Research Suggests Children Can Recover From Autism

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090508/ap_ ... m_recovery

Ya know, I kind of wish they would replace the word "recovered" with the word "adapted". I think many autistic people are just clever enough to "adapt" to the world they may not have understood as children.

I wish i was a child so badly, their is so much out there for children with autism, so much more chances for a child to lose their diagnosis, but for an adult everything is ten times harder, and not much out there at all. sorry mini rant... i also like how schleppenheimer says it adapting is a perfect way to put it. I still believe all those children have autism in them, but its not hindering them anymore, and is not seen as a disability.

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Being Normal Is Vastly Overrated

Age1600 you always cheer me! I think about your courage and your awesome attitude and my heart just goes out to you! I, too, wish I were a fortunate child in this enlightened age.

Merle

My son has AS. When he was small he was quite obviously Autistic but over the years we have worked hard to teach him how to interact and cope socially. He now has a Dx of AS and he goes to a mainstream school and most people have no idea he is autistic. He just seems a little bit different. I had really started to kid myself that he was losing his autism but then we had a bit of a trauma and the autism came flooding back. It made me realise that while he has learned adaptive behaviours they are just covering his autism, not replaceing it.

I wonder if maybe some of us were born with Autism and adapted quickly enough that nobody noticed. The other disorders it mentioned the "formerly autistic" people having sure do remind me of typical AS traits. "attention-deficit problems, tics and phobias"

On an unrelated little side note... who decided that a comma isn't needed after the 2nd to last thing listed? That's always bothered me since I was little. Without having that last comma, it makes it seem like the last 2 listed things (tics and phobias in this example) are somehow in a group together whereas the others are not. That and... if I read it out loud... I definately pause right there and... isn't that the criteria for a comma?

I was under the impression that nearly all children born on the spectrum gradually moved up the spectrum as they got older. TEACCH has the base diagnosis of "autism" as a child is 3 years old, then later will re-diagnose at Asperger's or PDD-NOS depending upon functioning level.

I would very much doubt if the majority of autistic children stayed at the same functioning level or even decreased in functioning.

I'm of the low-functioning turn high-functioning make (same disorder, however). I'm still definitely autistic, and I was seen as fine in elementary school too; the problems came in high school and onwards, like someone with Asperger's. However, I don't think they mean this; I think they mean the phenomenon that's called "Residual Autism".

They don't know why; it could be due to an immune response (i.e., certain types of autism are like other neurological disorders and come in "attacks", and some people only have one such attack in infancy; this ties in with the fact that some people can "regress" in early adulthood after the improvement), the genes that control verbal ability and obsessive thought patterns turn on in these people (there's documented proof of this), or something else entirely.

Possibly the 'residual autism' phenomenon has to do with developmental delay.

Babies go through these stages of social development in play -- solitary play, parallel play, group play.

If you're delayed and doing only solitary play at six, well, maybe with the right support (the kind of feedback that you'd normally get as a baby to move on to the next stage, but which you might not get at six because by that time all the other kids are into group play and treat you like a pariah) you'll continue to advance, just in your own 'wrong' time-scale.

So it's really noticable when you're a little kid who's still playing like a baby but with better motor-skills, just manipulating objects and treating people like objects, but when you master the group-play thing, maybe five or ten years behind the NT kids, you start to seem a lot closer to normal.

Probably applies not just to play but to all the other social whatfoos. I think from my own experiences that we might be really likely to make rocket-fast advances after long delays, too.

is it me but most "cures" seem to be brain washing and if it is genectic and then it will just supress it. to my understanding the drugs work is a simular way.

I wonder what you think 'brainwashing' actually means.