BBC News - Miniature 'human brain' grown in lab
"Ultimately we would like to move towards more common disorders like schizophrenia or autism. They typically manifest themselves only in adults, but it has been shown that the underlying defects occur during the development of the brain."
The first transgenic mouse model of a rare and severe type of autism called Timothy Syndrome is improving the scientific understanding of autism spectrum disorder in general and may help researchers design more targeted interventions and treatments....
“Most genetic mutations linked with autism increase the chances of having autism by a very small factor,” Rasmusson explains. “In contrast, 75-80 percent of people with this Timothy Syndrome mutation have autism spectrum disorder.”
More ... http://www.buffalo.edu/ubreporter/2011_09_15/rasmusson_autism
With childhood autism cases skyrocketing and no cure in sight, doctors at the Children's Institute in Squirrel Hill are planning on a Hail Mary pass approach to the mysterious disorder -- housing young patients for weeks at a time in a pollutant-free "clean room," in an attempt to detoxify their bodies.
No cause for autism has been found, and debates rage as to whether the brain development disorder is purely genetic or caused in part by environmental factors, including air and food-borne chemicals.
With roots in autism treatment theories that until now have lived mostly on the Internet, the pediatric clean room plan would be the first of its kind in a mainstream American hospital environment.
The Children Institute's Scott Faber, a pediatrician with several hundred autistic patients and a waiting list six months long, is one of the believers in toxic causes, and the institute is trying to back him with a multimillion dollar test of the novel theory.
Under the plans -- developed with help from Duquesne University -- autistic patients would live for more than six weeks in a 1,000-square-foot room kept mostly free of harmful chemicals and pollutants, using special air-filtering systems, ultraviolet lights and air locks on doorways.
Furniture, paints, toys and floor coverings would be designed to be toxin-free, and food, clothing and water organic and clean. Doctors would seek to rid patients' bodies of chemicals and boost their immune systems through natural means such as nutritional supplements and dietary changes.
Basically, it would be pushing a "reset" button on the child's body, with the hope of wiping autistic symptoms away.
"What we would like to do is have kids live in this wonderful environment where they are exposed to almost none of the Industrial Revolution. And we wonder, if the chemicals come out and the heavy metals come out, will the children start improving?" Dr. Faber said.
"Will they start showing signs of clinical improvement, such as language improvement and socialization improvement? Will they become less obsessive? Less fascinated?"
Autism is one of a group of developmental disabilities disorders that cause substantial impairments in social interaction and communication and are characterized by unusual behaviors and interests. Many people with these disorders also have unusual ways of learning, paying attention and reacting to sensation. Rates have greatly increased in recent years, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, though some of the rise may be due to changes in reporting and diagnosing the disorder.
Planning and fund-raising for the "Environmental Pediatric Room" is in the early stages, with the Alcoa Foundation awarding an initial $200,000 grant April 28. It will require an estimated $500,000 to fully design and at least $1 million in yearly operating support its first three years.
The 106-year-old Children's Institute (formerly called the Rehabilitation Institute) plans to fund the room through the $30 million capital campaign it launched in 2005, after buying out its Shady Avenue site from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. It completed an expansion last year that doubled its building space and its capacity, from 39 to 82 beds. Almost $24 million of the campaign total has been raised, with fund-raising for the clean room and other programs ongoing.
Clean rooms are common in high-tech manufacturing and research environments and have been used in hospital settings for patients struggling with infectious diseases and transplants. They have also been used to treat children with autism, but only in patients' homes, largely in work by Virginia researcher and nutritionist Karen Slimak.
Dr. Faber noted that Ms. Slimak's clean room work -- like much of the research on toxicity in autism -- "hasn't been written for the main [scientific] literature" but instead has been written mostly for the Internet. The Children's Institute plan would be taking what is arguably a fringe movement into the mainstream: It would be the first autism treatment of this kind staged in an American hospital setting. It will be matched with scientific analysis, sensors and video cameras to study the real impacts of detoxification. The data and findings will be shared openly, he said.
With so many doubts -- and so few answers -- about effective autism treatments among the growing community of families affected by the condition, the institute said openness is vital to the experimental method's success.
"We're not saying this is the full cause" of autism and related illnesses, Dr. Faber said. "Obviously there are multiple causes, and there are going to be found many genetic causes, many environmental causes and many genetic-environmental interactions. But we wonder -- we speculate -- that it's possible if we have children living in a unique environment that has not [previously] been created scientifically that we can make a difference.
There is no one way to teach reading to children with ASD. Learning styles vary between children so a range of strategies should be tried. Some children find reading remarkably easy, and very quickly learn to read far beyond their ability to understand the words they are reading (this is called hyperlexia), while others find it much more difficult to learn to read.
One approach is to use phonics, which means learning the letter sounds and blending them together to decipher words. Another approach is to learn to read whole words, and to be able to recognize them on sight.
I have found that, on the whole, teaching phonics can be more difficult than is normally the case with typically developing children. Many young children with autism have little or no language, and may not be able to repeat the letter sounds accurately or at all. It is a task all in itself to get some children just to repeat something when directed to. For you to be able to teach them to not only repeat those sounds but to use them as a decoding strategy in reading can be a big task indeed.
Some children learn the letter sounds quite easily, but find it much more difficult to use their knowledge of these sounds to blend them into words when reading. However, strategies that you would use with other children may still be useful even though they may take a bit longer: such strategies might include developing an awareness of the initial letter sounds of words, and playing with rhyming and alliteration.
Many children have a learning style based on their visual strengths, and may find it easier (especially at first) to learn that words are meaningful, and are useful in getting their needs met. Such children may benefit from being taught to learn to read a core vocabulary of words by sight. Your child may already have noticed the print in the environment, especially in areas in which they have a particular interest.
Once a child has learnt that words are meaningful, you can then increase their sight vocabulary by including other words that are of less direct interest to the child, but are nonetheless important for them to learn.
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