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Special Needs Research and News
Gainesville Music Therapy parents receive frequent e-mails with the articles of interest to the special needs community, including research on Autism, Down Syndrome, ADHD, etc.; conferences and trainings being offered in the local area; and information on music therapy practice. If you would like to receive these articles, and/or our monthly newsletter by e-mail, please e-mail us to join the mailing list.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006Music may hold a key to patients' mobilityChris Pasles Previous studies have shown that music therapy can have a greater effect than physical therapy on Parkinson's patients, but Tintner's study will explore which particular rhythms work better.
The goal of the yearlong study, funded by the Grammy Foundation, is to create a device that could be tailored to each patient's needs. Tintner's study reflects a growing music therapy movement exploring whether music can alleviate some of the mental and physical symptoms of disease. Dr. Ary L. Goldberger of Harvard Medical School has already done work showing the similarity between healthy heart rhythms and note patterns in classical music, which has led to some use of music during surgery. — Chris Pasles permalink posted on 9:54 AM 0 comments
Musical HealingNEW HYDE PARK, N.Y., April 16, 2006(CBS) Glenn Schifano is a music therapist - one of five thousand in the United States. He "performs" at Schneider Children's Hospital in Long Island and his audiences are children with life threatening diseases like cancer and heart disease. He plays not for money, not for fame, but to heal and offer hope. "It seeks to dispel some of the frustrating, suffering that goes on here," Schifano tells CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Dan Rather of his music. "A child that really can non-verbalize some of their angst, some of their pain can really verbally, through music, express that," he says. "It can be very healing." Schifano started his rounds on this day with 5-year-old Jake Brower, who less than two hours earlier had his 10th brain operation. "To put the shaker in his hand and then to get him to shake on his own, I think it was empowering for him and also empowering for parent," Schifano says. Baby Sekura is suffering from a head injury and Schifano is playing for both the baby and her father. "You can just imagine dad feeling overwhelmingly anxious -- they both got into this kind of lull and that is the hope, what you wanna do. That's, you know, the baby to feel that the father is calm, the mother is calm, there is safety there, there is security there," Schifano explains. When it comes to 18-year-old Ashley Crawford, who suffers from leukemia, Schifano doesn't have to figure out what music she needs. She was spelling it out to me: 'I wanna learn 'Ode to Joy.' Teach me 'Ode to Joy.' If it was last thing she did on this planet that is what she wanted to do, that was it. Give her that joy," Schifano says. For sick children well enough to live at home but still needing check ups, Schifano is the first person they meet in the hospital, even before their doctors. "Children come in, kids sign in, get blood drawn and go on to treatment area. That finger stick room dictates what happens that day," Schifano says. If music therapy only makes treatment less painful and sickness more bearable, it would seem to be enough. But music therapy does more: it sometimes can save lives. Just ask Dr. Mark Atlas, who heads the hospital's transplant unit, where the survival rate for children is only 40 percent. "The children in transplant tend to have difficulties with high blood pressure, both from medications and from pain. Relaxation, enjoyment, good positive mental state can help decrease blood pressure which actually improves their outcome," Atlas explains. Music can sometimes improve the outcome even with the youngest of the young. Ashton Webster arrived a perilous 10 weeks early, weighing less than one and a half pounds. Up is bad; down is good in terms of the baby's breathing. The more Schifano sang, the more Ashton's mother and hospital staff could see "down". All those differences were reason for hope said Dr. Dennis Davidson, chief of the neonatal unit. "These small, premature babies while they are in their hospital stay can develop neurologically," Davidson claims. "The sucking reflex becomes better, they gain weight faster and ultimately they are out of the hospital faster." Music therapy began not with children, but World Wart II soldiers suffering from battle-induced stress and trauma. Today music is medicine for all ages. At Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, a leading music therapy training center, nurses and aides often join in to help the elderly handle fear or depression. Premature children hear whooshing sounds to sooth their too quick transition from their mother's womb to the real world. Even the therapist handle their own stress with music. Schifano knows that melodies can not forestall the finality of death. Despite all medical and musical efforts, he sees both the old and the young sometimes finally succumb. "I try not to get concerned with that," Schifano says. "I try to keep in here and now, keep the child in here and now and be there for the family, musically and emotionally." ©MMVI, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. permalink posted on 9:50 AM 0 comments
Thursday, April 13, 2006Music Therapy on CBS this SundayAttention Gainesville Music Therapy Parents:MUSIC THERAPY MEDIA ALERT The television program CBS News Sunday Morning has tentatively scheduled a segment on music therapy, with reporting by Dan Rather, for Sunday, April 16. The program airs 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM eastern on CBS. Several music therapists, including Glenn Schifano at Schneider's Children's Hospital in New Hyde Park, New York, and Joanne Loewy at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City were involved in the production. The schedule is subject to change. Latest word is the program will air near 10:00 AM EST. permalink posted on 3:22 PM 0 comments
Research in motionA gently vibrating machine may build up bone density in children with cerebral palsy or slow bone loss in women.By Mary Beckman, Special to The Times April 10, 2006 FOR 10 minutes most days, 10-year-old Sonya Gomez stands on what looks like a gently vibrating bathroom scale. Leaning on a walker because her body has been weakened by cerebral palsy, she stands in hopes that an experimental treatment will fortify her bones and invigorate her muscles, even though she can barely tell anything's happening. "Every morning she eats breakfast while I'm getting ready. She brushes her teeth. Then she gets on the machine," says her mother, Anna Gomez, of Whittier. Sonya is participating in a pilot study examining whether super-high frequency, low-force stimulation can help kids with her disorder, who because of their limited mobility don't build bones or muscle as robustly as their peers. "A lot of kids with cerebral palsy can't do vigorous exercise therapy," says Tishya Wren, a biomechanical engineer who leads the study out of Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. The hope is that vibration therapy can help Sonya grow her skeleton past adolescence by gentle vibration instead of playground rough and tumble — a technique that has been shown to increase bone density in turkeys, sheep and mice by as much as 35%. Known as vibration or "dynamic motion" therapy, the technique goes beyond helping children such as Gomez. It has been tested in older women who are losing bone mass after menopause and younger women who have bone density at the low end of healthy. It's even being studied as a way to keep astronauts' bones and muscles strong in space. So far, results in people have shown gains in bone density as high as 6%. But researchers also count as successful the ability of the technique to simply slow bone loss. A recent study suggests the technique can also improve muscle mass — a property that could be important for elderly people, helping to prevent dangerous falls. An 'active, alive tissue 'The therapy works because bone responds to force. "Most people think of bone as the Georgia O'Keefe skeleton drying in the sun — but it is an active, alive tissue," says bone bioengineer Clinton Rubin of State University of New York at Stony Brook, who pioneered the vibration technique, originally working with turkeys. Bone is continuously being pulled on by muscles, says Rubin — a rapid, gentle shaking that puts low-level stress on the bones all day. Since muscles vibrate between 20 and 50 cycles per second (or hertz), Rubin developed a machine to vibrate at 30 hertz. (The plate also vibrates up and down to generate force, moving less than 50 micrometers in either direction.) Propping ewes on this gadget for 20 minutes a day for a year improved both the quality and bulk of their back legs, Rubin found. Not only were the sheep bones about one-third denser, they were 12% stiffer and 27% stronger. Rubin's device has been deemed safe by the Food and Drug Administration — and now he and others are conducting studies to prove the machine is medically useful. In one experiment, Rubin and colleagues followed 70 post-menopausal women for a year. Half of them were instructed to stand on the vibrating plate for 10 minutes twice each day, while the other half stood in place on similar devices that didn't vibrate. Although the scientists didn't see an effect over the entire group, they did find that women with the thinnest bones benefited from the treatment. Instead of losing about 2% of their spine density, the women either lost less than one-tenth of a percent or gained just a tad — with the women who stood closest to the 20-minute goal improving the most. Another study in children with cerebral palsy showed that bones of children who used the technology grew in density by about 6%, while bones in those who didn't thinned by almost 12%. Muscles seem to benefit too. Bone researcher Dr. Vicente Gilsanz at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles just completed a study of 140 young women age 15 to 20 who had low bone density. He found a modest benefit for bone, with density improving by about 2% to 4%. But the girls' thigh muscles increased in mass by about 5%. NASA is planning to try the device on the space station where, freed from the tug of gravity, astronauts lose bone mass 10 times faster than adults on Earth. NASA physician Dr. Victor Schneider at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., says the vibration plates are scheduled to go to the International Space Station in 2007 or 2008, along with bungee cords to strap the astronauts to the vibrating plates. But first they are being tested on Earth. Volunteers are staying in bed for a few days to months — a standard way to simulate the lack of gravity of space — and the plates are strapped to their feet and turned on every day. Anna Gomez's hopes for her daughter Sonya are more down-to-earth. "If it's going to help her, I want her on it," she says. "I'm not going to be around forever, so I've got to do what I can now that she's small." Vibration hits the gym Making its way into U.S. gyms and houses is another kind of vibrating technology, from Europe. Developed by the Dutch Olympic trainer Guus van der Meer, the Power Plate promises to bulk up muscle as part of a personal training regime. This device and similar teeth-rattling knockoffs shake much harder than Clinton Rubin's machine. Athletes and celebrities such as Madonna are rumored to use them in their workout routines. The machines are set to a similar vibration frequency as Rubin's plate but shake up and down at four to 15 times the force of gravity (as opposed to one-third the force of gravity).They have been shown to help build muscle and pump out hormones but their effects on bone density are unknown. Because these plates can shimmy an object off their surface, Rubin says he worries that people with weak bones might put their skeletons in danger. permalink posted on 3:19 PM 0 comments
Monday, April 10, 2006Free Learning ProgramSeeking participants for a free pilot study of the QuestionTrainer software program. The GrammarTrainer is an innovative linguistic software curriculum designed by a professional linguist specifically for children with Asperger's/Autism. It promotes active language learning by having children click or type his or her answers onto the screen. The program provides hundreds of exercises and clear, systematic, interactive feedback that guides the child towards the right answer.The QuestionTrainer focuses on the grammar of questions. It teaches the concept of question-asking, how to discriminate between different types of questions, and how to put the words in the right order and the verb in the correct form. If your child can read and type, but has trouble asking grammatical questions, he or she may be eligible for 7 free lessons of question trainining. Find out more by contacting:beals@autism-language-therapies.com http://www.autism-language-therapies.com/ permalink posted on 7:50 AM 0 comments
Free ABA Training WorkshopThe Jericho SchoolFor Children with Autism and Other Developmental Disorders The mission of The Jericho School (non profit 501(c) 3 corporation) is to provide comprehensive, individualized science-based education not otherwise available in our community. We believe those children with autism and other developmental delays deserve the opportunity to reach their full potential. The school’s curriculum provides effective treatment and education programs to children and their families based on Applied Behavior Analysis and Verbal Behavior. FREE 2 DAY WORKSHOP FOR PARENTS April 27th – 28th, 2006 9:00 am to 3:30 pm This two-day workshop will provide training on the basics of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and on the implementation of Verbal Behavior. This training will also provide instruction on how to teach the basic language and learner skills to children with Autism or other developmental disabilities. For more information or to register for this workshop call (There is no registration fee) (904) 744 – 5110 Sponsored by Publix Supermarket Charities The Jericho School accepts the John McKay Scholarship permalink posted on 7:47 AM 0 comments
Music Therapy: Disabled find their soundDisabled find their soundApr. 4, 2006. 06:34 AM JOHN TERAUDS CLASSICAL MUSIC WRITER There is only one thing that can help relieve the pain of seeing a severely disabled child: a smile. At age 7, Anjali Sharma is as tiny as a 2-year-old. She sits, restrained, in a little wheelchair, limbs akimbo, head at a wild tilt. Anjali has a severe form of Down Syndrome and cannot speak. She has trouble swallowing. Yet to her mother, her caregivers and the therapists gathered at Bloorview Kids Rehab, a new facility south of Sunnybrook Hospital, Anjali is a testament to the healing power of music. Thanks to a team of Bloorview researchers led by Dr. Tom Chau, Anjali can create sounds, through what the centre calls the Virtual Musical Instrument. A child's image is captured on a computer screen with a web camera. A therapist uses software to draw balloons around the child. The child sees the image and the balloons and, when she reaches for a balloon with a hand or foot or even with a tip of the head, it makes a sound. The balloon can make any sound the therapist chooses, from a piano key to a bird chirp. The balloon can also be adjusted for sensitivity so even the blink of an eye can generate a sound. That Anjali has made it this far is remarkable, says Dhan Sharma, who travels from her Brampton home every other day to visit. She has seen a big change in her daughter since she began music therapy last fall. Sharma says that Anjali has been very ill three times over the years. The last time this happened, doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children suggested she prepare for the worst. "Then, I arrived at the hospital in the morning, and she was fine," says Sharma. As soon as she was well enough to return to Bloorview, Anjali started working with music therapy intern Christina Weldon and therapist Andrea Lamont. "She has changed, but it's been very slow," says Sharma. "She used to get sick very quickly. Now she's on less medication, she gets less agitated. We can even bring her home for the weekend. I know I can handle her now." Lamont says the therapy helps passive children to engage with their surroundings: "A child needs to manipulate objects, to play with things in order to understand them." For example, a child with cerebral palsy who repeatedly tries and fails to grasp an object will eventually give up, says Lamont. "That has all kinds of implications, as the child learns to be helpless," she said. "When the child reaches out, the instrument is going to react in a particular way and make the child more willing to reach out and try again and be successful every time." The cause-and-effect of making sounds eventually helps the child connect with people. This helps the children develop "more meaningful relationships in their lives." "This generalization is starting to happen with Anjali, and that is so exciting," says Lamont. Weldon, who has been working with Anjali since October, says the girl now anticipates her weekly music therapy: "Her face just lights up when she's coming into the music room because she knows she's going to be part of this musical experience. Her focus on the screen has increased. Her attention span is going for a longer space of time." When Anjali started, says Weldon, "I don't think she understood that she was the one making the music ... Now she knows what to expect." `Music breaks through boundaries that have gagged people.' -Music therapist Fran Herman There now is more variety in her movements as well, "she doesn't just move her head," Weldon says. Lamont says the instrument helps participants "focus on ability rather than disability." Lamont thinks that having the child's face reflected on the computer screen helps: "Sometimes I wonder if they see themselves as a rock star when they're playing." Of course, music therapy is much older than computers. And the good-news stories have changed little over the years. Across town, near Bloor and Dufferin Sts., Fran Herman sits at the Canadian Music Therapy Centre, where a dozen adult sufferers of cerebral palsy and related debilitating conditions are arriving by Wheel-Trans for their weekly group session. Herman, a kindly grandmother figure, says she was one of four music therapists in Canada when she began practising in the early 1950s. Two of the people who have arrived for the group session, now in their 30s, were in her care as children. As in the case of Anjali, the adults are encouraged to make their own sounds — with guitars and percussion instruments. It's a merry cacophony. Even people who appeared vacant-eyed at the start of the session are smiling, singing or moving parts of their bodies. The effect is magical. What makes this treatment so special, says Herman, is that "music breaks through boundaries that have gagged people." This spurred Herman to found the Canadian Music Therapy Trust Fund 10 years ago. The organization has a broad range of activities, including providing financial aid to therapy students and funding therapy initiatives across the country. Laurel Young, the Music Therapy Centre's co-ordinator, says it also works in palliative care and with Alzheimer's patients. Young explains that music is so deeply embedded in our brains that, even when someone can no longer speak, it still allows a person to make a connection outside of themselves. In the case of Alzheimer's, for example, the person wakes up one day and can no longer understand what is being spoken around them, says Young. "It's like being in a foreign country. Then, suddenly, they discover that music is a language you can understand." Says Herman: "Have you ever heard of a human culture where a mother doesn't croon to her child?" Back at Bloorview, after many minutes of gently singing to Anjali while Lamont plays gentle background music on a synthesizer, Weldon gets out a drum and begins to tap it. Anjali's ill-co-ordinated left hand stiffens slightly. Her fingers reach out toward the drum's surface and her index finger begins to tap in unison with Weldon's hand. The smile on the face of Anjali's mother — and everyone else in the room — says more than any research study ever could. permalink posted on 7:38 AM 0 comments
Study on the rise of Autism creates debateMedical Studies/Trials
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Researchers: Epilepsy Cause IdentifiedFriday, March 31, 2006MESA, Ariz. -- Researchers have identified a genetic cause for epilepsy, which could lead to the development of medicines to treat epilepsy and autism, the Translational Genomics Research Institute announced Thursday. "This is the first step" in finding a cure for the childhood-onset diseases, said Dr. Dietrich Stephan, director of the neurogenomic division of TGen, the Phoenix-based research group that focuses on treatments and cures for genetically related illnesses. "It allows us to better understand what causes the diseases," Stephan said of the discovery of a genetic mutation in Old Order Amish children in Pennsylvania. TGen and the Clinic for Special Children in Strasburg, Pa. made the finding together. Currently, medications treating epilepsy don't work on about 40 percent of the varying types of the disease, Stephan said. And the only treatment for autism are behavioral therapies — working with kids extensively on a daily basis to teach them life skills, he said. Most epileptic symptoms, including recurring seizures, have been traced to abnormalities of the brain structure or chemistry that alter the electrical activity in nerve cells. Autistic traits also are believed to be caused by disrupted nerve networks. An estimated 2 million Americans are affected by epilepsy, while autism occurs in about 1.5 million, including about 100,000 school-age children. Seizures are the primary symptoms of epilepsy while autism can affect speech and the ability to interact with others. The new finding was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. It describes a mutated gene that causes an epileptic disorder in Old Order Amish children in Pennsylvania. All of the affected children had relatively normal development until the onset of frequent seizures in early childhood. They later developed language regression and other features of autism, which implicate the gene as a cause of autism in the general population, as well, Stephan said. The next step for TGen researchers will be to develop drugs to prevent the disease by changing the way the brain reacts to the broken gene, he said. Physicians at the Pennsylvania clinic isolated DNA from four of the affected children and their six parents and, in collaboration with TGen, identified a mutation that causes the gene to abnormally produce a protein called CASPR2. For the first time, researchers showed that the protein plays an important role in early human brain development, said Dr. Erik Puffenberger, laboratory director at the Clinic for Special Children. " Although these patients were from an isolated population, we anticipate that CASPR2 mutations will be found in children from other populations with mental retardation, seizures and autism," he said. The discovery of the protein-related mutation in the clinic's Amish patients has already allowed doctors to identify at-risk newborns before they show symptoms, said Dr. Holmes Morton, the clinic's medical director. "Our hope is that early treatment and prevention of prolonged seizures in these infants will lessen the effects of the disorder upon the lives of the children and their families," he said. permalink posted on 7:27 AM 0 comments
Monday, April 03, 2006New Model May Better Predict Outcomes for Children with Autism and Autistic Spectrum DisordersBy: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia on Mar 31 2006 17:13:21 A new classification tool may allow healthcare professionals treating children with autism and autism-related disorders to more systematically sort out the combination of traits in the condition, and to better predict how children may improve over time. If the model holds up to further study, it may also allow researchers to gauge the effectiveness of different autism treatments.
If larger studies validate the model, he adds, it may become a benchmark to help researchers evaluate the effectiveness of particular autistic spectrum disorders treatments. "Many currently popular therapies may be capitalizing on the natural history of ASD, and claiming such improvement on their own behalf," he writes in the paper. If patients improved more than would be anticipated from the model's outline of the natural course of ASD alone, that might provide evidence for a treatment's success.
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Childhood Disorder Identifies Possible Cause of AutismReported March 31, 2006(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A study published in this week's New England Journal of Medicine uncovers the genetics behind a rare childhood disorder, shedding some light on other, more common disorders. Researchers examined a condition now known as cortical dysplasia-focal epilepsy syndrome (CDFE). The affected children all experienced frequent seizures in childhood followed by language regression and other characteristics similar to autism. DNA from both the children and their parents, all of whom were Old Order Amish from Pennsylvania, were analyzed. The research uncovered a common mutation to the gene that codes for a protein called CASPR2. This information, along with the similarities between this condition and autism, led researchers to believe the gene may also be behind the development of autism. They say this is the first step in developing effective treatments for the more common conditions. Holmes Morton, M.D., one of the study authors, says, "The identification of the mutation in CASPR2 in our Amish patients has already allowed us to recognize affected newborns before they become symptomatic." He adds that he anticipates this information and early treatment will help lessen the effects of the disorder in the patients' lives. CASPR2 is known to play a role in maintaining contact between neurons and neighboring cells in the nervous system. This study is the first to show the protein may also play a role in brain development. This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, who offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, go to: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/. SOURCE: The New England Journal of Medicine, 2006;354:1370-1377 permalink posted on 4:56 PM 0 comments
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