Information About Autism – Facts About Autism Spectrum Disorders

The following are few earth shattering facts about autism and autism spectrum disorders that you should know.

- One in every 3000 American children were estimated to suffer from autism in the mid-nineties, but by the middle of the current decade, the number had risen to about one in every 500 believed to suffer from classic autism. For autism spectrum disorders, the number was then closer to 600 thousand children. The projections are that by the year 2010, going at this rate, one out of every ten American kids will suffer from some variation of the disease!

- There are many treatment procedures and a few medications that are known to help various physical symptoms of autism, but there is no cure. Research has been ongoing for years but the best that the medical community has to offer are possible risk factors from genetics, chemicals, and the environment. Besides that, there are only a number of training therapies that have not been proven to heal anyone just yet, and cannot be demonstrated as actually helping the autism patient improve in any way.

- At least one child has died from experimental procedures that are supposed to help find a cure for autism. Many clinicians are getting frustrated by the hollow and echoing lack of results after more than fifty years of testing and researching to find the cause and cure for autism, and they are beginning to grasp at straws. Heavy metal chelation, a chemical process that was supposed to bind with and extract heavy metal deposits of cadmium and mercury from the body of the patient, backfired once, and a child was lost without any positive results.

- Autism does not go into remission with the coming of age. If anything, the reality of it gets worse. Except for a few instances in which the sufferer may have high functioning autism and can function on their own in the society, most patients have to be supported throughout their lives and a close watch kept over them.

- Autism was once believed to have been caused by the refrigerator mother syndrome in which the set of symptoms that characterize the disease are as a result of coldness from the mother. Understandably, many mothers of autistic children were devastated by this report that was only rescinded late in the last century. More theories have sprung up, but none has yielded definitive results that can be backed by scientific proof.

- Autism itself is called classic autism, one of a class of five syndromes classified as PDDs – Pervasive Developmental Disorders. Basically, they all share the same symptoms except that the severity of the warning signs and the time of their onset in the patient. In some cases, some of the symptoms are missing; in other cases the symptoms are severe enough to result in the death of the patient.

- Autistic disorder is more common in boys than in girls; in fact, there are four times as many boys who suffer from the disease than there are girls. However, when girls have autism, their condition is so much more serious than that of the average male autism patient. Rett’s syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder that affects only girls and is very severe. Sometimes, this condition results in the death of the patient due to loss of motor skills, seizures and irregular breathing.

Symptoms Of High Functioning Autism

The main symptoms of autism are of the social and communicative nature, even though there are many more unusual behaviors and associated symptoms related to this psychological condition. Sufferers of autism tend never to share their own enjoyment with others and never share in the enjoyment of others. Even in their infant stage, when people make gestures and smiles at them, they never respond with that communal smile like babies often do. For a specialist in the profession, this is enough for an initial diagnosis, although some people think it is inconclusive.

Autistic children make poor eye contact if at all, and rarely ever imitate sounds made to them. And in addition to that, they do not make gestures of their own or respond to those of others. An autism patient will rarely ever point at anyone or anything, and like a stubborn cat, they would rather look everywhere else than at the object you are pointing to. They do not make friends very well, and neither connect with their parents, siblings or caregivers because they are not expressive of their own feelings and they are not sensitive to that of others.

Most children with autism have significant delays in their ability to learn to speak, and there are several cases in which the patient actually never learns to speak at all. Plus, the fact that they don’t make gestures often also contributes to their inability to replace their ominously missing speech with signs and gesticulations. If they do speak, many times they tend to just repeat what you have spoken to them back at you in what you may think of as a parrot syndrome.

As a matter of fact, they could repeat whole parts of a movie, play or event to you verbatim as though they had some amazing ability, but then they could refuse to talk about anything else. Autistic patients tend to misuse pronouns, often using the second person in conversation to refer to themselves, and as they age, they rarely ever lose this symptom even if other characteristics improve their perceptibly.

People who suffer from autism have a limited number of interests at best, but those interests are intense enough to cause them to implode emotionally if you interrupt them. It is not often that you may notice this pattern in a child before they turn five years old, but it becomes more obvious as they approach maturity. They could pick on a specific toy and play with the same thing all day long every day, while not even playing in the same way most other kids would.

It is common to find a patient with autism sitting staring at a wall for long hours or just lining up their toys; they could repeat body movements all the time, and when in distress they could harm themselves by biting or knocking their heads against a wall.

Autistic patients tend to be extra sensitive the certain specific stimuli like sounds, sights, smells, or textures. They could hate the smell of new clothes bad enough to never want to touch them, or dread the sound of falling rain enough to freak out screaming when they hear it. Often they appear to be mentally retarded, but this has been proven to be non-generic; however, they do tend to have intellectual abilities that have been professionally put down as the savant syndrome.

For the most part, autism is treatable but not curable. Sufferers of the condition tend to live out the whole of their lives with little improvement, if any, and more often than not they require the presence of a caregiver for as long as they live. Some autism patients with high functioning autism are actually able to live and work on their own, with minimal support from family, friends, and the society, and even take on jobs in various practices. Others who are unfortunate enough not to have their symptoms lessen with time and have to be sustained all through life.

High Function Autism Symptoms

There are basically two types of autism all distributed within the autism spectrum. There is low functioning autism, and there is the high functioning autism. Low functioning autism is the very severe type that you can tell that a patient is suffering from as early as a few months into their lives, perhaps just three months after birth. The symptoms of low functioning autism are obvious and relentless, and you may have to keep such a patient under close observation and medication the entire time.

In high functioning autism, you may not know for a long time that the patient suffers from the disease because it is well hidden. Sometimes the symptoms of high functioning autism do not show up for the first several years of suffering. As a matter of fact, the patient may appear to be having quite a normal development before they begin to give you an idea about the fact that they are suffering from something.

Also when you suffer from a high functioning autism like Asperger’s syndrome or CDD – Childhood Developmental Disorder – the symptoms of the condition may gradually fade as you get into adulthood. Because there really isn’t any known cure for autism at this time, I wouldn’t go so far as to presume to write that you are cured or anything, but your suffering gradually lessens.

There are several adults living with high functioning autism in the United States today. Some of them are even able to find regular jobs and live independently by themselves almost like normal persons. They tend to have better language skills than most other sufferers, as well as remarkable intelligence to boot, considering their suffering.

There are adults who suffer from Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS), and as their suffering wanes with the coming of maturity, they are able to take up all kinds of jobs like writing or veterinary medicine. They do have to work on developing certain skills and strategies to help them communicate better with people, especially in the areas of being able to read people’s emotions from their faces, or to retain certain memories that they find hard to hang on to.

It is not the same with those adults who suffer from low functioning or severe autism. Most of them end up requiring a lot of noteworthy community support even while they live in a suburban neighborhood. But it all boils down to how you translate their condition. High functioning autism is a condition that both you and the patient can thrive with.

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