on the OTher hand

The new hot topic of the year-AUTISM- as this becomes a more and more common disability, more people are interested in what it is. Having thousands of children and now adults being diagnosed with this disability, is giving way to the interest of discussion and research. 15 years ago this was a developmental disorder labeled to children who lacked any kind of social interaction along with severe speech and language delays.  Parents were identified as being at fault for the child disability, many times the mother was referred to as a “refrigerator mother”.  This name was paired with a mother who lacked the social bonding and interaction with her child during the infant/toddler stage of life.  As you could imagine this type of accusation was mind boggling for the parent who felt that their interaction with their child was the same as all her other children, and how could this possibly be true.  Fortunately in the past 10 years this theory has proven false.  There is now speculation that a gene is found linked to autism, yet, some believe that there must be an environmental trigger that is provoking the onset of autism in a child.

Unfortunately because of new research and a substantial enlargement of the autism spectrum, children are being diagnosed with autism who would have never even been considered a candidate ten years ago.  In the past there was only the diagnosis of typical autism.  Now there exist a huge spectrum that includes; mild, moderate, and severe autism, Asperger’s syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, along with several other small categories.  In other word a child is diagnosed with autism like behaviors and they are automatically placed under this huge umbrella and labeled as being on the “autism spectrum”.  This is also a problem for those identified as Asperger’s, which is a high functioning form of autism referred to as idiot savant in the past, because they are now being identified as on the spectrum as an adult when autism is a disability that should be diagnosed in the first five years of life.  Another example is children with speech delays, many times if they have any type of autistic behaviors they are immediately labeled as possibly on the spectrum, when ten years ago they may have not even been given speech therapy because they would be expected to grow out of the delay.

As of today there is no proven fact as to what is causing autism or why the numbers are so high?  Some tend to call this disorder an epidemic, unfortunately that would turn this into a disease because developmental disorders never increase substantially in numbers, they remain fairly constant throughout history.  Society does not want to accept this completely a genetic issue because genetic mutations also do not grow in numbers.  Yet there must be some kind of genetic linkage because siblings of an autistic child have a one in four chance of being autistic, versus 1 in 155 of the average child.  There has also been links found with children born to schizophrenic, manic depressive, and bipolar parents.  Nor does society want to consider this completely an environmental issue, because of the difficulty in pinpointing what could possibly be affecting so many children.  As for now theorist are concluding that there is a genetic predisposition to being autistic, in the past this may have been seem as the odd child, computer geek, with little social skills and mild developmental delays not severe enough for a special education placement.  Once the child has this genetic predisposition theorist are suspecting that there is something in our environment that is triggering the autism to surface in the early years of life, whereas in the past that environmental trigger was non-existent.  People have suspected things like pesticides used in farmlands, hormones added to our meat products, the increase in use of plastic products, the increase in air pollution in the past ten years, and most commonly heard of is the use of mercury in children’s vaccinations, as well as the increase in number of vaccinations given per doctor’s visits.  This being common occurrences in most children’s lives it is very difficult to pinpoint a particular environmental change in autistic children.   

These are all new hot topics of research because the controversy continue to rise as to whether autism is actually increasing in numbers or has the autism spectrum grown so much that many of those identified today would have never been identified fifteen years ago.  For some time other countries of the world could not understand how the United States had such a dramatic increase in number of diagnosis, yet as time has passed, more countries are adapting the same criteria for diagnosing children under the autism spectrum.  The statistics of these countries are sky rocketing exactly the same as they have in the past ten years here in the US.  Hopefully the research and studies will continue to happen until some form of prevention or cure is discovered for the millions of families struggling to find answers.