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 Understandably, many mothers of autistic children were devastated by this report that was only rescinded late in the last century.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.