Dr. Anjum Usman, of Naperville, has been a star in the world of alternative treatments for autism for years, but now she's facing professional discipline for her approach to the frustrating disorder.
According to the complaint, which was filed Wednesday, Usman "made statements to (the boy's) mother that the prescribed treatments had positive clinical benefits for children with autism, despite the lack of empirical research."
Five years ago, Philadelphia was not on the map when it came to researching one of the most mysterious and expensive childhood medical conditions of our time. Now it is among the top cities in the nation, with expertise in nearly all the key fields - genetics, environmental exposure, brain imaging, behavioral interventions - that are critical for finding causes and developing treatments. Most of the local talent is at the Center for Autism Research at Children's Hospital, which in less than four years has grown into a powerhouse with more than 100 researchers and staff running two dozen studies.
A new strain of mice engineered to lack a gene with links to autism displays many of the hallmarks of the condition. It also responds to a drug in the same way as people with autism, which might open the way to new therapies for such people.
A primary characteristic of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is impairments in social-communication skills. Children and adolescents with social-communication problems face difficulty understanding, interacting and relating with others. University of Missouri researchers found that children who receive more intensive therapy to combat these impairments, especially at early ages, achieve the best outcomes.
The first transgenic mouse model of a rare and severe type of autism called Timothy Syndrome is improving the scientific understanding of autism spectrum disorder in general and may help researchers design more targeted interventions and treatments.
Researchers have for the first time identified two biologically different strains of autism in a major breakthrough being compared with the discovery of different forms of cancer in the 1960s. The findings, to be announced at an international autism conference in Perth today, are seen as a key step towards understanding the causes of autism and developing effective treatments as well as a cure. The findings bring hope that the communication, socialization and other difficulties that autistic children experience can be tackled more easily and earlier.
Researchers at the Center for Translational Social Neuroscience (CTSN) at Emory University are focusing on prairie voles as a new model to screen the effectiveness of drugs to treat autism. They are starting with D-cycloserine, a drug Emory researchers have shown enhances behavioral therapy for phobias and also promotes pair bonding among prairie voles. Giving female voles D-cycloserine, which is thought to facilitate learning and memory, can encourage them to bond with a new male more quickly than usual.
It seems that the place where your brain transfers electricity between synapses and how your genes determine how these processes function, are tied to autism in one way or another. There can be genetically driven disturbances in this process that lead to varying levels of autism according to a new study of DNA from approximately 1,000 autistic children and their kin.
A new study found that treatment-resistant epilepsy (TRE) is common in idiopathic autism. Early age at the onset of seizures and delayed global development were associated with a higher frequency of resistance to antiepileptic drugs (AEDs). Full findings appear online in Epilepsia, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE).
A new set of analyses offers sobering news in the long search for effective treatments for autism. Researchers concluded that medications are of little help to most autistic children. Although intensive behavioral therapies can be effective, they don't work for everyone, and doctors don't have a way to predict which children will benefit, according to three reviews in today's Pediatrics.
