A Webster family has made a breakthrough in their struggle with autism with the help of dog.

“The dogs sense that this child needs something,” said Beverly Swartz. “It's magic.”

Bentley is giving the Bayer family some peace of mind. The 2-year-old Labra Doodle joined the family last week to be an extra set of eyes and ears for 17-year-old Lyndsy Bayer, who was diagnosed with autism when she was five.

“Lyndsy doesn't have a high functioning level, so she doesn't talk or verbalize her needs. She doesn't have any safety awareness,” said Irene Bayer, Lyndsy’s mom.

A barefoot girl in her nightgown is picked up wandering along a dark Dane County highway. Sheriff deputies have no idea how the little girl got there, who she is, what happened to her, or where to take her.

A young man walks out of a camp for adults with cognitive disabilities and into the woods. It takes thousands of searchers a week to find Keith Kennedy -- naked, weak, covered with scratches and ticks, but alive.

A 7-year-old with blue eyes slips out of the basement of his house in Saratoga. On the fifth day of a massive search, rescue dogs find Benjamin Heil in a nearby pond, drowned.

These recent Wisconsin cases all involved individuals with autism, a devastating brain disorder that impairs judgment and communication. Over the past decade, the number of children diagnosed with this disorder has multiplied tenfold, and the national Centers for Disease Control now considers autism to be a public health crisis. Autism frequently wreaks havoc not just on a child's entire family, but on law and safety enforcement in the streets. The problem is expected to get worse as this population grows up.

Today, the number of children diagnosed with autism has soared to one out of 192 in Wisconsin, and across the state, law enforcement and safety officials report more and more of these confusing situations on the beat. According to a 2001 bulletin from the FBI, individuals with autism have up to seven times more contact with law enforcement than others. And police officers don't always know what to do.

Some parents of children with autism evaluate facial expressions differently than the rest of us--and in a way that is strikingly similar to autistic patients themselves, according to new research by neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs of the California Institute of Technology and psychiatrist Joe Piven at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology, and his colleague Michael Spezio (now at Scripps College in Claremont, California) collaborated with Piven and autism experts at the University of North Carolina to study 42 parents of children with autism, a complex developmental disability that affects an individual's ability to interact socially and communicate with others. Based on psychological testing, 15 of the parents were classified as being socially aloof.

"This manifests as a tendency not to prefer interactions with others, not to enjoy 'small talk' for the sake of the social experience, and to have few close friendships involving sharing and mutual support. This characteristic is really a variation of the normal range of social behavior and not associated with any functional impairment," says Piven, director of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities.

The parents participated in an experiment that measured how they make use of the face to judge emotions. The subjects were shown images depicting facial expressions of emotion that were digitally filtered so that only certain regions of the face were discernible--the left eye, for example, or the mouth. The subjects were then asked to decide as quickly as possible if the emotion depicted was "happy" or "fear." The part of the face shown, and the size of the revealed area, randomly varied from trial to trial.

The children return from school confused, scared and sometimes with bruises on their wrists, arms or face. Many won’t talk about what happened, or simply can’t, because they are unable to communicate easily, if at all.

Brian Stauffer

 

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Doug Benz for The New York Times

Tim Miller was restrained by teachers at his middle school.

“What Tim eventually said,” said John Miller, a podiatrist in Allegany, N.Y., about his son, then 12, “was that he didn’t want to go to school because he thought the school was trying to kill him.”  read more »

ARTIST Peter Howson hopes to raise thousands to help autistic people by giving a valuable painting of John Lennon to charity.

Howson's daughter Lucie, 21, has the autistic spectrum disorder Asperger's syndrome and he was diagnosed with a milder form of the condition in 1993, when he was 34.

He has now donated the Lennon painting, one of a series he did of the former Beatle, to the charity ENABLE.

Another of the series was sold for s50,000 recently.

The portrait will be auctioned at the Big Apple Ball in Glasgow in September.

Howson, who has also painted controversial nude portraits of Madonna, also revealed he has plans to create a special painting about autism which he will also donate to the auction.

He added: "I help out ENABLE probably once every year but this time it's a bit more major.

Last Thursday, we ran two letters responding to the Times' coverage of insurance companies' policies autistic kids; both called on insurers to pony up. After the page went to print, we received these letters, which provide another point of view.

Business and insurers both argue that the buck, this time, shouldn't stop with them.

Wrote Gary Toebben, CEO of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce:

This article highlights the need for both a public and legislative consensus on comprehensive health care reform.

As the Times reported, the costs of helping children with autism and people with other chronic disabilities are overwhelming. There must be sufficient regulation to assure adequate coverage of legitimate medical needs while at the same time addressing developmental, educational, and employment needs through other mechanisms.

A research has revealed that genes are linked with autism problem in many cases. Autism is a spectrum of disease, which shares three key traits. These traits are patient’s slow speed to develop language, poor social skills, and their stereotyped behaviors over and over again. Autism causes some specific defects that affect a child's ability to learn and remember.

Autism was once a rare problem in US but every 150 children are suffered by it at present. It was disclosed in a report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study was conducted by Christopher Walsh, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and at Children's Hospital Boston. Scientists and physicians in the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Kuwait had also contributed in research work. The results of research wok were published on July 12, 2008 in the journal Science.

A life-changing experience and an opportunity to write a book about it now have Kristi Chrysler touring the country talking about her son's autism.
Chrysler, who is originally from Brighton Township and now lives in Howell, has five children: Chloe, 16, Heather, 14, Richie, 11, John, 9, and Kyle, 8, all of whom she home schools. Her book focuses on Richie, and it's called "Autism: Recovery Against All Odds."

"It's the chronicle of my son's journey through autism, from severe and being told to institutionalize him to a full recovery five years later," says Chrysler. "It was not a miracle but was five intensive years of prayers and diligent work by many, which brought him to recovery."

Chrysler says Richie was developing normally until what she calls outside triggers compromised his immune system and he developed autism. The family used a biomedical approach plus therapy to help him.

Richie was diagnosed with autism at the age of 5 and began seeing psychologists, a psychiatrist and pediatric neurologists. The family used treatment that included eliminating such food ingredients as gluten and the dairy protein casein along with numerous other foods that Richie was allergic to. He also took a variety of supplements.

Richie's physician is Dr. Sidney Baker. He is a co-founder of Defeat Autism Now, a project of the Autism Research Institute of San Diego to foster a dialogue among parents, practitioners and researchers concerning the treatment of children diagnosed with autism. Baker, whose practice is based in New York, also co-authored "Autism: Effective Biomedical Treatments."

Here is a new press release from June 4, 2008, if you would like more information, please email me at; brentsweigard@hotmail.com and I can forward the information to you when it becomes available.

http://www.marketamerica.com/mabrent/index.cfm?action=news.wpNewsDetail&contentID=3128

Gov. Ed Rendell has signed a bill that advocates for people with autism say will make the state a national leader in helping children with autism.

Rendell signed the bill Wednesday at The Vista School in Hershey, which serves children with autism. After much wrangling during the past week, a bill finally passed both the state House and Senate.

It requires health insurers to pay up to $36,000 per year toward medically necessary treatments of autism.

QUACK RESEARCH? The government wants to test chelation, a treatment for lead poisoning, on children with autism — even though there's no evidence it leads to improvements.

WHY? Proof that chelation doesn't work might dissuade many parents from trying it, the government theorizes. Other scientists decry it as quack medicine.

CHELATION DANGERS? Chelation treatment can involve pills, suppositories or IV treatment. Side effects can include rashes, low white blood cells and vomiting. Also, three deaths have been linked to medication errors involving the IV treatment.

The owner of a local restaurant accused of discriminating against an autitisic child says the incident was a misunderstanding, but his company is eager to make amends anyway.

Sarah Seymour said she and her family were at a west-end Smitty's Family Restaurant when her five-year-old daughter, who is autistic, became disruptive.

Seymour said the restaurant manager told her that she shouldn't bring her daughter out with them if she was known to behave erratically.

She calls him Casanova. His real name is R.J., short for Robert John, and once each week his mom, Wendy Schmoll, takes him horseback riding and then to the Wal-Mart in Rhinelander where he is known to give strangers hugs.

The weekly outing has become a tradition and it is part of R.J.'s therapy.

R.J. was diagnosed with Williams syndrome, mild retardation, attention deficit disorder and autism when he was just seven months old.

Autism is a developmental disability that can make simple things like sound or touch painful and communicating the pain a confusing challenge.

But autism itself is not simple.

Treating autism at a very young age can improve language skills and IQ scores. But the condition can be tough to detect in the very young, and often isn’t diagnosed until age 4 or so.

Researchers are trying to change that by studying children as young as a few months old, paying special attention to the eyes, the WSJ reports.

The video at left shows software that tracks how a baby looks at a human face. Most babies will look at a person’s eyes; if the person is speaking the baby will look at the mouth and other parts of the face. But researchers suspect autistic infants and toddlers tend to have different scanning patterns.

It’s still early days for the research, which is going on at labs at Yale and Canada’s McMaster University, among others.

1943: Based on a study of 11 socially withdrawn children, child psychiatrist Leo Kanner identifies autism as "lack of affective contact, fascination with objects, desire for sameness and non-communicative language before 30 months of age."

1944: German scientist Hans Asperger describes a "milder" form of autism, known today as Asperger's syndrome. Over time, experts will place Asperger's and other autism-related conditions on a spectrum ranging from mild to severe dysfunction.

1965: U.S. psychologist Bernard Rimland establishes the Autism Society of America, one of the first advocacy groups for parents of children with autism.