Institutional Autism in Romania?
Dr. Helen Egger, a child psychiatrist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center, presented findings at a meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Atlanta. She notes that it is not parental neglect that causes autistic symptoms in young children but the “extreme situation” of a child left for hours without any human contact.
The article, Brain Studies Yield Autism, a Ped Med installment on Autism,
We are not looking at autism per se but at the effects of severe neglect and deprivation,” Egger said in an interview. “Are there mechanisms that are similar in these children that will help us understand what happens in autism?”
Or are they poles apart?
(In autism) flapping and spinning may result because children are so bombarded with stimuli, it’s a way to block some of it out,” Egger speculated. “But kids in a neglected environment may be rocking to provide themselves with desperately needed stimulation. The symptoms may look similar but have different mechanisms.
The article continues to state that to get the answer the researchers are taking biomedical tests to determine abnormalities in their brains’ electrical activity and will also conduct blood tests to gauge the children’s response to stress.
In an important advance that speaks to how neuron, or nerve-cell, connections are formed, two independent teams working with rats have identified a master protein that appears to regulate the lifelong promoting and pruning of the cellular links in response to outside stimulation.
Understanding the protein, and the molecular pathway it guides, could provide insight into learning and memory, and how they are altered in autism and other psychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases in which the neuron connections called synapses either fail to form or run rampant, the study authors said in the journal Science.
I am especially interested in the findings of this study, as I have a personal connection. Will they observe Institutional Autism in its root form?
March 29th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
[...] or orphanages but we all know how kids turn out in countries with little or no funding. See Romania or Russia? Tags: Adoption, foster_care, guatemalan, human_rights, orphanages, romania, Russia, [...]