Study: 1 In 4 With Cerebral Palsy In Pain

Many children and teens with cerebral palsy are struggling with chronic pain, researchers say, but it often goes unrecognized and untreated.

UNC study shows promise for children with autism

CHAPEL HILL — Preschoolers with autism benefit from high-quality classrooms, a new study shows, whether or not teachers employ popular treatment models used for decades.
The study followed 198 children for one school year and measured changes in communication skills and autism symptoms, said researcher Bryan Boyd, a fellow at UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.
The study looked at two established models – Learning Experiences and Alternative Program for Preschoolers and their Parents, and TEACCH, which was originally Treatment and Education of Autistic and related Communication Handicapped Children but is now known only by its acronym, – as well as high-quality control classrooms.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/07/18/3039075/unc-study-shows-promise-for-children.html#storylink=cpy

Higher Autism Diagnosis in High-Tech Areas, Study Says

Autism experts have long noted that they meet a lot of engineers and computer programmers who have autistic children compared to, say, salespeople. A new study suggests there may be merit to those observations.

Researchers from Cambridge University in England found that nearly three times as many children were diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder in a region of the Netherlands known as a center of high-tech industry than in two other regions with fewer high-tech jobs.

The possible explanation: Autism is highly heritable -- meaning, it runs in families -- and has a strong genetic component related to a trait called "systemizing," which is a skill for analyzing how systems work and creating them. Workers in high-tech industries -- engineering and computing, for example -- tend to excel at systemizing.

Study of Autistic Toddlers May Lead to Early Detection

Researchers studying autistic toddlers have discovered their brain activity appears to be out of sync at a very early stage -- a finding that sheds light on the biology of the condition and might help in earlier diagnosis.

In research published in the journal Neuron, scientists in Israel used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of sleeping toddlers and found that certain types of neural activity are disrupted in autistic children, but not in typical children or in others with delayed language development.

"What we looked at is how the activity is synchronized," Ilan Dinstein of Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

"And we found that the synchronization was different -- specifically in toddlers with autism and across the hemispheres (of the brain) in areas related to language and communication."

Children with Seizure-Related Developmental Disabilities Respond to Behavioral Treatment, Study Finds

Brookville, N.Y. – Infants who experience seizures may go on to have difficulty understanding the meaning of sounds – but the condition can be eased through persistent positive reinforcement by parents and caregivers, a professor of psychology at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University reports.

“The problem is not that the subjects can’t hear; it is that they have trouble learning what the sounds mean,” said John C. Neill, Ph.D. “The good news is that we also found that it was possible to teach subjects to learn how to respond correctly to sounds with the right behavioral procedures.”