Autism 'begins long before birth'

[muriel_volestrangler]

Patchy changes in the developing brain long before birth may cause symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), research suggests.

The study, in the New England Journal of Medicine, raises hopes that better understanding of the brain may improve the lives of children with autism.
...
US scientists analysed post-mortem brain tissue of 22 children with and without autism, all between two and 15 years of age.

They used genetic markers to look at how the outermost part of the brain, the cortex, wired up and formed layers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26750786

[Shivering Jemmy]

1. Really wish they would drop the disorder language

Do not like being considered a "disorder"

[unblock]

2. agreed, "syndrome" would be more accurate and less pejorative.

but then "autism spectrum syndrome" doesn't abbreviate well....

i'm actually not sure a lot of autism even belongs in the same grouping. mini-unblock is a high-functioning pdd-nos (pervasive developmental disorder - not otherwise specified), and we have a friend who has a boy roughly his age who is profoundly autistic, i don't know the exact diagnosis, but he has some of the classic sensory and repetitive issues and is highly dependent. they enjoy playing together but it's difficult to see how it's helpful to lump their conditions together, they are so completely different.

then again, health is full of judgmental terms. i'm considered "color-blind" even though my color-vision is objectively no better or worse than the norm. one of my cones sets peaks at a slightly different frequency than usual. that means i can't distinguish certain colors that others can, but it also means that i *can* distinguish other colors that people with "normal" vision can't. i'm the color-blind one purely because i'm in the minority.

[SheilaT]

3. I can tell you that my son who has Asperger's

was different from the very day he was born. I happened to belong to a support group of first time parents at the time and it was very obvious he wasn't quite like any of the other babies. It's just that babies are growing and changing constantly during those early days, weeks, and months, and of course they can't talk yet. Plus he reached all of his developmental milestones almost exactly on schedule. But I could see he did things differently, oddly.

I also remember reading more than one book written by mothers of autistic children -- and here we're talking severely autistic children -- who invariably said things like, "Even before the baby was born I could tell it wasn't like my other babies."