Healthsifter by mary desmond pinkowish, since 2003

Tech Company in Denmark Hires Primarily People with Autism

What an intriguing story from The Independent in London:

"When Thorkil Sonne was told that his three-year-old son had autism, the Danish IT specialist ran the classic gamut of responses for parents of an autistic child, from anger that a doctor could burden his happy boy with the label of a lifelong disability, to a desire to learn everything about the condition.

Few, however, go so far as to embark on a one-man mission to revolutionise society’s isolating attitude to autistics by setting up a company staffed almost entirely by sufferers that has some of the world’s biggest corporations, including Microsoft and Cisco Systems, queuing to buy its services.

Specialisterne, which has a turnover of £2m and employs more than 40 people with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Denmark, is set to open its first international operation in Glasgow early next year as a test run for an expansion strategy which would see people with ASD working as IT consultants world wide."

Using Music to Help Kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders

ScienceDaily reports about an ongoing study at UCLA that uses music to help kids with autism spectrum disorders understand emotions and social interactions. Here's an excerpt:

"The 12-week program uses elements from the Orff method — including games, instruments and teamwork — and combines them with musical games. The idea is to pair emotional musical excerpts with matching displays of social emotion (happy with happy, sad with sad, etc.) in a social, interactive setting."

The Orff method is a music education method developed by German composer (Carmina Burana) Carl Orff that uses movement and rhythm--clapping, dancing, chanting--as the foundation of musical education in all kids. The goal of this study is to see if the Orff training will enhance social communication and emotional functioning in children with autism.

As Claudio Monteverdi wrote in 1638, "The end of all good music is to affect the soul."

For more on the Orff-Schulwerk Association, a Cleveland-based organization dedicated to movement and music education for everyone, click here. Read more about this study at the UCLA site.

More on the Autism Vaccine Link, Not

Here's a portion of Slate's good article on the proceedings, which they cheekily titled "In Your Eye, Jenny McCarthy":

At one point in testimony, a University of Virginia pediatric neurologist named Robert Rust tried to explain the dogged persistence of the vaccines-cause-autism theory. The believers have many data points at their fingertips, thanks to the Internet. Rust compared them to Tycho Brahe, the 16^th-century astronomer who convinced his contemporaries that the sun revolved around the Earth. Frustrated parents and scientists who have long rejected the vaccine-autism connection frequently return to that analogy. Alison Singer quit her leadership position in the charity Autism Speaks because she tired of its demand for more vaccine studies. "The question has been asked and answered and it's time to move on," she told Newsweek last month. "We need to be able to say, 'Yes, we are now satisfied that the earth is round.' "

Autism Claims Quashed in "Vaccine Court"

Feb. 12, 2009 -- The federal "vaccine court" has rejected claims that either the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine or thimerosal in vaccines caused children's autism.

The vaccine court -- shorthand for the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims -- administers a system that since 1988 has overseen all claims for compensation due to injury from vaccinations.

Today's ruling is a major setback for the more than 5,000 cases in which families claim that the MMR vaccine, either alone or due to the mercury-based thimerosal preservative in the vaccine, caused a child's autism.

Read more at WebMD.

This ruling would be a relief if it meant that people would accept the scientific evidence that vaccines do not cause autism. I wish.

More Evidence Against an MMR-Autism Link

Another study seems to refute the contention that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism in some kids. According to this theory, the MMR causes severe GI symptoms that are followed in some children by autism.  Read the details at MedPage Today, where you can also hear an audio clip from an interview with one of the study investigators, Mady Hornig, MD. The original study was published in the online, open-access journal PLoS Medicine. The investigators studied a group of children who had both GI symptoms and autism and examined the time links between the conditions and the immunization. Here's how MedPage Today summarizes the findings:

Equally, the temporal sequence of events did not support a link between the vaccine and either autism or GI disorders. Specifically:

• The first appearance of GI symptoms, on average, was 12 months in the autism group and two in the controls.
• 13 of the 25 cases had the vaccine before the onset of autism.
• 16 of the cases had the GI symptoms before the onset of autism.
• And five of the cases had the vaccine before the onset of GI symptoms

Autism and Vaccines: Autism One Conference, Chicago

AMEDnews reports evenhandedly on the Autism One conference, which was held in Chicago over the Memorial Day weekend.One of the featured speakers was Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the British physician whose 1998 paper in The Lancet claimed an association between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in 12 kids. But this is what's happened since then, quoting from AMEDNews:

"Every so often, a small study such as the one conducted by Dr. Wakefield comes along to buttress that belief. In this case, the momentum has held, even though 10 of the 13 authors on the 1998 paper published a statement inThe Lancet in 2004 retracting the original interpretation that their data indicated a causal link between MMR and autism, and Dr. Wakefield faces significant professional scrutiny."

That is, Dr. Wakefield is in danger of losing his license to practice. In June, the UK health authorities declared that measles is now endemic in that country and confirmed a recent measles-related death. In the US, measles rates are at their highest since 2001. It's more than spots: encephalitis and pneumonia are just two possible complications.

Damage done.

New Ways to Detect Autism in Very Young Children

Scientists are working hard to find ways of detecting autism spectrum disorders in young infants. The hope is that earlier detection will lead to earlier and more helpful interventions. Read about it in today's Wall Street Journal, even if you need to pay for access. There's a fascinating video on that page showing how researchers at Yale University are using a visual tracking system to determine how healthy infants, as well as those with possible autism, scan pictures of human faces. See how the baby in the video scans one face, and how she compares faces when two, similar-looking faces appear on the screen.

60 Minutes Autism Videos

Old news to some people, but these videos of very young and older children, along with interviews with autism researchers are pretty interesting. Note the very subtle clues displayed by infants and very young children with possible autism. (And no annoying commercial intros here. Gets my vote.)

Vaccine-Autism Debate Continues

Read how infectious disease specialist Paul Offit (himself a vaccine developer) responds to the recent Hannah Poling case ruling in vaccine court. The decision flies in the face of almost everything we know about vaccines, the immune system response to vaccines, mitochondrial enzyme deficiencies, and the origins of autism. Quoting from Offit's NY Times op-ed today:

“There is no evidence that children with mitochondrial enzyme deficiencies are worsened by vaccines,” Salvatore DiMauro, a professor of neurology at Columbia who is the nation’s leading expert on the disorder, told me. Indeed, children like Hannah Poling who are especially susceptible to infections are most likely to benefit from vaccines."

He put a great title on his article: "Innoculated Against Facts."

Do scientists have more kids with autism?

Link: BBC NEWS | Health | Scientific brain linked to autism.
Science types tend to be "systemizers," and when they have babies together, they may be more likely to have child with autism. I'm not yet convinced, but researchers at the University of Cambridge, England, believe that the genes that confer great analytic abilities may also confer suboptimal social skills.  The study on which this news story is based runs in the current issue of Archives of Disease in Childhood.