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.

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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".

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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.

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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 ...

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Autism and robots

Med Journal Watch has an interesting article on the use of robots in teaching autistic children to interact with others.

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Autism Journal contents, May issue

Most of the following articles are available free in abstract form only to ordinary readers.

A new issue of Autism has been made available:

1 May 2007; Vol. 11, No. 3

URL: http://aut.sagepub.com/content/vol11/issue3/?etoc

Editorial
Dermot Bowler
Autism 2007;11 203-204

http://aut.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/11/3/203?etoc

Pilot study of a parent training program for young children with autism:
The PLAY Project Home Consultation program
Richard Solomon, Jonathan Necheles, Courtney Ferch and David Bruckman
Autism 2007;11 205-224

http://aut.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/3/205?etoc

Nature of motor imitation problems in school-aged boys with autism: A motor or a cognitive problem?
Marleen Vanvuchelen, Herbert Roeyers, and Willy De Weerdt
Autism 2007;11 225-240

http://aut.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/3/225?etoc

Evidence against poor semantic encoding in individuals with autism
Andrew J.O. Whitehouse, Murray T. Maybery, and Kevin Durkin
Autism 2007;11 241-254

http://aut.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/3/241?etoc

Memory and generativity in very high functioning autism: A firsthand account, and an interpretation
Jill Boucher
Autism 2007;11 255-264

http://aut.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/3/255?etoc

Face processing in children with autism: Effects of stimulus contents and type
Leslie L. Speer, Anne E. Cook, William M. McMahon, and Elaine Clark
Autism 2007;11 265-277

http://aut.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/3/265?etoc

Lack of evidence for increased genetic loading for autism among families of affected females: A replication from family history data in two large samples
Robin P. Goin-Kochel, Anna Abbacchi, John N. Constantino, and Autism Genetic Resource Exchange Consortium
Autism 2007;11 279-286

http://aut.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/3/279?etoc

Book review: Encouraging Appropriate Behavior for Children on the Autism Spectrum: Frequently Asked Questions by Shira Richman. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2006. ISBN 1843108259. $19.95 pbk. 220 pp
Carrie Roylance
Autism 2007;11 287-288

http://aut.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/11/3/287?etoc

SAGE Contents Alert is available to anyone free of charge. Please let your colleagues know that they may sign up for this service at
http://online.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts. Don't forget to sign up for SAGE Product Alerts at http://www.sagepublications.com/newproductalerts to receive information on new journals, books and other products of interest.

To order reprints, please visit http://www.sagepub.com/reprints.aspx for relevant details.

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Publications.

Snow Cake

This is a review of a newly-released movie in which Sigourney Weaver plays a high-functioning autistic. The writer is not too enamoured of the film, though he has some adoration issues regarding Ms. Weaver.

I was interested to learn that the screenwriter wrote the story based on her experiences with her own seven-year-old autistic son. Quite how a son of seven maps onto a woman of 58 is anyone's guess.

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