Childhood Autism: Desperate Parents turn to bogus therapies for vain hope

In a study of the range of treatments being employed for young children with autism and other developmental delays, UC Davis MIND Institute researchers have found that families often use bogus and ineffective procedures masked as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments.

The most frequent users of both conventional and bogus complementary approaches are those with higher levels of parental education and income.

There is no Food and Drug Administration-approved medical treatment for the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, a lifelong neuro-developmental condition whose hallmarks are deficits in social relatedness, repetitive thoughts and behaviours and, often, intellectual disability.

In the vain search for treatments to help their children, families may turn to bogus and snake-oil approaches such as mind-body medicine (e.g. meditation or prayer), homeopathic remedies, probiotics, alternative diets or more invasive therapies such as vitamin B-12 injections, intravenous immunoglobulin or chelation therapy; many of which carry significant risks.

Robin Hansen

The research is published online today in the Journal of Behavioural and Developmental Pediatrics. It was led by Robin Hansen, director of the Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities at the MIND Institute and chief of the Division of Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics in the UC Davis School of Medicine.

"In our Northern California study population, it does not appear that families use bogus and ineffective complementary and alternative treatments due to the lack of a definitive answer and therfore, a lack of appropriate conventional services, as has been suggested by other research," Hansen said.

"Rather, desperate parents with excess money use bogus treatments in addition to and in parallel to conventional approaches. Thus causing great confusion as to the benefits of either."

The cause or causes of most neuro-developmental disorders are not known, and the conditions have no cure. 

Many children suffer from a wide array of associated symptoms that may not be directly associated with their condition and that make their daily lives and those of their families very stressful.

Such symptoms include irritability, hyperactivity, gastrointestinal problems and sleep disorders.

The study included nearly 600 diverse children between 2 and 5 years with autism and developmental delay who were enrolled in the Childhood Autism Risk from Genetics and the Environment (CHARGE) study.

Of the participants, 453 were diagnosed with autism and 125 were diagnosed with developmental delay.

"Our study suggests that pediatricians and other providers need to ask about CAM use in the context of providing care for children with autism and other developmental disorders, and take a more active role in helping families make decisions about treatment options based on available information related to potential benefits and risks," said Roger Scott Akins, lead author and a former postdoctoral fellow at the MIND Institute, who now is chairman of the Division of Neurodevelopmental Pediatrics at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, Va.

Irva Hertz-Picciotto

Irva Hertz-Picciotto, professor of public health sciences and principal investigator for the CHARGE study, said the research supports the emergent need for identifying validated treatments for neurodevelopmental conditions.

"These findings emphasize the enormous and urgent need for effective treatments and for rigorous research that can identify them and verify their effectiveness and safety," Hertz-Picciotto said.

"Of course it is reasonable for parents to keep searching for ways to help their children, when there are few effective treatments and none that can help every child."

Bilingual Children have a Two-track Mind

Skott Freedman

Adults learning a foreign language often need flash cards, tapes, and practice, practice, practice. Children, on the other hand, seem to pick up their native language out of thin air.

The learning process is even more remarkable when two languages are involved.

In a recent study examining how bilingual children learn the two different sound systems of languages they are acquiring simultaneously, Ithaca College faculty member Skott Freedman has discovered insights that indicate children can learn two native languages as easily as they can learn one.

"At first glance, the process of learning a language can seem incredibly daunting," said Freedman, an assistant professor of speech language and pathology and audiology.

"Environmental input presented at a fairly rapid rate must be mapped onto detailed representations in the brain. A word's meaning, sounds, and grammatical function all must be extracted from the incoming speech stream. Yet this potentially arduous task is typically executed with little effort by children barely a year old. In fact, studies show that children can learn a word in as little as one exposure."

But how complex is the process when a child grows up learning two languages?

"It has commonly been debated whether a bilingual child has one large set of sounds from both languages or, conversely, two separate sound systems," Freedman said.

"A way of testing this theory is to measure a child's language productions in both languages using some measure of complexity and then comparing the two languages."

Freedman's study measured complexity in terms of the word shape, such as the presence of word-final consonants and consonant clusters.

He also measured the degree to which the children could approximate their languages. For example, if a child said "tar" for the word "star," he or she produced three of four possible sounds, therefore approximating the word with 75 percent accuracy.

"A hypothesis proposed several years ago predicts that, though bilingual children may differ in their productions between languages, they will nevertheless maintain a similar level of overall approximation," Freedman said.

"The hypothesis was confirmed in a study using an English-Hungarian bilingual child, but no study to date has tested the hypothesis in Spanish, the fastest-growing language in the United States."

Freedman's study compared the language productions of five English-Spanish bilingual children during a picture-naming task to the productions of five English-only and five Spanish-only speaking children.

The results confirmed the hypothesis, with some added insights.

"While bilingual children produced more complex forms in Spanish than in English, they nonetheless approximated English and Spanish to the same degree. Perhaps while learning a language, some inner algorithm determines how much one needs to articulate in order to be understood regardless of the different kinds of sounds between languages. Otherwise, children should have been more easily understood in Spanish."

In addition, Freedman found that no production differences emerged between the bilingual children and their monolingual counterparts in English or Spanish, indicating a sufficient amount of independence between a bilingual child's two sound systems.

"Bilingual children manage not only to learn two sets of words at one time and keep these two systems separate, they even keep the two sound systems separate," Freedman said.

"This result makes a case against not exposing children to more than one language at birth because they might be confused or overwhelmed."

The results of Freedman's study were published in the December 2012 issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism.

Dyslexia: Cause may be different than previously known

Iris Berent

New research has argued that dyslexia may result from impairment of a different linguistic system than previously thought.

Speech perception engages at least two linguistic systems: the phonetic system, which extracts discrete sound units from acoustic input, and the phonological system, which combines these units to form individual words.

Previously, researchers generally believed that dyslexia was caused by phonological impairment, but results from the current study, led by Iris Berent of Northeastern University in Boston, suggest that the phonetic system may actually be the cause.

“Our findings confirm that dyslexia indeed compromises the language system, but the locus of the deficit is in the phonetic, not the phonological system, as had been previously assumed,” says Berent.

In the study, Hebrew-speaking college students had difficulty discriminating between similar speech sounds, but had no problem tracking abstract phonological patterns, even for novel words, suggesting that the phonological system is intact but the phonetic system is compromised.

“Our research demonstrates that a closer analysis of the language system can radically alter our understanding of the disorder, and ultimately, its treatment,” concluded Berent.

Read the full article here

The study has been published in the open access journal PLOS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044875

Notes from a busy Mum

I've been looking at Inspiration software from S.A for mind mapping, strategies for studying and organizing time in "Study Skills" - See also Dyslexia Software

The Complete Guide to Smart Learning, the need to take charge of supporting your child through getting the basics (learning to read and write) and the need to constantly remind teachers that your child is dyslexic, especially when exams and internal assessments loom.

We also discussed Dragon software which my son is using and loving - allowing him to dictate stories and then print them out!!! He loves it that his stories are now displayed like everyone elses.

We discussed the sometimes defensive attitude taken by schools and hoped we could in some way overcome that, although we weren't sure how to. We discussed the fact that any communications to school should be cc'd to all relevant players.

Mental Health and Debt Management Leaflet

Philosophy for Children: Get Young Minds Racing!

Philosophy can be used to improve teaching and learning, for the lasting benefit of individuals and communities

Philosophy for Children / Communities aims to encourage children (or adults) to think critically, caringly, creatively and collaboratively.

Click on the picture to go to the website

It helps teachers to build a 'community of enquiry' where participants create and enquire into their own questions, and 'learn how to learn' in the process.

Matthew Lipman, creator of the philosophy for children movement, has died. Read this interesting article about him in the New York Times

Intro to Mind mapping to help study

Mind maps help you produce a more visual representation of linked ideas, allowing you to dig deeper without losing sight of your original purpose.

You can take the research journey full circle by using your sub-links to find more information, then by re-associating your new findings through the key concept you started with.

If you’ve not seen them before, or want a recap of the basics, check the video at the bottom of this post for an example of a mind map in development.

For remembering key facts and forming a basic, overall awareness of something, they’re great. You can easily add more to them and shape them in a way that benefits you.

There are a huge number of services for creating mind maps on computer and online. Chuck Frey has put together a huge resource list of all the mindmapping tools currently available. There are so many tools out there, you’re spoilt for choice.

But be warned. Mind maps aren’t a perfect study tool: “A disadvantage of mind mapping is that the types of links being made are limited to simple associations. Absence of clear links between ideas is a constraint.” (Davies)

Mind mapping to help study | TheUniversityBlog

Prosopagnosia: A Podcast with Oliver Sacks

A NEUROLOGIST’S NOTEBOOK is about prosopagnosia, or the inability to recognise faces and places. The writer describes his own difficulties recognising and remembering faces. He also has the same difficulty with places and often becomes lost when he strays from familiar routes.

At the age of seventy-seven, despite a lifetime of trying to compensate, he has no less trouble with faces and places than when he was younger. He is particularly thrown when seeing a person out of context, even if he was with that person five minutes before.

The writer gives several examples of his inability to recognize familiar people out of context, including his therapist and his assistant. After learning that his brother suffered from the same problem, the writer came to believe that they both had a specific trait, a so-called prosopagnosia, probably with a distinctive genetic basis.

He mentions several other people who have the same trait, including Jane Goodall and the artist Chuck Close. Face recognition is crucially important for humans, and the vast majority of us are able to identify thousands of faces individually, or to easily pick out familiar faces in a crowd.

People with prosopagnosia need to be resourceful and /or inventive in finding strategies for circumventing their deficits: recognising people by an unusual nose or beard, or by their spectacles, or a certain type of clothing.

The Notebook describes research done on the way the brain recognises facesand tells about the work of Christopher Pallis, Charles Gross, Olivier Pascalis, Isabel Gauthier, and other scientists. Above all, the recognition of faces depends not only on the ability to parse the visual aspects of the face—its particular features and their over-all configuration—and compare them with others, but also on the ability to summon the memories, experiences, and feelings associated with that face.

The recognition of specific places or faces goes with a particular feeling, a sense of association and meaning. He also briefly discusses déjà vu and Capgras syndrome and considers the difference between acquired prosopagnosia—through trauma, stroke or Alzheimer’s —and congenital prosopagnosia.

The writer discusses the work of Ken Nakayama and Brad Duchaine, who have explored the neural basis of face and place recognition. They have also studied the psychological effects and social consequences of developmental prosopagnosia. Severe congenital prosopagnosia is estimated to affect two to two and a half per cent of the population—six to eight million people in the United States alone.

A Podcast with Oliver Sacks : The New Yorker

Studying Young Minds, to Learn How to Teach Them

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

But recent research has turned that assumption on its head. A number of other so called, conventional wisdom, has also been overturned; geometry, reading, language and self-control in class.

The findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts.

In one recent study, for instance, researchers found that most preschoolers could perform rudimentary arithmetic, by using a practical example; distributing candies among two or three play animals.

In another study, scientists found that the brain’s ability to link letter combinations with sounds may not be fully developed until age 11. This is much later than many have previously assumed.

The teaching of basic academic skills has up until now been largely the realm of tradition and guesswork, but it is finally giving way to approaches based on cognitive science.

In several US cities, including Boston, Washington and Nashville, schools have been experimenting with new curriculums to improve math skills in preschoolers. In others, teachers have used techniques developed by brain function scientists, to help children overcome dyslexia.

In addition, schools in about a dozen US states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, in an effort to improve concentration and self-control in class.

“Teaching is an ancient craft, and yet we really have had no idea how it affected the developing brain,” said Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at Harvard. “Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education work together.”

This relationship is new and still awkward, experts say, and there is more hyperbole than evidence surrounding many “brain-based” commercial products on the market. Fortunately, there are others, like an early math program taught in Buffalo schools, that have a track record.

If these and similar efforts find traction in schools, experts say, they could transform teaching from the bottom up — giving the ancient craft a modern scientific compass.