Autism

The Mysterious Case of Donald T., Autism’s First Child

The Atlantic has an absorbing tale in the current issue about the first person ever diagnosed with autism. The man, now 77, is named Donald Gray Triplett and the story’s authors tracked him down in Mississippi where — 74 years after he was institutionalized for exhibiting introverted behavior — he spends his days playing golf, …

Using Videos to Help Diagnose Autism in Babies

The causes of autism are still unclear, but evidence is building that early intervention — before age 1 — may help mitigate or even prevent the developmental disorder from occurring in the first place. Making such early treatment more possible, researchers now report a promising new way of detecting autism in infants as young as 14 months.

Analyzing baby sounds to detect autism early?

A new technique that identifies early differences in vocal development between children with an autism spectrum disorder or language delay and those developing on a normal trajectory could give pediatricians and other caregivers a tool for earlier detection of autism, and as a result facilitate earlier intervention. To distinguish the

Doctor behind vaccine-autism link loses license

It took nearly six months but the General Medical Council (GMC) in the U.K. has pulled Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s license to practice medicine in the United Kingdom.

Wakefield is the researcher who nearly single-handedly fueled parental concerns about the link between vaccines and autism. In 1998, he published a paper in the medical …

Parents of autistic children not more likely to break up

Though the oft-quoted statistic — that strain and stress contributes to an 80% divorce rate among parents of autistic children — has long had its critics, new research presented today at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Philadelphia more definitively undermines that figure with findings based on families of more than

DSM-5: Hoarding, binge-eating and hypersexuality

Adding Asperger’s syndrome to the autism spectrum, eliminating the terms “substance abuse” and “dependence” in favor of “addiction and related disorders,” introducing the condition “hypersexual disorder” and introducing an assessment of mental illness based on severity are among the proposed changes for the new edition of the Diagnostic

Children born to older mothers at higher risk for autism

Women who give birth after age 40 face a higher risk of having an autistic child, regardless of the father’s age, according to a comprehensive study of all births in the state of California in the 1990s. Researchers from the University of California, Davis, found that a woman who gave birth after age 40 was 50% more likely to have an

Study linking vaccines to autism officially retracted

Twelve years ago, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a study indicating a link between the mumps, measles and rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism. The finding validated the fears of a growing subculture suspicious of vaccines, and played a role in the significant decrease in vaccination rates—in the U.K., for

  1. 1
  2. ...
  3. 5
  4. 6
  5. 7
  6. 8