Articles labeled: autism

First autistic kids getting banned from church, and now they’re being booted off airplanes.

There were no weapons on board or concerns about terrorism, but an American Eagle flight about to take off from the Raleigh-Durham, N.C., airport was turned back to its gate on Monday to remove two passengers.

The culprits? An upset, autistic toddler and his mother.

By all accounts, two-year-old Jarret Farrell wasn’t a happy traveler. But his mother, Janice Farrell, who said she tried everything to calm her son, believes there was no reason for the airline to kick them off the plane.

Carol Race, who was issued a restraining order after she refused to stop bringing her autistic son Adam to church, plead not guilty to charges she violated said order. Race has also started a website to inform other families with special needs children that may also have issues bringing them to church. Race was initially asked to not attend the church any longer because they felt her son was a danger to other parishioners.

Race initially ignored the order and was ticketed after attending church with Adam on Mother’s Day. Lately, she’s been attending a neighboring church, while friends with autistic children have taken her family’s pew in St. Joseph’s to show support.

The case sparked a national media blitz, including a spot on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” which was set in motion by Race and her support group of families with special-needs children.

Race hopes the new website, www.project-adams-pew.org, will prompt churches across the country to reserve a pew “for families that might need a special welcome.”

Hundreds of parents of autistic children are outraged over the report that a kindergarten teacher in Florida allegedly allowed the other children in class to vote an autistic boy out of their classroom, Survivor-style.

Morningside Elementary School in Port St. Lucie, Fla., recently alerted Melissa Barton that her son, Alex, suffers from a high-functioning form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome, WPEC News reported.

Barton claims that Alex was punished for symptoms of his disability, such as humming and eating his homework. She says Portillo went too far last week when she kicked Alex out of class, and then allowed the other students to vote on whether he should be allowed back in.

Each student was also allowed to say what he or she did not like about Alex. By a 14-to-2 margin, the students voted Alex out of class, according to The South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

“She said this was her way of correcting his behavior,” Barton told WPEC. “I asked him how that made him feel and he said, ‘I feel sad.’”

The parents of a 13-year-old boy with autism in Bertha, Minnesota have been issued a restraining order by the local church because of their son’s behavior. WWJD?

Walz claims Adam [Race] has urinated and spat in church and that his behaviour presents a danger to other parishioners.

But Adam’s parents say the boy has a medical disability and they try to control their son as best they can.

“He said that we did not discipline our son. He said that our son was physically out of control and a danger to everyone at church,” Carol Race said. “I can’t discipline him out of his autism, and I think that’s what our priest is expecting.”

But Walz told authorities he has spoken to the parents and the parish has tried to offer “many options for accommodations that would assist the family while protecting the safety of parishioners. (But) the family refused those offers of accommodation.”

A new study purports that the parents of children with autism are twice as likely to have been hospitalized for a mental disorder. Is this getting scientists closer to proving some sort of genetic link?

The study looked at 1,237 children born between 1977 and 2003 who were diagnosed with autism before age 10. To be deemed autistic, the children all had to have received a diagnosis of autism disorder, Asperger Syndrome or pervasive developmental disorder.

Seventy-seven per cent of the children involved in the study were boys.

“These results support those of smaller studies that indicated an increase in psychiatric conditions among parents of children with autism, specifically schizophrenia, neurotic disorders and depression,” write the authors. “Identifying families with a propensity for rare psychiatric conditions may help uncover rare genes that contribute to the susceptibility of both disorders.”

So the question, as the article states, is “does it mean U.S. kids are being over-treated? Or that U.K. children are being under-treated”?

Experts say that’s almost beside the point, because use is rising on both sides of the Atlantic. And with scant long-term safety data, it’s likely the drugs are being over-prescribed for both U.S. and U.K. children, research suggests.

Among the most commonly used drugs were those to treat autism and hyperactivity.

In the U.K. study, anti-psychotics were prescribed for 595 children at a rate of less than four per 10,000 children in 1992. By 2005, 2,917 children were prescribed the drugs at a rate of seven per 10,000 — a near-doubling, said lead author Fariz Rani, a researcher at the University of London’s pharmacy school.

A West Bloomfield, Michigan man accused of raping his 15-year-old daughter had all charges against him dropped, because his daughter — who is severely autistic — could not testify.

The case was controversial from its beginning because the 15-year-old girl, who cannot speak, made the claims through facilitated communication, a widely discredited method of communication in which a teaching aide helps such students type words into a keyboard. Experts testified that scientific evaluations of the method have proven that the teaching aide, consciously or unconsciously, authors the messages.

Oakland County Assistant Prosecutors Paul Walton and Barbara Morrison defended their decision to press the case until it became clear the girl would not testify.

“We wanted to make sure we were giving her the same kind of opportunity to have her voice heard in court as every other kid,” Morrison said.

“We’re never going to feel good about this case,” Walton said. “Have we sent a child back to a potentially dangerous situation?”

We were first prone to outrage when we read the headline and first paragraph of the story until we got to the bit about “facilitated communication” — prosecutors might as well have said the girl told them she was raped by ESP. On the surface, this makes the Duke lacrosse team rape case look well run in comparison.

Here’s more on the farce of facilitated communication, which serves only to cruelly give parents of these kids false hope.

Despite the lack of scientific studies linking vaccines and autism, the government has agreed to a settlement in the case of Hannah Poling, whose parents had sued believing that vaccines administered to Hannah caused her autism. Advocates are jumping all over the ruling, claiming it to be the proof they previously lacked. Government officials, however, are cautioning parents from jumping to conclusions:

“Let me be very clear that the government has made absolutely no statement indicating that vaccines are a cause of autism,” Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Thursday. “That is a complete mischaracterization of the findings of the case and a complete mischaracterization of any of the science that we have at our disposal today.”

Given that the details of the case have been sealed by court order, what is certain is that there are still a lot of unanswered questions.

Hannah’s father, Dr. Jon Poling, was a neurology resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital at the time, and she underwent an intensive series of tests that found a disorder in her mitochondria, the energy factories of the cells.

Such disorders are uncommon, their effects can be significant but varied, and the problems associated with them can show up immediately or lie dormant for years.

There are two theories about what happened to Hannah, said her mother, Terry Poling. The first is that she had an underlying mitochondrial disorder that vaccinations aggravated. The second is that vaccinations caused this disorder.

“The government chose to believe the first theory,” Ms. Poling said, but added, “We don’t know that she had an underlying disorder.”

Even though the Autistic son who a mother failed to strangle to death is 20 years old, I am putting this under the category of “child abuse” since the young was functionally retarded.

When the failed murder attempt was foiled, the mother then took her own life.

The family is blaming it on depression. Let this be a wake-up call. Those with clinical depression should be forbidden from caring for others, especially children. They just aren’t capable of doing it without a significant amount of risk.

Investigators said on Jan. 4, Tegtmeier called Ankeny Schools at 7:30 a.m. and said her son Rory Jr. was sick and she cancelled his bus pickup. Tegtmeier also called a siding company that was coming to work on her home and told them not to come because of a family matter. She then called her husband at his Ames office and left a message that she could not keep their 11 a.m. lunch appointment.

Police said following her phone calls Tegtmeier went to an upstairs bathroom and attempted to strangle her son with a cord.

During interviews with Rory Jr., 20, who has autism, investigators learned that Rory Jr. struggled to get free from the cord and forcefully pushed his mother away. He then hid in the basement, later telling investigators he was scared of his mother.

Rory Jr. told investigators he then heard a loud noise and rushed back upstairs to find his mother on the kitchen floor. Police said she had taken her own life by strangling herself.

A report published in the New England Journal of Medicine today indicates that researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have found a genetic link to autism that may affect approximately 1 percent of people with the disorder, putting scientists one step closer to discovering the cause of this condition that appears in 1 out of every 150 children as well as further damaging the case of those that point to external causes such as thimerosal.

Background Autism spectrum disorder is a heritable developmental disorder in which chromosomal abnormalities are thought to play a role.

Methods As a first component of a genomewide association study of families from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE), we used two novel algorithms to search for recurrent copy-number variations in genotype data from 751 multiplex families with autism. Specific recurrent de novo events were further evaluated in clinical-testing data from Children’s Hospital Boston and in a large population study in Iceland.

Results Among the AGRE families, we observed five instances of a de novo deletion of 593 kb on chromosome 16p11.2. Using comparative genomic hybridization, we observed the identical deletion in 5 of 512 children referred to Children’s Hospital Boston for developmental delay, mental retardation, or suspected autism spectrum disorder, as well as in 3 of 299 persons with autism in an Icelandic population; the deletion was also carried by 2 of 18,834 unscreened Icelandic control subjects. The reciprocal duplication of this region occurred in 7 affected persons in AGRE families and 4 of the 512 children from Children’s Hospital Boston. The duplication also appeared to be a high-penetrance risk factor.

Conclusions We have identified a novel, recurrent microdeletion and a reciprocal microduplication that carry substantial susceptibility to autism and appear to account for approximately 1% of cases. We did not identify other regions with similar aggregations of large de novo mutations.

For quite some time, a large number of people have pointed their finger at thimerosal, a mercury based preservative in vaccines, as the primary culprit in the rise in autism cases throughout the United States despite the lack of scientific evidence. A new study may put that causality case even further back — a recent report shows that autism cases in California are still on the rise, despite the ban of thimerosal several years ago:

Researchers from the state Department of Public Health found the autism rate in children rose continuously during the 12-year study period from 1995 to 2007. The preservative thimerosal hasn’t been used in childhood vaccines since 2001, but is used in some flu shots.

Doctors say the latest study adds to existing evidence refuting a link between thimerosal exposure and autism risk and should reassure parents that the disorder is not caused by vaccinations. If there was a risk, they said, autism rates should have dropped between 2004 and 2007.

The findings show “no evidence of mercury poisoning in autism” since there was no decline in autism rates even after the elimination of thimerosal, said Dr. Eric Fombonne, an autism researcher at Montreal Children’s Hospital who had no role in the research.

The amount of violence against children in this country is staggering. Sometimes I lament over middle-eastern countries and how they can strap bombs to their children in praise of their pending murder/suicides, yet look at all the crazy people in this country commiting heinous crimes against children? And an autistic boy? This act has left him blind. What a cowardly act, to torture a special needs child.

This country needs to get rid of the insanity defense. This is inexusable.

LAUDERHILL, Fla. — Lauderhill police said a family member stabbed a 12-year-old autistic boy in both eyes with a dagger.

Police said his aunt stabbed him at a home on Northwest 53rd Street about 1 a.m. Friday, but the family waited about 10 hours before notifying authorities.

We’ve all heard about the “explosion” in autism cases, which naturally leads one to believe that the number of kids afflicted with the disease is on an alarming rise. Well another school of thought is proposing that the numbers are caused by an advance in diagnosing autism, as well as the relatively recent expansion of the “autism umbrella” into a range “autism spectrum disorders” and that the actual number of cases may not really be on the rise at all:

But many experts believe these unsociable behaviors were just about as common 30 or 40 years ago. The recent explosion of cases appears to be mostly caused by a surge in special education services for autistic children, and by a corresponding shift in what doctors call autism.

Autism has always been diagnosed by making judgments about a child’s behavior; there are no blood or biologic tests. For decades, the diagnosis was given only to kids with severe language and social impairments and unusual, repetitious behaviors.

Many children with severe autism hit themselves or others, don’t speak and don’t make eye contact.

As someone who was under the impression that a diagnosis of autism in a child could not be definitive until 4 years old, this is interesting news. The American Academy of Pediatrics today is urging parents to bring their kids in for at least 2 autism screenings before they are 2 years old. Certain warning signs can apparently be seen as early as 4-months-old, and the recommendation is to try to catch and treat cases of autism as early as possible:

The advice is meant to help parents and doctors spot autism sooner. There is no cure for the disorder, but experts say that early therapy can lessen its severity.

Symptoms to watch for and the call for early screening come in two new reports. They are being released by the American Academy of Pediatrics on Monday at its annual meeting in San Francisco and will appear in the November issue of the journal Pediatrics and on the group’s Web site.

The reports list numerous warning signs, such as a 4-month-old not smiling at the sound of Mom or Dad’s voice, or the loss of language or social skills at any age.

The authors of the report are quick to point out that parents should not freak out if your kid displays a couple of the symptoms, as not all kids with “quirky behavior” are autistic.

Thimerosal doesn’t cause brain damage, so unqualified voices against thimersal really need to find another bandwagon to hop on and stop making unscienfic and false conclusions based on false pretenses and incompetent theories. Just stop it already. Simplying believing that it causes brain damage doesn’t make it so:

In the most recent study funded by the CDC, researchers evaluated more than 1,000 kids between the ages of 7 and 10 who were exposed to various levels of thimerosal as babies.

Researchers tested the children extensively, assessing the children in 42 different areas of neurological functioning and making almost 400 different statistical comparisons. They found that for the vast majority of tests, children with high levels of thimerosal exposure performed equally well compared to children with low exposure levels, indicating that thimerosal has no effect on brain development.