Thursday, August 30, 2007

Girls with autism -- New York Times

Autism - Mental Health and Disorders - Brain Development - Genetics - Girls - New York Times
What Autistic Girls Are Made Of

An article on the particular problems of girls with autism, partly related to the fact that there are fewer of them. In many ways, girls have it harder than boys on a social level. Extract:

Because there are so many fewer females with autism, they are “research orphans,” as Ami Klin, a psychology and psychiatry professor who directs Yale’s autism program, puts it. Scientists have tended to cull girls from studies because it is difficult to find sufficiently large numbers of them. Some of the drugs, for example, commonly used to treat symptoms of autism like anxiety and hyperactivity have rarely been tested on autistic girls.

The scant data make it impossible to draw firm conclusions about why their numbers are small and how autistic girls and boys with normal intelligence may differ. But a few researchers are trying to establish whether and how the disorder may vary by sex. This research and the observations of some clinicians who work with autistic girls suggest that because of biology and experience, and the interaction between the two, autism may express itself differently in girls. And that may have implications for their well-being.


Powered by ScribeFire.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Aspies explained

A beautiful, hilarious, insightful article on growing up with Asperger's, by music critic Tim Page. Anyone who knows one, or indeed is one, will smile with recognition. If you wanted a clear explanation of what exactly Asperger's is, and how it's nothing like Rain Man, you couldn't ask for better.

Here's a short extract, unexpected and typically funny.

Oddly, the book that helped pull me into the human race was Emily Post's "Etiquette," which I had picked up in a moment of early-teen hippie scorn, fully intending to mock what I was sure would be an "uncool" justification of bourgeois rules and regulations. Instead, the book offered clearly stated reasons for courtesy, gentility, and scrupulousness;reasons that I could respect, understand, and implement. It suggested ways to inaugurate conversations without launching into a lecture, reminded me of the importance of listening as well as speaking, and convinced me that manners, properly understood, existed to make other people feel comfortable, rather than (as I had suspected) to demonstrate the practitioner's social superiority. I revelled in Post's guidance and absorbed her lessons. And, typically, I took them too far: even today, I would never dream of addressing a teen-age busboy in a small-town diner as anything other than "sir".



Powered by ScribeFire.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

I Cannot Tell a Lie - what people with autism can tell us about honesty

Article by development expert Simon Baron-Cohen on theory of mind (Wiki) and the ability of people with autism to be deceitful.

Blog post with some explanation of terms, which also signals Bad Science's treatment of an article on autism research in The Observer.

Powered by ScribeFire.

New Theory about Autism Roots

It appears that some boys have as much as a 50 percent risk of developing the mysterious disorder
By Nikhil Swaminathan

In work that may one day lead to earlier detection of children at risk
of developing autism, a team of scientists has devised a genetic model
for the enigmatic disorder. The two-tiered theory integrates families
with one or more autistic children.

More ...

Powered by ScribeFire.