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Saturday, July 21, 2007

New DVD on Siblings: Understanding Brothers and Sisters on the Autism Spectrum

A new DVD, produced by Coulter Video, is designed to help siblings understand their brothers and sisters with autism. "Understanding Brothers and Sisters on the Autism Spectrum" includes four programs. The program for siblings 4 through 7 years old features a live narrator interacting with puppets. Two programs, for siblings ages 7 through 12 and age 12 through adult, include interviews with siblings describing how they’ve learned to deal with a wide range of au! tistic behaviors and found ways to enjoy interacting with their brothers and sisters on the spectrum. The fourth program, designed for parents, describes ways they've found to help their children accept and support each other.

The DVD does not cover Asperger syndrome because the company plans to release a second DVD in this series, "Understanding Brothers and Sisters with Asperger Syndrome," in late August 2007. This DVD will feature interviews with families who are dealing with AS.

www.coultervideo.com

This company does fine DVD's to help explain the spectrum utilizing knowledgeable teachers, professionals and individuals on the spectrum to share practical experiences on autism and Asperger's. AHA has reviewed many of them in our newsletter, On The Spectrum.

Simple hand gestures help students learn better

Movement may help brain create stronger memories, research suggests

By Melinda Wenner

Updated: 12:52 p.m. ET July 3, 2007

The difference between success and failure in school could be as simple as the flick of a wrist.

Children taught to gesture with their hands as they learn new concepts perform far better at solving similar problems weeks later than children who don't gesture, a new study finds.

Previous studies have shown that people who spontaneously gesture as they learn tend to remember new concepts better, but it has been unclear whether gesturing simply accompanies the process of learning or if it actually facilitates the process. Susan Wagner Cook, a University of Rochester psychologist, along with colleagues at the University of Chicago decided to test whether children who tend not to gesture on their own—but who are taught to gesture while learning a new concept—comprehend and remember the concept better than kids who are not taught to gesture.

Solve this
They split 84 third- and fourth-grade students into three groups and taught each of them how to solve math problems they were initially unable to solve correctly.

One group of the kids was taught to speak through the problems aloud as they solved them, such as by saying, "I want to make one side equal the other side." A second group was taught to speak through the problems aloud like the first group, but they were also taught to gesture in a specific way to convey the same idea. The third group was taught to gesture without speaking.

After this instruction, Cook's team tested the students to see which groups were able to solve similar problems by themselves. They found that all three groups performed comparably, many of the students having learned how to solve the problems correctly.

After four weeks, the students were asked to solve the same types of problems again in a classroom setting, without any further instruction. Those who were taught to gesture and speak through the problems remembered 92 percent of what they had previously learned, and those who gestured without speaking remembered 80 percent.

By contrast, the non-gesturing students remembered only 33 percent of what they had learned.

"When we want to convey a new concept to children, it certainly won't hurt to use our hands, or to get them to use theirs," Cook told LiveScience. "Gestures may be less precise than speech, but that may be precisely what learners need."

Why it works
Cook says it's not clear yet exactly why gesturing helps children remember what they have learned, but it could be that moving the body somehow helps the brain create stronger memories.

"Gestures engage the body, the mind and the environment, all at the same time," Cook said. "I think that all of these aspects, as well as the simultaneity, are probably part of the reason we see the effects of gesturing that we observed."

Cook, whose study will be published in the journal Cognition, hopes to design additional experiments to tease out exactly what gesturing does for memory , and she also wants to find ways to incorporate gesturing into the classroom. This "could certainly have profound implications, especially since gesture is free and readily available," she said.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Music Therapy Helps "Soul Sisters" Cope With Speech Loss

Scientists Reverse Symptoms of Autism in Mice

06.25.07, 12:00 AM ET

MONDAY, June 25 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists may have uncovered a way to reverse symptoms of mental retardation and autism in mice.

Researchers from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) genetically manipulated the mice to model Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), which is the leading inherited cause of mental retardation and the most common genetic cause of autism.

FXS is tied to a mutated X chromosome gene called the fragile X mental retardation 1 ( FMR1) gene. When this gene is mutated, it can cause mild learning disabilities to severe autism.

"Our study suggests that inhibiting a certain enzyme in the brain could be an effective therapy for countering the debilitating symptoms of FXS in children, and possibly in autistic kids as well," study co-author Mansuo L. Hayashi, a former Picower Institute postdoctoral fellow currently at Merck Research Laboratories in Boston, said in a prepared statement.

The enzyme that was inhibited in this study is called p21-activated kinase, or PAK, and it affects the number, size and shape of connections between neurons and the brain.

When PAK's activity was halted, the brain abnormalities in the FXS mice were reversed.

"Strikingly, PAK inhibition also restored electrical communication between neurons in the brains of the FXS mice, correcting their behavioral abnormalities in the process," co-author Susumu Tonegawa, 1987 Nobel laureate and Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, said in a prepared statement.

Tonegawa said that there are known chemical compounds that can inhibit the activity of PAK, which is something that may be useful in developing drugs to treat FXS.

The FXS mice showed abnormalities similar to those in FXS patients, including hyperactivity, purposelessness, repetitive movements, attention deficits, and difficulty with learning and memory.

When the activity of PAK was inhibited, these abnormalities were partially or fully ameliorated.

"Notably, due to an elegant genetic manipulation of method employed by the Picower Institute researchers, PAK inhibition in the FXS mice did not take place until a few weeks after appearance of disease symptoms. This implies that future treatment may still be effective even after symptoms are already pronounced," Tonegawa said.

The findings were reported in the June 25-29 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More information

The National Autism Association has more about autism.

UCLA Study First to Show Autistic Brains Can Be Trained to Recognize Visual and Vocal Cues

Autism Link to Vaccines Argued in Federal Court

Editor: Bob Carroll, Attorney at Law

Firm: Tampa Injury Law Firm.

June 14, 2007

By Staff Writer

The test case of Michelle Cedillo, argued in a special Federal "vaccine court" this week, explores autism's potential link to the preservative thimerosal in vaccines administered to young children. The first few test cases of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington will decide the fate of some 5,000 other families, all of whom maintain that the mercury content of thimerosal, a preservative found in most measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccines, caused their children to become severely autistic and to suffer from numerous other unrelated illnesses.

Cedillo's mother asserted in Federal court that within days of being administered her MMR vaccines, Michelle suffered from high fever and autistic symptoms. Doctors subsequently evaluated her and suggested that she would need to be institutionalized because of her severe autism.

Numerous epidemiological studies on thimerosal and the link to autism have revealed no conclusive causal connection. Trenchant arguments aside, the burden of proof for these test cases is easier to meet than in traditional personal injury cases. Petitioners need only prove that it is "more likely than not" that the vaccines caused their injuries. Argument in the Cedillo case will last about a month, and then attorneys will proceed on to the next of nine overall test cases.

Many sides of autism

By LIDIA WASOWICZ

Copyright 2007 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Children with Autism Have Difficulty Recognizing Ordinary Words

Newswise — New research indicates that young children with autism have a difficult time recognizing ordinary words and more of their brains are occupied with this kind of task compared to typically developing youngsters.

“Rather than becoming an expert in recognizing words, their brains slow down,” said Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and an expert in how babies acquire language.

“Because these children can’t distinguish what should be a familiar word their brains work too hard and they are unable to focus on new words. When they can’t understand a word, they miss everything else that follows in a sentence.”

The research is part of an effort to understand why language disorders are a characteristic of children with autism as scientists begin to peer inside the brains of some of these children to understand what’s behind their language deficits.

Kuhl will present findings that compare 19-to 30-month-old typically developing and autistic children during a keynote address Friday (May 4) at the Sixth International Meeting for Autism Research in Seattle.

She and her colleagues placed caps fitted with 20 sensors on the heads of the children and recorded brain waves that “leaked through their scalp” as the babies listened to familiar words (ball, dog, cat, book) and words that would be unfamiliar (verb, pint, bide, rate). The children also were exposed to common words that were recorded and played backwards. Backwards words produce sound patterns that are not characteristic of any language.

The brains of typically developing infants responded with a unique pattern of activation for each of these types of words. The responses for known and unknown words were markedly different. With the backward words, the children’s brains reacted as if they were hearing something totally different from the other types of words and gave a different signal, according to Kuhl, who is a professor of speech and hearing sciences. In addition, brain activity was focused in the temporal lobes of both hemispheres of the brain for each word type.

The children with autism, however, showed no difference in their responses between known and unknown words, meaning they couldn’t differentiate between them. However, their brains did react to the backwards words, and the pattern of activity was somewhat similar to that of the typically developing children. Overall brain activity in the children with autism was more diffuse and not focused in the temporal lobes, indicating more of their brains were tied up trying to understand the words.

Earlier work by Kuhl showed dramatic differences in how children 32 to 52 months of age responded to a computer-generated warbling sound and “motherese,” or baby talk, a speech form that is rich in phonemes. When given a choice by letting them turn their heads in one direction versus the other, normally developing children consistently preferred to listen to motherese, a near universal form of baby talk that is directed at infants and young children. Children with autism preferred the warble sound and chose it consistently. Youngsters with the most serious symptoms of autism had a stronger preference for the warble than did higher functioning children with autism.

Kuhl believes there is some good news for parents from these studies because there are indications that some autistic children are achieving some learning.

“One of the puzzles of autism is the variability of children with it,” she said. “We believe the highest functioning autistic children have some recognition of phonemes (the basic sounds of a language). And this new study shows autistic toddlers can differentiate between backward words, which are not characteristic of a language, and real words. So some learning has gone on.”

“To crack the speech code children must be able to distinguish phonemes, understand known words and be able to decode the word order of a sentence in English or their native language.”

Kuhl said researchers need better measures and tools such as magnetoencephalography, which is a non-invasive technology, to test and look inside the brains of children with autism.

“We’d like to know what kind of knowledge these children may have locked up in their brains. Children at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum may have quite a bit. The first possible use of this research would be as a predictor of which children with autism might be responsive to treatment. With these tools we may be able to identify a part of the brain that is not responding, and that may suggest treatments by developing more targeted interventions.”

The National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development and the Cure Autism Now Foundation supported the research.

© 2007 Newswise. All Rights Reserved.

Autism can temporarily affect younger siblings

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH

Younger siblings of children with autism may have delayed verbal, cognitive and motor development in their early childhood years, according to a study carried out by Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University of California at Los Angeles. HU Prof. Nurit Yirmiya and doctoral candidate Yifat Gamliel and Dr. Marian Sigman of California found that some siblings of children with autism - ranging from 14 months to 4.5 years - were diagnosed with delayed verbal, cognitive and motor development. After the age of four and a half, most of those children were able to close the gap with other children of the same age who had siblings with normal development, except for some small delays in verbal abilities.

The study has been published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. The issue was edited by Prof. Nurit Yirmiya and Prof. Sally Ozonoff of the M.I.N.D. Institute at the University of California, Davis. They reported finding that 30 percent of children with older autistic siblings were found to have delayed development in the three areas studied, as opposed to only 5% in a group whose siblings did not suffer from autism.

The reasons for this phenomenon, says Yirmiya, can be traced to the genetic tendency of children in the former group to carry an endophenotype of autism (an hereditary characteristic normally associated with some condition but not a direct symptom of that condition). "Siblings of children with autism are likely to inherit genes that will cause a weakened expression of autistic symptoms," she explained. These can take the form of delayed linguistic abilities, difficulties in expressing feelings and making eye contact, and in social interaction.

Yirmiya continued that such problems cannot be traced to an imitation of the older sibling with autism. "The children examined had other models that they could have imitated, such as parents, friends or other [normal] siblings in the family with whom they had frequent contact," she asserted.

The research tested 39 Israeli children who had older siblings with autism. The research also involved a comparison group with older siblings of normal development. The children in both groups were examined at four months, 14 months, 24 months, 36 months and 54 months.

The results showed that there were no significant differences between the two groups at the age of four months. Most of the developmental delays were found in the first group from the age of 14 months until the age of four and half. After that, most of those in the group who had siblings with autism were able to close the gap between them and children in the comparison group, with the exception of a few children who persisted with some difficulties in verbal expression.

Yirmiya said follow-up work should be undertaken into the elemental school years in order to determine whether there are symptoms such as learning difficulties, since these sometimes surface at a later age. She stressed that while the research does illustrate some developmental problems with siblings of children with autism, to a large extent these problems resolve themselves at a young age. Therefore, it is not clear whether prevention programs should be recommended for such children, especially considering the burden that the families are already experiencing.

INNOVATIVE CENTER FOR BLIND-DEAF

It's hard enough to be blind; being blind and deaf is much more difficult. Now the country's only learning center for the deaf-blind has joined the prestigious international Karten Network of centers for adults with disabilities, which is based in England, Scotland and Wales. The network aims at improving the quality of life and independence level of disabled adults with a supportive learning environment that uses state-of-the-art computer technology.

The new Karten Computer-Aided Training, Education and Communication Center (CTEC) for People with Deaf-Blindness is located at Tel Aviv's Center for Deaf-Blind Persons in the Helen Keller House is already helping 15 young adults learn communication, life and vocational skills. The Center for Deaf-Blind Persons, established in 1989 by the Beth David Institute, is the only Israeli organization that develops and provides comprehensive educational, rehabilitation and social services for this population.

The most common cause of deaf-blindness here is Usher Syndrome, a genetic condition affecting an estimated 1,000 Israelis. Victims are born with hearing loss as well as retinitis pigmentosa, a progressive and degenerative eye disease. Students at the learning center range in age from 20 to 50. These years are considered a window of opportunity for individuals with Usher Syndrome, a time when they retain enough residual vision to prepare for total blindness. Several of the center's staff members have Usher Syndrome themselves - a fact which helps them empathize with the students and set an example of success.

The vision-hearing impaired need services and programs specifically designed to meet their needs. The learning center uses modern technology to teach the deaf-blind to read files via a Braille display or enlarged text, use e-mail and communicate via MSN messenger. Daily life skills include solutions to such mundane problems as how to get help in a store and how to use the bank, thereby gaining independent control of one's finances. These skills are taught in one-on-one sessions, and can make the difference between isolation and dependence and an independent life.

Leah, a 50-year-old from a poor neighborhood in Tel Aviv, is both deaf and severely visually impaired from Usher Syndrome. For years, she had used tactile sign language to communicate with friends and family, including her five children. Several months ago, despite her low self-esteem and poor reading and writing skills, she was persuaded to try using a computer at the new learning center. Since then, her progress has been remarkable. For the first time, Leah can communicate independently with her friends, make doctor's appointments and carry out other activities that most adults take for granted.

A generous donation from the Ian Karten Charitable Trust covered most of the necessary equipment and renovations, and paved the way for the enlarged Tel Aviv learning center to join the Karten CTEC Network. The new facility also has the support of the Ministry of Welfare and Social Services. Dr. Shlomo Elyashar, head of the ministry's rehabilitation division, says the Karten center will greatly advance rehabilitation and education for the hearing and visually disabled.

Name Test is Early Warning Sign of Autism

Children who do not respond to their name by age one are more likely to have a developmental abnormality -- perhaps even autism, a new study revealed.

Researchers studied 101 children aged one, whose older siblings had autism and who were therefore considered at risk. They gave the babies a simple name test, whereby a researcher stood behind the child and called out its name in a normal voice. They compared the result to 46 infants of the same age who were not believed to be at high risk:

• At age 1 year, all infants in the low-risk group responded to their name on the first or second call
• In contrast, 14% of the at-risk kids failed to respond, even after a second call.

The study marks a big step forward as evidence now shows that autism can be far less severe in kids who get early treatment. The condition is usually not diagnosed until age 3 or 4.

“The really exciting thing is that by beginning early we are able to prevent the full-blown autism syndrome," said author Dr Geraldine Dawson. "If we can work with a baby at the time those brain systems are developing, we think they will be much more responsive to treatment."

The researchers however warn that this test can by no means identify all children who will experience developmental problems; conversely, not all children who test positive will fail to develop normally.

The study was published in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, April 2007.