There are many reasons why living near a highway is undesirable — the noise, the poor air quality, the endless stream of lost tourists using your driveway to turn around.
Autism
Study: More Hope for a Brain Scan for Autism
A team of researchers from the University of Utah and Harvard have reported using a brain-imaging test that looks at connections within the brain in order to distinguish people with autism from those without.
Vaccination Rates Drop in Wealthier Kids: The Autism Rumors Take a Toll
If there’s one great truth of political debate, it’s this: when noise trumps knowledge, someone’s going to get hurt.
Study: Some Autistic Brains Really Are Wired Differently
Too many tight connections in frontal-lobe circuits and too few long-distance links between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain may cause some of the language, social problems and repetitive behavior seen in autism …
How to Raise a Happy Child
Little minds can be very complicated minds. The mere fact that you’re young — even extremely young — does not mean that you don’t experience a world of complex feelings and thoughts. That’s one reason so many U.S. kids — …
FDA Goes After Popular Alternative Treatments for Autism and Alzheimer’s
For many desperate patients, over-the-counter chelation treatments used for conditions including autism, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease, among others, offered hope for a cure. Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is …
1 in 5 Kids With an Autistic Sibling Show Subtle Symptoms Too
It’s not easy being the brother or sister of an autistic child. “Typical” siblings sometimes feel embarrassed by or responsible for their autistic sib, or may feel jealous of all the attention he gets. Now researchers have found …
Whooping Cough Cases May Break Record in California
With nine deaths and 4,017 illnesses reported, California is on track to break a 55-year record in pertussis, or whooping cough, infections — a highly contagious upper respiratory illness that affects children in …
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, …
A Five-Minute Brain Scan Tracks Kids’ Development and May Spot Disorders
Researchers have designed a scanning test that can measure the maturity of the brain, a technology that may someday help doctors determine whether children are developing normally and identify those who might be at risk of …
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.
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 …
No benefit to delaying childhood vaccinations
In all the time I’ve covered health and medicine issues, nothing has been more polarizing than the debate over childhood immunizations. And while scientific evidence continues to mount against a causal connection between vaccines and developmental disorders such as autism, there was one concern voiced by some parents that seemed to …
