Autism continued....
While intelligence is within normal limits with the Asperger???s patient, social interactions and abilities preset difficulty for such a patient. As with Autism, medications and behavioral therapy are treatment regimens with one with this syndrome
Rett???s Syndrome or disorder presents with not only atypical behavior, but also suffers from restricted physical growth and movement. There is cognitive and social impairment as well. The disorder affects mostly girls, and the cause is due to a gene mutation.
Childhood Disintegrative disorder is rare, and is 10 times less common than autism. The disorder has a late onset with mild autistic symptoms. The disorder affects mostly boys, and regression is sudden and possible with this disorder. Skills lost with this disorder may be language, social, self-care, as well as play or motor skills. Decreased function or impairment with this disorder may include social skills and behavioral flaws. Central Nervous System pathology is a suspected cause of this disorder.
Finally, there are passive development disorders that are not otherwise specified. This may include atypical autism, for example. Yet as with the rest of types of these disorders, the symptoms vary in their frequency and intensity, as well as the range of abilities of these developmental disorders vary widely as well.
Medicinal treatment along with cognitive and behavioral therapy prove to be most beneficial for all the different types of Passive Development Disorders that unfortunately exist for unknown reasons, yet further research should be done to discover both the etiologies as well as more effective treatment for the Autism Spectrum.
www.autism-society.org
Dan Abshear
Kids With Autism Love This Software
A program created for architects is an unexpected hit with children on the spectrum.
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Science is rich with happy flukes. Remember the story of penicillin? Alexander Fleming discovered the bacteria-destroying mold by accident when he left a culture dish uncovered in his lab in 1928. Eight decades later, here's another one: a Googlesoftware program called SketchUp, which was intended largely for architects and design professionals, has found a very unexpected and welcome fan base—children with autism. SketchUp is not only entertaining kids with autism spectrum disorders, it's providing them with skills that might one day help them as they age out of school and into the workforce.
It all started when Google's Tom Wyman and Chris Cronin started getting enthusiastic calls and e-mails from architects who had children on the spectrum. Their kids, the parents reported, had discovered the software program and loved it. All they needed was their creativity and a computer mouse and they could design entire neighborhoods. It turns out that SketchUp, which was acquired by Google from a small Colorado-based startup in 2006, allows people with autism to express their ideas in a visual way—a welcome release for kids who have trouble communicating through speech or writing. "After the second or third call, you begin to think there may be something here," says Wyman. So he contacted his local chapter of the Autism Society of America (ASA) in Boulder. "What gives?" he asked.
What gives is that many people with autism excel at visual thinking. Studies show they perform exceptionally well on the Block Design Task, part of a standard IQ test, which assesses an individual's ability to recreate a complicated red and white pattern using a set of red and white blocks. "They're able to mentally segment the design into its component parts so they can see where each block would go," says Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, something non-autistic kids have trouble doing. Geraldine Dawson, chief scientific officer for Autism Speaks, a leading autism advocacy group, found that the parents of children with autism have superior spatial abilities on the Block test, too—a gift they may be passing on to their kids. Environment likely plays a role as well, says Dawson. Because children with autism have trouble communicating with people, they tend to spend their time interacting with objects. The end result: the visual portion of their brain becomes highly developed.
Anja Kintsch, head of the assistive technology team for the Boulder Valley School District, has seen this spatial talent up close. Kintsch, who is trained in special education, has seen students with autism walk the streets of Denver, then go back to their desks and create perfect architectural renditions of the city. "I thought they were professional blueprints," she says. Kids with autism tend to love computers, too, because they're predictable and don't demand the social skills required of humans: you don't have to look them in the eye, talk to them, or read their emotions.
All of this makes SketchUp a captivating program for people with autism. Amateur designers can draw straight or curved lines, then use a "Push/Pull" tool to pull flat shapes into 3-D objects. A rectangle can be pulled to become the living room in a house; a hole can be pushed out of a wall to make a window. An "Orbit" tool lets you look at a desk from back, front, top and bottom. Users can find models that already exist—furniture, playgrounds, amusement parks—in the program's 3-D warehouse to incorporate into their own designs. Or they can store their 3-D houses or stadiums or cities in the warehouse for others to see. Google's Wyman says he has seen kids with autism adapt to the program with little difficulty: "They picked it up at least as quickly as architects do." The response was so positive that Google launched Project Spectrum,a partnership between SketchUp and educational outlets, including the Boulder Valley School District and the Boulder chapter of the ASA, to get the software into the hands of kids and teens with autism for free.
Meg and Casey Grothus are two of the lucky ones. The week before they were introduced to SketchUp by the ASA, the teens tried to hand-sketch the bathroom in their house for a geometry class assignment. A rectangular room with a door, the layout was "pretty basic," says their mother, Heidi Grothus. But it turned out to be a frustrating, time-consuming and tearful experience. Meg, 17, who has Asperger Syndrome, says she thinks in pictures and can visualize a design in her head, but she can't translate that image onto paper. "I just wouldn't know how to get it out," she says. But when she and her brother tried the same exercise on SketchUp, "it just clicked," says Meg. Casey, 18, has high-functioning autism. He calls his original drawing "a piece of junk, very crude, very inaccurate." With SketchUp, Casey was able to draw the bathroom—and decorate it with toilet, sink, plants and wallpaper.
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