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TREATMENT
At UC Davis MIND Institute, Learning Can Be Child's Play For Autistic
PEOPLE
Autistic Boy Bonds With Wildlife Safari Elephants
The Promise of Music and a Phemoninal Young Man Video.
PUBLIC HEALTH
Author Robyn O’Brien Talks Of Dangers Lying On Our Plates
RESEARCH
Psychologists Use Non-Expert Student Observers In Autism Research
Everybody Laughs, Everybody Cries: Researchers Identify Universal
Emotions
EVENTS
Dear John Premiere Raises More Than $100,000 for Autism
The Annual Seaver Autism Center Conference: New Insights in the
Etiology, Diagnosis, Neurobiology, Genetics and Treatment of Autism
COMMENTARY
Autism Clusters In California Real, Not Genetic
The Scandalous History of MMR in the UK
LETTERS
Thank you for "Chasing the Hope" - Autism Awareness Won
TREATMENT
At UC Davis MIND Institute, Learning Can Be Child's Play For Autistic
By April Dembosky, The Sacramento
Bee. is.gd/73811
Lezlie Sterling
Most parents never think they'll have to
learn how to play with their own children.
But if a toddler is diagnosed with
autism, moms and dads can spend years with the child and a therapist,
drawing with crayons and playing hide and seek. Research is proving
that as parents color and stack building blocks with their kids, they
are subtly teaching them to overcome cognitive, language and social
delays.
"When we first came in, he wasn't
talking, he didn't respond to his name, he wasn't making eye contact,"
said Cindy Jensen of her son Cooper, who's now almost 3.
After more than a year of specialized
play therapy through the UC Davis MIND Institute in Sacramento, Cooper
is speaking in seven-word sentences, learning to take turns and
initiating pretend play. "It's a lot of training, but it's worth it,"
Jensen said.
Treatments for autism are geared to
children between 3 and 5 years old. Researchers said there is growing
urgency - even a sense of obligation - to develop effective
intervention for much younger children.
New diagnostic tools can identify autism
in kids as young as 12 months, and prevalence of the disorder is
reaching record numbers. The federal Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention reports one in every 110 children has an autism spectrum
disorder.
Researchers at the MIND Institute are
conducting a study adapting a specialized program, the Early Start
Denver Model, for children to begin as young as 1 year old. The model
focuses on building relationships with children and teaching skills
through play: 20 hours every week with a therapist, and at least five
hours a week with parents.
"What the child learns is that it's more
fun to do things with others, rather than alone," said Sally Rogers,
professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the MIND Institute.
"Kids with autism enjoy playing with others, they enjoy being tickled.
They just don't know how to initiate."
Rogers co-authored a previous study,
recently published in the journal Pediatrics, which found that autistic
children who received this therapy showed significant improvement in
IQ, language, motor skills and adaptive behavior compared to a control
group of autistic children who did not receive the same therapy.
Some kids improved so much that they no
longer met the diagnostic criteria for autism, classified instead as
having a less-severe developmental disorder.
"We're trying to identify these kiddos
early so they can learn in a typical way," Rogers said.
The coaching channels an autistic
child's learning pattern toward eye contact and verbal communication,
before autistic developmental characteristics become entrenched.
"This is unique in that parents learn
the model," said Vanessa Avila-Pons, a therapist and team leader for
the early intervention study at the MIND Institute. Avila-Pons
demonstrates play techniques and offers guidance while parents play
with their children.
During a recent session, Carrie King
played with her 2-year old son Elijah. King held a plastic toy gun for
a game of helicopter.
"Go!" Elijah said. King pushed a button,
sending a small plastic disc spinning through the air and onto the
table. Elijah was delighted. After a few more times, she handed him the
toy. He fiddled with it but couldn't get the same result. He looked up;
King reached out her hands, palms up.
"That's good she responded," Rogers
said, watching from the other side of a two-way mirror. "For these
little ones, eye contact is hard. A lot of parents wait for a word."
Kids don't know that eye contact and
gestures are communication tools, Rogers said. By giving Elijah the toy
without showing him how to work it, King forced him to ask for help. By
holding out her hands, she reinforced Elijah's request for help through
eye contact. King had introduced to him a new gesture that means "help"
or "give me."
"Push," King said, "push!" The disc
flew. King opened her eyes wide and let out a "Wow!"
Rogers nodded.
"She's using simple one-word phrases,
because that's where he's at," she said. "The use of the word 'wow,'
shows kids that words are not just for labels or requests. It's an
emotional word. 'Wow' is social. We want kids to know that words are
used in a lot of different ways."
Elijah and King will finish their
initial 12-week coaching this week, then move to the 25 hours of weekly
therapy over the next two years. King said she was relieved when she
enrolled Elijah in the study, soon after he was diagnosed at 18 months.
"It's so great to get a diagnosis,
because your life can start," she said.
+ Read more: is.gd/73811
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• • •
PEOPLE
Autistic Boy Bonds With
Wildlife Safari Elephants
is.gd/71N2N
Winston, Ore. — Wylie Malek has
liked elephants for as long as he can remember. His father, Kris Malek,
said as soon as his son was able to sit up and watch TV he was
fascinated with the giant creatures, whether real ones on the Discovery
channel or cartoons on Disney.
Wylie, 10, is autistic but has already
proven himself to be a |
Robin
Loznak/The News-Review
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hard
worker and willing to do the tough jobs —
just ask the elephants at Wildlife Safari.
When the Maleks discovered they lived
just miles away from three elephant residents of the safari park in
Winston, they became regulars, stopping in every couple of months since
Wylie was 2 years old.
Eventually, park officials noticed his
passion and enthusiasm for the gentle giants and worked up an
arrangement that has benefited the boy and his co-workers for the last
two years.
“We don't do job shadows on a regular
basis,” Dinah Wilson, elephant manager, said. “But he has been an
inspiration to us."
Wylie, a student at Green Elementary
School, works with trainers about once a month to do almost every
aspect of elephant care. He spreads sawdust, shovels waste and puts out
food. When it is time for an elephant bath, Wylie raises a brush high
above his head, spreading soap and bubbles across their thick, gray
skin.
“Wylie likes to outwork me, I think,”
elephant keeper Timmy Hamilton said. “We were sweeping hay in the barn
and we had a race and he won."
The boy constantly has a positive
attitude, Hamilton said, and she hasn't found a chore her young helper
won't complete.
“He wants to be out here every day,”
Kris Malek said. “He is pretty proud that he has a job. He feels pretty
important to have that responsibility (and) takes it real serious that
he gets to come out here."
He wants to be an elephant keeper
“forever,” Wylie said. The boy might not know exactly what that means,
his father said, but he knows he wants to be working with elephants for
life.
The young man's communication skills
have improved through the interactions, his father said, both with the
adults at Wildlife Safari and with kids in his classes at Green
Elementary. Sometimes it is hard to get the otherwise reserved boy to
stop talking about the elephants, his father said. When he recites for
the fifth time how much an elephant can eat, his family has to change
the subject, Kris Malek joked.
“I think in the last year especially he
has gotten much more gregarious, more chatty,” Wilson said. “He is
getting more comfortable with my staff and he works well to help. He
likes being here and we like him."
The elephants like him, too, Wilson
said, as they have a noticeably calm demeanor when he is around.
He is a natural elephant man, she said.
“Some people say I am the lucky one,”
Wylie said. “I feel lucky. I like it out here."
• • •
The Promise of Music and a Phemoninal Young Man Video.
Here:
• • •
PUBLIC HEALTH
Author Robyn O’Brien Talks Of Dangers Lying On Our Plates
By Katie Simon, smudailycampus.com is.gd/73hF4
It’s no big news that the food we eat
does not fall off a tree and ship straight to our local grocery stores
untouched by processing chemicals and dyes. What may be less known is
the detrimental impact that many food and drinks we consume have on our
health.
Author Robyn O’Brien spoke Thursday
night at DeGolyer Library about her book, “The Unhealthy Truth: How
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Our
Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It” and her passion in
taking
action against what food corporations are putting in our food.
But O’Brien explained that she never
grew up as a “foodie.” “I am a very unlikely crusader for
cleaning up food supply,” she said. “I was born and raised in Houston,
Texas on Twinkies and Po’ Boys."
However, when one of her four children
developed a food allergy, that all changed. Curious, she decided to
research food allergies: what she came across was not only astonishing
to her, it compelled her to take big steps to alert people in the
nation about what they were putting in their bodies.
The information she found led her to
write a letter to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
sAs a result, she landed a spot on his
radio show, gained media coverage across the country, and successfully
published her book. According to her research, the Centers for
Disease Control reports that between 1997 and 2002, there was a 265
percent increase in hospitalizations related to food allergies.
This begged her to ask the question, “Is there something foreign in our
food that wasn’t there when we were kids?"
O’Brien found her answer when she
learned that in 1994, corporations introduced a new synthetic protein,
RBGH, that they were inserting into dairy cows in order to increase
their lactating profitability.
Even more suspicious to her—many top
world governments never allowed the introduction of RBGH into their
cows because of its toxicity potential.
“There were nights…where I thought, ‘How
many sippy cups of this stuff have I filled? And how many bowls of
cereal have I poured this on, not knowing that this was not allowed in
children’s food around the world?’” O’Brien said. As a result of
the introduction of this protein, milk is now the most common food
allergy in the U.S.
So how does O’Brien suggest ridding
these chemicals out of one’s diet? Aside from avoiding corn syrup and
sticking to organics, she suggests considering three simple questions.
“Ask yourself, ‘Would grandmother have
had this on her kitchen counter? Can my eight-year-old read the
ingredients on the side of the box?” And finally, “is it pronounceable?"
O’Brien has an MBA in finance from Rice
University. She is the founder of the AllergyKids Foundation, an
organization that funds research to advance and practice techniques to
heal children with autism, ADHD, asthma or allergies.
+ Read more: is.gd/73hF4
The
Autism Community
Supports the
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• • •
RESEARCH
Psychologists Use Non-Expert
Student Observers In Autism Research
medicalnewstoday.com is.gd/73ddn
Non-expert is not often a term
that one would associate with scientific research, but it could become
a new trend in psychology research. Some recent studies have begun to
rely on non-expert students to observe and provide data during
experiments.
In a research project about early autism
detection in infants, Dr. Daniel Messinger, an associate professor of
psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of
Miami (UM), and his research group are doing exactly that.
"The idea is that human beings are
essentially experts on certain aspects of interpersonal interaction.
This seems to be particularly true for emotion, as understanding the
emotions of others is critical to our own development," says Dr. Jason
Baker, a UM postdoctoral researcher with Messinger and first author of
the study.
The study entitled "Non-Expert Ratings
of Infant and Parent Emotion: Concordance with Expert Coding and
Relevance to Early Autism Risk," is published in the January issue of
the International Journal of Behavioral Development.
The study used 188 non-expert students
to observe the interactions of 38 parents and their six-month old
infants, 20 of whom had older siblings with autism spectrum diagnoses
and were considered high risk, and 18 of whom did not have a sibling
with autism and were used as a control group.
The parents were asked to play with
their child for three minutes and then to keep a still emotionless face
for two minutes. The idea was to measure the infant's interactions and
how their emotions changed in response to the + Read more: is.gd/73ddn
• • •
Everybody Laughs, Everybody Cries: Researchers Identify Universal
Emotions
is.gd/73l5M
ScienceDaily — Here's a piece of
research that might leave you tickled: laughter is a universal
language, according to new research. The study, conducted with people
from Britain and Namibia, suggests that basic emotions such as
amusement, anger, fear and sadness are shared by all humans.
Everybody shares the vast majority of
their genetic makeup with each other, meaning that most of our physical
characteristics are similar. We all share other attributes, too, such
as having complex systems of communication to convey our thoughts,
feelings and the intentions of those around us, and we are all able to
express a wide range of emotions through language, sounds, facial
expressions and posture. However, the way that we communicate is not
always the same -- for example, people from different cultures may not
understand the same words and phrases or body language.
In an attempt to find out if certain
emotions are universal, researchers led by Professor Sophie Scott from
UCL (University College London) have studied whether the sounds
associated with emotions such as happiness, anger, fear, sadness,
disgust and surprise are shared amongst different cultures. The results
of their study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, Economic and Social
Research Council, University of London Central Research Fund and UCL,
are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They provide further evidence that such emotions form a set of basic,
evolved functions that are shared by all humans.
Dr Disa Sauter, studied people from
Britain and from the Himba, a group of over 20,000 people living in
small settlements in northern Namibia as part of her PhD research at
UCL. In the very remote settlements, where the data for the present
study were collected, the individuals live completely traditional
lives, with no electricity, running water, formal education, or any
contact with people from other groups.
Participants in the study listened to a
short story based around a particular emotion, for example, how a
person is very sad because a relative of theirs had died recently. At
the end of the story they heard two sounds -- such as crying and of
laughter -- and were asked to identify which of the two sounds
reflected the emotion being expressed in the story. The British group
heard sounds from the Himba and vice versa.
+Read more: is.gd/73l5M
• • •
EVENTS
Dear John Premiere Raises More Than $100,000 for Autism
is.gd/7233w
Charleston, SC - Charleston may not be
known for hosting red carpet movie premieres but Sunday night it sure
looked and felt like Hollywood. More than 400 fans had tickets to the
sold-out world premiere at the Terrace Hippodrome Theater hundreds of
others showed up to scream and meet the star, Channing Tatum and Amanda
Seyfried, but there was much more to this show than just glitz and glam.
Every penny raised at Sunday night's big
Dear John premiere benefitted Carolina Autism. The event raised more
than $100,000 dollars. The organization works with more than 100
autistic adults and children including 7-year-old Braeden Reed of
Daniel Island who landed a role in the film.
”Two-hundred fifty on average is how
much it costs to serve a kid in our home program for a week," said Phil
Blevins, Executive Director of Carolina Autism.
"Everyone who bought a ticket basically
provided a child with autism a week's therapy," he added.
Blevins hopes Braeden's role in 'Dear
John' raises more awareness of the disorder. Statistics show it affects
one in 110. The actors said the experience touched them personally.
"He was the most natural person on set,
as actors we're thinking about what we're doing and he didn't think, he
was just being and as an actor that's what we strive for," Channing
Tatum told ABC News 4.
"It's powerful being next to someone
like him what's going on in his mind is just amazing," said Seyfried.
The film debuts nationwide on Feb. 5.
For more information on Carolina Autism click here: www.carolinaautism.org
• • •
The Annual Seaver Autism Center Conference: New Insights in the
Etiology, Diagnosis, Neurobiology, Genetics and Treatment of Autism
Sunday, April 11, 2021 8am-5pm
Stern Auditorium at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine 1468 Madison Ave,
New York, NY 10029
The course director is Joseph Buxbaum,
PhD. Distinguished speakers include Evdokia Anagnostou, MD; Bryan King,
MD and Sarah Spence, MD, PhD.
Keynote speakers are Dr. Eric London and
Alison Singer, MBA.
For more information, please contact: Natasha.ludwig@mssm.edu
• • •
COMMENTARY
Autism Clusters In California Real, Not Genetic
From Autism Speaks.
Two recent, separate publications
identified regions with higher than expected numbers of autism cases -
or clusters - in California. Using data collected by the California
Department of Developmental Services (DDS) on 2.5 million births
including almost 10,000 autism cases from 1996-2000, investigators at
UC Davis[1] uncovered several clusters of elevated risk for
autism. Autism Speaks reviewed these studies and found that the
majority of these clusters were found to be strongly associated with
higher parental education and, to a lesser extent, with parents of
older ages. It is thought that parents with higher levels of education
may have better access to the regional diagnostic and service centers
in California, as the DDS relies on parents actively seeking services.
Thus the distribution of cases is likely influenced by proximity to
specialty research and service centers.
However, demographic factors, alone, may
not explain the increased numbers of cases in these clusters. The
authors propose that other factors, including environmental exposures,
may play a role but warrant further investigation to understand their
contribution to autism etiology.
“Examination of clusters can help us
understand the factors that have led to in increase in autism
prevalence over time,” said Autism Speaks’ Chief Science Officer,
Geraldine Dawson, Ph.D.
Similar to the UC Davis study, a second
study using data collected by the California DDS, which was conducted
by investigators from Columbia University identified a significant
cluster of increased risk for autism as well as a set of lower risk
clusters in and around Northern Los Angeles. However, rather than
looking at incidence of cases by DDS Regional Center catchment area,
Mazumdar et. al. examined more than 11,500 autism cases among four
million births by place of birth. This approach was used to avoid
potential bias caused by parents moving to neighborhoods that improve
access to specialty autism services.
“Our paper is different,” Columbia
University co-author Peter Bearman, Ph.D. said. “It identifies a large
and stable primary cluster for autism based on residence at birth that
is observed over many years and which crosses over regional center
boundaries."
The primary cluster accounted for
approximately 3 percent of new autism cases in California each year
from 1993-2000. While the primary cluster was found to be in an area of
higher socioeconomic status than comparison regions, this factor did
not fully account for the increased cases of autism in this region.
“Our findings point strongly to the idea
that a local process is associated with the increased risk of autism.
Such a local process could be either an environmental factor or a
social influence factor, or both,” noted Bearman.
Both publications add to the growing
body of evidence suggesting that the distribution of autism cases
differs across different regions. While the exact causes of the
clustering in California are unknown, ongoing studies exploring
environmental exposures and social factors will be useful in providing
answers.
• • •
The Scandalous History of MMR in the UK
By John Stone ageofautism.com is.gd/73jxx
The updated ChildHealthSafety
documentary account tracing events back to a hidden deal between the UK
government and the manufacturers in 1988 involving a product already
banned in Canada, and the astonishing array of conflicts among Andrew
Wakefield’s persecutors, all the way to the present General Medical
Council hearing in London can be found here (HERE is.gd/73k2V . First posted last
January, amid rumours that important new documents were to be made
available through Freedom of Information, the information about the
improper relations between government and industry was already
damning. Whatever “the findings on fact” when the hearing
resumes on Thursday there can be no excuse the continuing naive
reporting of these events.
“The person who commissioned Deer was
Paul Nuki, Sunday Times’ sometime Head of Newsroom investigations and
“Focus” editor. Paul Nuki is son of Professor George Nuki.
Professor George Nuki in 1987 sat on the Committee on Safety of
Medicines when the CSM was considering Glaxo company Smith Kline &
French Laboratories’ Pluserix MMR vaccine for safety approval.
The CSM approved Pluserix MMR but it caused very high levels of adverse
reactions and was withdrawn by the manufacturers on very little notice
in late 1992 leaving the Department of Health in an embarrassing
position..."
“Professor Denis McDevitt was due in
July 2007 to chair the unprecedented British General Medical Council
hearing of the case of Doctors Wakefield, Murch and Professor
Walker-Smith. McDevitt and the GMC failed to declare McDevitt’s
personal involvement in approving the dangerous Pluserix MMR vaccine in
1988. He only stood down after Jamie Doward of the Observer,
Martyn Halle, freelance journalist for the Sunday Express, Andy Wilks
of the Mail on Sunday, Jenny Hope of the Daily Mail and Heather Mills
of Private Eye challenged the GMC over the matter. ["MMR Conflict of
Interest Zone" Private Eye - June 2007]
Read more at ChildHealthSafety
Note: The opinions expressed in COMMENTARY are those of
the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Schafer
Autism Report.
• • •
LETTERS
Thank you for "Chasing the Hope" - Autism Awareness Won
From the National Autism Association. is.gd/73dIK
Out of 500,000 nonprofits across the
country, you helped us become one of Chase Community Giving’s Top 100
highest voted organizations on Facebook and earned us $25,000.00 for
our programs. You also earned us a chance to enter Round 2 of the Chase
Community Giving Campaign and a shot at winning $1,000,000.00 for the
most amount of votes earned on Facebook, and $100,000.00 for positions
two through six. The results are in, and NAA made it to the 7th place
position.
While some may see this as yet another
loss for our community, we believe it is an extraordinary win for our
cause. We are incredibly overwhelmed by the amount of support, hard
work, dedication and compassion that has occurred over the last seven
days of this competition.
We've seen people working around the
clock pulling for our children and loved ones. Many of the people who
jumped in wholeheartedly aren't directly affected by autism, yet worked
alongside us as if they were. We saw autism nonprofits come together
and forego our organizational names for a week to simply became the
name "vote autism."
The amount of press coverage and free
media placement was unexpected. We saw ABC and Fox affiliates airing
our 60 second autism PSA in the daytime, which is unheard of. We saw
morning news shows airing our three minute autism video, and radio
stations around the country donating free airtime to "Vote Autism on
Facebook, the #1 Childhood Disorder in the Country." We saw high
profile figures bringing attention to our cause. Jim Carrey, Jenny
McCarthy, HollyRod Foundation, The Doug Flutie, Jr. Foundation, Kathy
Ireland, Nia Vardalos, CNN's Jack Gray with over a million Twitter
followers - all of them were bringing awareness to autism.
Most of all, we saw you fighting like
mad to spread the word. Colorful profile pictures with the words "Vote
Autism" decorated thousands of Facebook news feeds and our “Think
Autism” Facebook Group reached 1.3 million members. We saw Age of
Autism, SafeMinds, Autism Speaks, Talk About Curing Autism, Schafer
Autism Report, Autism One, Kim Stagliano for Huffington Post, Unlocking
Autism, Autism Research Institute, Autism Action Network, Generation
Rescue, Tommy Foundation, AutismLink, Houston Autism Disability
Network, Easter Seals Miami, Spectrum Magazine, all NAA Chapters and so
many other groups and advocates come together to help our cause win
resources for our community.
+ Read more: is.gd/73dIK
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Today's SAR newslist
is human compiled and
provided through the support of
paid subscriptions.
- THANK YOU -
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In
This Issue:
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•
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TREATMENT
At UC Davis MIND Institute, Learning Can Be Child's Play For Autistic
PEOPLE
Autistic Boy Bonds With Wildlife Safari Elephants
The Promise of Music and a Phemoninal Young Man Video.
PUBLIC HEALTH
Author Robyn O’Brien Talks Of Dangers Lying On Our Plates
RESEARCH
Psychologists Use Non-Expert Student Observers In Autism Research
Everybody Laughs, Everybody Cries: Researchers Identify Universal
Emotions
EVENTS
Dear John Premiere Raises More Than $100,000 for Autism
The Annual Seaver
Autism Center Conference: New Insights in the
Etiology, Diagnosis, Neurobiology, Genetics and Treatment of Autism
COMMENTARY
Autism Clusters In California Real, Not Genetic
The Scandalous History of MMR in the UK
LETTERS
Thank you for "Chasing the Hope" - Autism Awareness Won
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your LETTER
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DO
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the Schafer Autism Report.
$35
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www.sarnet.org |
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Now's the perfect time to order your free Puzzle
Piece kits and launch an autism awareness campaign in your community.
When we raise the funding necessary, ARI will see that important
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Supports the
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