Autism tends to go hand in hand with a variety of other mental and behavioral conditions in kids, suggests a new study that highlights the fuzzy nature of autism diagnoses themselves.

Researchers said that other disorders that often go along with autism – such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or learning disabilities – may complicate the diagnosis, or slow down any improvement in kids who do get diagnosed and treated early.

“The most important message that (the study) underscores is that these children tend to have multiple disabilities, not just autism,” said Johnny Matson, who studies autism spectrum disorders and intellectual disabilities at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge but wasn’t involved in the new research.

Dr. Andrew Zimmerman from Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Lexington and his colleagues found that the conditions they typically saw occurring together with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis varied depending on the age of the child.

Learning disabilities were more common in the youngest kids with an autism spectrum disorder, while anxiety, speech problems and seizures were more often seen in elementary school kids and teens.

The study also found that one-third of kids who had ever been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder no longer had the diagnosis at the time their parents were surveyed.

The researchers note in their report, published in Pediatrics, that past studies have also found that some kids who originally have an autism spectrum disorder eventually lose that diagnosis and are no longer considered autistic.

Whether that’s due to a mistaken first diagnosis or actual changes in kids’ brains and behaviors is controversial.

Autism spectrum disorders include autism, Asperger’s syndrome and “pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified,” or PDD-NOS. the number of kids diagnosed with one of those conditions has spiked in recent years, with about one in every 110 kids in the United States now considered to have an autism spectrum disorder, according to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An upcoming revision of psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is expected to narrow the definition of autism and related disorders, potentially shrinking the number of children and adults who qualify for the diagnosis.

The new study included data from a phone survey of about 92,000 parents of kids age 17 and younger in the U.S. in 2007 and 2008.

Parents were asked if a doctor had ever told them their child had an autism spectrum disorder and if the child had one of the disorders currently, as well as if kids had a range of other mental and behavioral conditions such as anxiety and developmental delays.

In total, 1,366 of the parents surveyed said their kid had a past or current diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder. in 453 of those cases, kids had at one point been diagnosed as having one of the disorders but didn’t anymore, parents said.

Compared to kids who had lost their diagnosis, the youngest kids that were still considered autistic were more likely to have a learning disability or delayed development, while elementary school kids had more anxiety disorders and teens more often had a speech problem or mild seizures and epilepsy.

In her own studies, “the kids that had more co-occurring diagnoses tended to be diagnosed (with autism) later,” when an autism diagnosis may be more definitive and stable, said Dr. Susan Levy, an autism and child development researcher from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

In addition, she told Reuters Health, “The kids that had more co-occurring diagnoses had a lot more difficulties and their progress may have been impeded,” making it harder for their autism-related symptoms to improve with treatment.

Some of the kids who ended up not having an autism spectrum disorder may have originally been diagnosed incorrectly, especially if they got the diagnosis when they were very young, researchers said.

Kids and teens in the study that had once been considered autistic but weren’t any longer were more likely to have hearing problems than those who still had an autism spectrum disorder — suggesting that those problems might have been originally mistaken for autism.

But experts disagreed about whether it’s possible for kids who are diagnosed correctly with one of the autism-spectrum disorders to improve to the point where they are no longer affected.

“When you’re autistic, you’re autistic. It’s a very stable condition,” Matson said, noting that even when symptoms improve, people with autism have to keep getting treatment and work to maintain that progress.

Zimmerman argued that recognizing autism early and starting treatment can increase the likelihood for real, lasting improvement.

“It’s not unusual to see a child start out with more severe autism and then become more moderate and even mild as the years go by. a lot of the kids are improving, and we don’t really know why, except we know there’s a lot of moldability of the developing brain,” he told Reuters Health.

“We think that earlier treatment is essential and there are reasons to think that we can improve the kids. I’m very optimistic.”

THURSDAY, Feb. 3 (HealthDay News) — A special restrictive diet may significantly reduce symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in young children, a new study suggests.

When children between the ages of 4 and 8 were placed on a diet containing no processed foods for five weeks, ADHD symptoms diminished in 78 percent of them. and, when suspected trouble foods were reintroduced into the diet, two-thirds of the children experienced a relapse in symptoms.

“A strictly supervised restricted elimination diet is a valuable instrument to assess whether ADHD is induced by food,” wrote the study authors. “We think that dietary intervention should be considered in all children with ADHD, provided parents are willing to follow a diagnostic restricted elimination diet for a five-week period, and provided expert supervision is available,” they concluded.

Results of the study are published in the Feb. 5 issue of The Lancet.

Makes sense to me – feed your kids like humans and they may be human

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2011) — thanks in part to a Norwegian research biobank, researchers have generated important new insight into ADHD and how the condition manifests itself. among other things, they have found that there is some overlap between ADHD and bipolar disorders with regard to rapid mood swings.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) occurs on a worldwide basis and appears to affect two to five per cent of the population, depending on the method of measurement used and the population groups examined. although the condition has been recognised for over 100 years, insight into its causes, prevention and treatment remains limited.

In 2005, a long-term, interdisciplinary research project on the clinical and biological factors associated with ADHD ("ADHD in Norway: Basic and translational studies") was launched in Bergen with funding from the Research Council’s Programme for Mental Health (PSYKISK). An extensive international collaboration has been established to follow up the research results in the coming years.

A research biobank containing clinical informational and biological samples from Norwegian ADHD patients and their families, as well as from control subjects, was established as well. using this data as a basis, the researchers have sought to map the connection between ADHD symptoms and other mental disorders.

Mood swings

"one of our findings is that there is some overlap between AHDH and bipolar disorders with regard to rapid mood swings. it is now being discussed whether mood swings should be included in the official diagnosis criteria for ADHD," explains Jan Haavik, project manager and professor at Haukeland University Hospital and the University of Bergen.

The researchers have also shown that the Norwegian population has many genetic variants that regulate the synthesis of the pheromones dopamine and serotonin. some of these genetic variants are associated with ADHD symptoms.

Email or share this story:

Story Source:

the above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by The Research Council of Norway. the original article was written by Elin Fugelsnes/Else Lie. Translation: Connie Stultz/Carol B. Eckmann.

Note: if no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: this article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

LOIS CAIRNS

many of the children being given drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may have been misdiagnosed, an expert believes.

Psychologist and behavioural expert Frances Steinberg believes shoddy diagnostic processes are seeing kids labelled with ADHD when they are suffering from other problems such as foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS).

“Most people diagnosing the problem operate from an orientation of `if it moves around and daydreams, it must be ADHD’ rather than doing a careful exclusion of other factors that could be causing the inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity,” Steinberg told the Sunday Star-Times. “And if you’ve labelled the child incorrectly, no amount of medication could fix what is wrong because you would not be addressing the underlying problem behind the attention problem.

“If we get the diagnostic end of the process correct, the high levels of inappropriate medications will be automatically sorted out.”

last weekend, the Sunday Star-Times revealed that record numbers of children are being medicated because of behavioural problems despite lingering concerns about the safety and effectiveness of the drugs they are taking.

In the past year, more than 106,000 prescriptions were issued for methylphenidate – commonly sold under the brand names Ritalin and Rubifen – and typically used to treat children and young people with ADHD.

Family First is now calling for changes to the prescribing rules so that at least two specialist doctors must be consulted before any child is given methylphenidate, which stunts growth.

Steinberg says the key is getting the diagnosis correct in the first place. “It’s not just naughty kids who are thrown into the ADHD basket. Children who have foetal alcohol syndrome, processing difficulties, depression and anxiety disorders, traumatic stress difficulties, head injuries, autistic spectrum disorders – you name it – are also lumped into the category.

“In the early 2000s, we developed a programme in West Auckland that operated as a model for how the assessment process could be done, for little or no extra funds, by co-ordinating previously existing services.

“In the pilot programme, of the 18 children studied, all of whom the psychiatrist said would have been diagnosed with ADHD under normal circumstances, only four were found to have ADHD. The others had various other processing, behaviour, or developmental problems.”

Peter Bell, from the Foetal Alcohol Support Trust, said children suffering from FAS were often misdiagnosed with ADHD and given Ritalin because they were difficult or impossible to teach, and hyperactive. The problem was that while the symptoms of ADHD and FAS were similar, the recommended course of treatment was different.

WHAT IS FASD?

Foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is the umbrella term used to describe the range of adverse effects on development when alcohol is consumed during pregnancy.

FASD is estimated to occur in at least one of every 100 live births (about 600 babies each year), although no research has confirmed the prevalence in new Zealand.

FASD can cause serious social and behavioural problems and is the leading known preventable cause of mental retardation yet there are no specialist diagnostic centres here and women still get conflicting messages about whether it is safe to consume alcohol during pregnancy.

The most recent national figures from the 2007-08 Alcohol Use in new Zealand data indicate that 28% of women aged 18-44 drank during pregnancy.

Alcohol Healthwatch health promotion adviser Christine Rogan said the current assessment process for FASD was “grossly inadequate” and a generation of children were being let down because they were not being properly diagnosed and treated.

Families with children with FASD were being passed from “pillar to post” because of the lack of knowledge about FASD and how to diagnose it, and it was costing the health system a fortune. “We need to recognise this is happening to our children out there,” Rogan said.

The tragedy of it all was that FASD could be prevented if women refrained from drinking while pregnant.

“There is no evidence to say any amount [of alcohol] is safe,” said Rogan.

– Sunday Star Times

Chalk up another point for video gaming’s health benefits. This time, a new study suggests that kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have shown symptom relief after engaging in a five-week working memory-training program revolving around “game-like” software.

The study, published in The Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, demonstrates that students who participated in the experiment were shown to have improved working memory, or the ability to retain information long enough to complete a task (such as remembering a phone number long enough to dial it).

“Working memory is critical in everyday life, and certainly for academic success, but it is one of the things that is very difficult for children with ADHD,” says Christine Hanson, a graduate student in Psychology at Ohio State University, who worked on the study.

The game itself was developed by Swedish Company Cogmed in partnership with Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Stockholm. according to the study, students — from a specialized Columbus school for children with disabilities ranging in ages 7 to 17 — who played the game for 30-40 minutes a day were rated to show improved ADHD symptoms such as reduced inattention and a better working memory.

The game itself isn’t exactly Mass Effect 2; rather, a robot may say a set of numbers and the students are expected to type them back in the correct order. (Fun!)

“At first the kids love it, because it is like a game,” says graduate student Synthia Puffenberger, who also worked on the study. “But the software has an algorithm built in that makes the exercises harder as the students get better. So the children are always challenged.”

[via Medical News Today]

More on Time.com:

Warning: Nintendo 3DS not Recommended for 6 and Under

So You want To Be a Video Game Tester?

What We’re Looking Forward to in 2011: Video Games

Public release date: 14-Dec-2010 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Joseph L. Jacobson, Ph.D. 248-701-2159 Wayne State University School of Medicine

Julie a. Kable, Ph.D. 404-712-9833 Department of Pediatrics, Emory University School of Medicine

Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research

• On the surface, children with fetal alcohol exposure and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) appear to be similar with respect to poor academic performance
• But a new study exploring number processing shows that each disorder appears to affect different areas of the brain
• These results indicate that the treatments for one might not be effective for the other, and therefore, there is a need to create tailor-made interventions for each

In children, the brain is in a constant state of flux as it analyzes and evaluates stimuli from the environment. Fetal alcohol exposure and ADHD represent two disorders that can affect children’s ability to learn and process information from a very young age.

Both ADHD and fetal alcohol exposure are linked to poor academic performance in cognition and attention, so the researchers decided to try to pinpoint the exact brain areas affected by each disorder with the hope that this research could lead to the creation and development of new and improved treatments.

The results will be published in the March 2011 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

Joseph L. Jacobson, lead author of the study and Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the Wayne State University School of Medicine, said that the goal of the study was to determine if alcohol-related deficits in magnitude comparison (the ability to mentally represent and evaluate relative quantities) seen in children with prenatal alcohol exposure would also be true for ADHD.

“We thought it very interesting that this is not the case. the arithmetic deficit in ADHD is mediated primarily by poorer executive function and attention problems rather than magnitude comparison, which is more often impaired in children with fetal alcohol exposure.”

The researchers assessed 262 African-American adolescents at 14 years of age. Their mothers were recruited during pregnancy and interviewed extensively regarding their use of alcohol to determine the amount of alcohol the child was exposed to prior to birth. the children were evaluated for ADHD symptoms at ages 7.5 and 14 by parent/guardian and teacher reports, and their number processing abilities were assessed at 14 years.

The results showed that children with fetal alcohol exposure demonstrated strong deficits in number comparison, while children with ADHD demonstrated deficits in attention and memory. thus, although number processing is affected in both ADHD and fetal alcohol exposure, the exact cause of the difficulties appears to be different.

In a related study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, the researchers found that, when given simple number processing problems, alcohol-exposed children appear to be able to recruit different brain regions to compensate for the damage done to the areas of the brain. However, the recovery is never complete and is variable at best depending on the child.

“The extent of the brain damage experienced by the individuals is an important predictor of recovery of function and is influenced by the quantity and duration of alcohol consumed while in utero and various genetic and metabolic characteristics of the mother and fetus,” said Julie a. Kable, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine. “More extensive damage leads to less available resources to compensate.”

However, Jacobson does not consider the performance of the children in this study to constitute recovery. he said that the alcohol-exposed children in the fMRI study performed as well as the control group on the arithmetic tasks only because of the relatively easy nature of the problems selected for that study.

“In our view, the alternate strategies these children use are less efficient than those used by the controls. As a result, these strategies are not likely to be as effective as the problems get harder.”

Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research (ACER) is the official journal of the Research Society on Alcoholism and the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism. Co-authors of the ACER paper, “Number Processing in Adolescent with Prenatal Alcohol Exposure and ADHD: Differences in the Neurobehavioral Phenotype” were Rafael Klorman of the Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology and the University of Rochester in new York, and Neil C. Dodge, Matthew J. Burden and Sandra W. Jacobson of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit Michigan. the study was supported by grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the Joseph Young, Sr. Fund from the State of Michigan. this release is supported by the Addiction Technology Transfer Center Network at ATTCnetwork.org.

[ | E-mail | Share ]  

Symptoms Of Autism Toddlers

Understanding chosen of the Autism Symptoms for children will help to supply appropriate intervention as fast as possible. Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurological disorder which reportedly effects up to 1 in 150 toddlers. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized as a spectrum disorder while the concentrations of the disorder can vary dramatically. Symptoms Of Autism Toddlers

ASD presents in the forms of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Aspergers and critical Autism. To date there is no known cure of Autism, with research continuing there are suggestions that genetic pre curses to the disorder may exist. Early diagnosis and intervention offers the best outcome for the child. Parents who are concerned that their child may have signs of the disorder should seek a diagnosis as early as possible.

It can be very difficult for parents of babies and toddlers to see the signs of Autism Spectrum Disorder, as they are still developing but there are some definite early warning signs that parents can look out for. Signs of ADD and ADHD are a little more obvious for parents to detect. Children suffering from ADD and ADHD often have very short attention spans, are extremely over active the majority of the time and very difficult to feed. Their world just seems to have too much in it and not enough time to see and touch it all. Symptoms Of Autism Toddlers

If you are recognizing these early warning signs of ADD or ADHD in your child one thing that may be considered is their diet. There is much research to suggest that children with ADD and ADHD can be affected greatly by the foods that they consume. Chemical additives in the food and drinks they consume can have a dramatic effect on their disposition.

Not to be confused with a sugar high, some additives in foods can exacerbate their agitated and uncontrollable restlessness. Eliminating these chemicals from the diet and replacing them with fresh foods and natural alternatives will go a long way to helping toddlers control their behavior. within the spectrum is Autism itself, this condition has no known cure and can affect a child dramatically for the rest of their life. Symptoms Of Autism Toddlers

This severity of this condition varies from very mild to severe. some of the obvious warning signs for Autism include; your child not responding to his or her name, your child not responding to a smile with a smile, and an inability to be comforted with physical affection. Don’t let your child suffer anymore! Lead your child out of his world through Symptoms Of Autism Toddlers program now!