they know differently:
Glia, in fact, are busy multitaskers, guiding the brain’s development and sustaining it throughout our lives. Glia also listen carefully to their neighbors, and they speak in a chemical language of their own. Scientists do not yet understand that language, but experiments suggest that it is part of the neurological conversation that takes place as we learn and form new memories. Read the rest!
The data in the spotlight come from the National Survey of Children’s Health, a telephone survey primarily funded by the Maternal and Child Health Bureau.
During one period in 2003 and another in 2007, researchers called nearly 200,000 U.S. households with at least one child and asked a variety of questions about the family’s demographics and the child’s physical and mental health.
The 2007 data, released earlier this month, found that about one percent of parent respondents answered ‘yes’ when asked if a health professional has ever told them their child has autism. That was up from 0.5 percent in the 2003 survey.
The numbers seem striking, but I’m leery of the survey’s methodology. First, the question about autism changed slightly — from asking in 2003 whether the child had been labeled with “autism” to asking in 2007 if the child had “autism, Asperger’s Disorder, pervasive developmental disorder, or other autism spectrum disorder.” Casting a wider net of conditions is likely to up the ‘yes’ response rate.
More troubling is that the survey didn’t ask whether the child had received an official autism diagnosis. If a child has a developmental delay, a “medical professional” — which the parent might interpret to mean doctor, nurse, therapist or social worker — could suggest autism without giving the child a rigorous diagnostic test.
Finally, even if the results are sound, the idea of one percent general autism prevalence is not new. Since 1999, in fact, rigorous epidemiological studies from Sweden, England and Canada have estimated the prevalence to be one percent or more. So the new survey needn’t spur worries over a dramatic rise.
In fact, when their parents play copycat — by immediately mimicking the kids’ gestures or playing with an identical toy, for example — some children with autism suddenly take notice, making eye contact, smiling and speaking more.
A new study on monkeys shows that the animals not only pay attention to imitative play, but prefer to interact with people who show it — suggesting that this impulse is deeply ingrained in innate primate social behavior.
Yes, really! I was so, so happy to hear this NPR report of rebirth in (an albeit tiny neighborhood of) Detroit. Hope more of this happens in the rest of my home state.
From Photo Synthesis:
As filter feeders, crinoids optimally position themselves in places where currents — tidal and otherwise — pass over them. The cirri of crinoids have tiny hooks at the ends, which help them to hold on and stay in place during feeding. While this may be functional for the crinoids, should they decide to perch on a soft surface, those hooks on the cirri can do damage.
Surprisingly, though, most experts don’t consider these issues core features of the disorder. One reason is that no one has definitively calculated the extent to which these behaviors crop up in people with autism. Even if a high prevalence were confirmed, sensory impairments could simply be secondary consequences of a more fundamental deficit, such as a problem with attention or an aversion to social interactions.
But last week, a group of Australian researchers reported that these symptoms are probably universal among children on the autism spectrum. Their study also found that some children show both high and low sensitivities, and that specific combinations of sensory symptoms tend to arise more frequently than others.
Eric Goosby, new PEPFAR head
Since its inception in 2003, the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—PEPFAR—has spent $18.8 billion curbing the HIV epidemic in developing countries. But after providing antiretroviral drugs to more than 2.1 million people, the massive program is now shifting its focus from treatment to prevention.
In May, as part of his federal budget request, US President Barack Obama moved PEPFAR under a new administrative umbrella—the ‘Global Health Initiative’—and suggested a six-year commitment of $51 billion for PEPFAR and malaria programs.
More recently, on 19 June, the US Senate approved the president’s choice of a new PEPFAR leader: Eric Goosby, a physician and former chief executive officer of Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation.
Since his confirmation, Goosby has repeatedly stressed that big changes are in store for PEPFAR—most notably in handing over management responsibilities to local governments overseas and in scaling up prevention efforts. “Prevention is an essential component of PEPFAR and is becoming an increasingly critical priority in the absence of an HIV vaccine or cure,” he told Nature Medicine in an email.
This new focus comes as welcome news to many public health experts. “[PEPFAR] badly needs some new directions,” says Joanne Csete, associate professor of population and family health at Columbia University.
