INDEPTH: AUTISM
Autism: Overview
Lani Krantz, CBC News Online | October 10, 2003
Doctors Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger described autism in the early 1940s as a set of symptoms they found among the children they were studying. Oddly, they were completely unaware of each other's work since they were on different continents and working in different languages. Kanner was a child psychologist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore; Asperger, whose work was published a year after Kanner's, was a pediatrician in Vienna. But they both used the word autism – from the Greek word for self – to describe the children they treated who seemed enclosed in their own solitary worlds.
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Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and the world's richest man, is thought by many to be the most famous face of Asperger. He has often been seen rocking and tends to speak in monotones–both habits are acknowledged symptoms of Asperger.
Microsoft was one of the first major U.S. corporations to offer to pay for behaviour therapy for its employees' autistic children.
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Since Asperger, unlike Kanner, included people who had average to high IQs in his definition, the scientific community has reserved "Asperger syndrome" to describe prodigies and high functioning people with autistic disorder. Seventy per cent of people with other forms of autistic disorders suffer from mild to severe mental retardation.
For years, autistic people with sparkling artistic, mathematical or technical ability were referred to as "idiot savants," though the prefix has now been dropped. Ten per cent of people with autism are clearly gifted and it has been argued that there is a relationship between autism and genius.
In 2001, a Wired magazine article coined the term "Geek Syndrome" after researchers in California (particularly Silicon Valley) noticed a three-fold surge over 10 years in the number of reported cases of autism.
Researchers have found children with autistic disorders are more common among the offspring of parents in particular careers. In the mid-1990s, clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen compared the professional backgrounds of parents and grandparents of almost 1,000 children with autism to groups of parents of children with Tourette's syndrome, Down syndrome and other language delays, and to a control group of parents chosen randomly. His findings showed that the fathers and grandfathers of autistic children were twice as likely to be engineers as the parents of children who were not autistic.
One hypothesis geneticists offer for the increase is the rise in "assortative mating," which is the tendency for people to mate with others who share their own physical traits or idiosyncrasies. The logic is that the minds of people with Asperger's or autism work alike. And since researchers can't dispute the likelihood that genetics play a role in the development of autism, they think that assortative mating might help illuminate the mystery of "Geek Syndrome" and the puzzle of autistic disorders.
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Some Autism Spectrum Disorders
Autistic disorder: This is also known as classic autism. It affects ability to communicate with and relate to other people. Some people with autistic disorder can speak and interact while some who are more severely affected are completely non-verbal.
Asperger syndrome: People with Asperger syndrome do not have a delay in speech development, but may have a range of deficits in social development. They often also have obsessive, repetitive behaviours and preoccupations such as rocking or hand waving.
Childhood Disintegrative Disorder (CDD): CDD is also known as regressive autism. Children with CDD usually develop normally for two to four years before they begin to lose language, social skills and interest in their environment.
Source: National Alliance for Autism Research
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