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Query: UMLS:C0004352 (autism)
 32,579 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Autism is one of the behaviorally defined developmental disorders of brain function. It has a variety of genetic and nongenetic etiologies, with etiology being unknown in the majority of children. Boys are more frequently affected than girls. Manifest in the preschool years, autism always affects sociability, communication, and the child's repertoire of activities and interests. Autism encompasses children with a broad range of severities and a variety of other signs of brain dysfunction. These include motor signs, notably stereotypies; abnormal responses to a variety of sensory stimuli; and disorders of affect and attention. A significant proportion of autistic children experience epileptic seizures and have abnormal EEGs. Neuroimaging, preferably magnetic resonance imaging, discloses abnormalities of brain development in a minority of autistic persons. The level of intelligence may range from profound mental deficiency to giftedness. The pattern of cognitive skills is likely to be uneven, typically with better nonverbal than verbal skills. In the preschool years, all autistic children have a developmental language disorder. Verbal expression may range from total lack of language to verbosity with echolalia; comprehension and language use are invariably impaired. While there is no specific pharmacologic agent to mitigate the fundamental disorder, children may benefit from drugs to treat specific symptoms such as attention disorder and seizures. Although autistic behaviors are the consequence of a static disorder of brain function, their character changes with maturation and appropriate intervention. Communication skills and sociability remain deficient but improve in all but the most severely affected children. Outcome is a function of both innate cognitive competence and the effectiveness of early intervention focused on the development of appropriate social skills and meaningful communication. Intelligent autistic adults may be educable, employable, and able to live independently, while more severely handicapped ones require a lifelong protected environment.
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PMID:Autistic children: diagnosis and clinical features. 170 91

In nonretarded autistic, receptive developmental language disordered, and normal subject groups, we recorded in auditory and visual target detection tasks two neurophysiological components of the event-related brain potential, Nc and P3b. Existent research shows that, in normals, Nc and P3b appear early in development, are associated with attention and memory processes, and are endogenous which means that they are triggered by internal, consciously initiated attentional and cognitive mechanisms and that they can be triggered even by the omission of sensory stimulation so long as it has meaning or importance for the subject. In this report, Nc and P3b were recorded in response to auditory and visual stimulation and to the omission of auditory and visual stimulation. Consistent with the hypothesis that non-retarded autism involves abnormal attentional and cognitive responses to important information, P3b was found to be smaller than normal and Nc was small and often absent in the nonretarded autistic group even under the condition when no auditory language or sensory processing was required. Receptive developmental language disorder has been linked with difficulties in processing sequences of auditory stimuli, and in this study P3b was found to be somewhat enlarged in this group even under the conditions when P3b was elicited by stimuli separated by 1 sec and also when P3b was elicited by the omission of stimulation.
J Autism Dev Disord 1989 Mar
PMID:Pathophysiologic findings in nonretarded autism and receptive developmental language disorder. 270 93

An interim follow-up study of a group of "higher functioning" boys with infantile autism and control group of boys with severe (receptive) developmental language disorder (or dysphasia) is reported. The boys were compared both initially and at follow-up for overall functioning in the areas of language, peer relationships, stereotyped behaviors, and disruptive public behaviors, as well as for the presence of a number of specific symptoms. In some respects, the behaviors that differentiated the groups initially did so also at follow-up, although there were important differences. Very few of the autistic boys had good language skills at follow-up, whereas nearly half of the dysphasic group were communicating well, a difference that is striking in view of the initial general similarity between the groups in terms of poor language functioning. However, some of the dysphasic children had developed greater difficulties in peer relationships. The implications for concepts of the nature of the deficit in severe receptive developmental language disorders are considered.
J Autism Dev Disord 1989 Mar
PMID:Infantile autism and developmental receptive dysphasia: a comparative follow-up into middle childhood. 270 1

Brainstem auditory evoked potentials (BAEP) and middle latency responses (MLR) were studied in 8 nonretarded subjects with infantile autism (mean age = 23.3, SD = 2.8), 8 subjects with receptive developmental language disorder (mean age = 16.3, SD = 1.4), and normal control subjects matched to each group for age, gender, and Performance IQ. Click stimuli were delivered monaurally to the left and the right ear and binaurally for both the BAEPs (70-dB HL, 7/sec) and the MLRs (60-dB HL, 13/sec). Amplitudes and latencies (Waves I to VI), interwave latencies (III-V, I-V, and I-III), and Wave I/V amplitude ratio of the BAEPs were determined for each group. For the MLR study, Wave Na, Pa, and Nb latencies, and Wave Na-Pa and Pa-Nb amplitudes were calculated. There were no consistent differences in the BAEP and MLR characteristics of the control and the experimental groups. These results suggest that the abnormal cognitive processes indexed by the cognitive and attention-related event-related potential components in infantile autism and receptive developmental language disorder are not due to abnormal sensory processing in the brainstem and in areas central to the brainstem whose activity generates the BAEPs and MLRs.
J Autism Dev Disord 1989 Jun
PMID:Brainstem and middle latency auditory evoked potentials in autism and developmental language disorder. 274 91

This research extends previous research regarding the intellectual functioning of autistic individuals on standardized measures of intelligence (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised). In Study I 33 individuals with autism who closely fit the DSM-III criteria were studied. Clear evidence was found that differentiates these individuals' verbal intellectual processes from their visual-motor intellectual abilities. Principal components analysis was used to examine the interrelationship among the various intellectual abilities which such tests of intelligence measure. In Study II the intellectual abilities of a group of autistic 8- to 12-year-olds were compared to age-matched groups of children with receptive developmental language disorder, dysthymic disorder, or oppositional disorder. The intellectual abilities of autistic children were significantly different from the other groups of children.
J Autism Dev Disord 1988 Dec
PMID:A study of intellectual abilities in high-functioning people with autism. 321 79

The kinetics of 5-HT uptake by platelets was studied in cases of infantile autism and developmental language disorder (DLD) and normal subjects. Two patients of the autism group were twins, and the seven patients of the DLD group were members of four pairs of twins. The Vmax values (means +/- SD) for autism and DLD were 6.46 +/- .90 pmol 5-HT/10(7) cells/min and 4.85 +/- 1.50 pmol 5-HT/10(7) cells/min, respectively. These values were both significantly higher than that of 2.25 +/- .97 pmole 5-HT/10(7) cells/min for normal children. The Km values of the three groups were not significantly different. Data on the five pairs of twins examined suggested that the elevated Vmax of 5-HT uptake by platelets was determined genetically.
J Autism Dev Disord 1986 Mar
PMID:Kinetics of 3H-serotonin uptake by platelets in infantile autism and developmental language disorder (including five pairs of twins). 395 59

A family with fragile-X syndrome is reported. One sibling has atypical pervasive developmental disorder and moderate mental retardation. A second sibling has Tourette's syndrome, moderate mental retardation, seizure disorder, and autism. A third sibling has attention deficit disorder, moderate mental retardation, and developmental language disorder, expressive type. The authors believe that this family represents a classic example of the differential outcome of interactions of common biogenetic and environmental influences. We propose that in this family the multipotential outcome is at least influenced by if not caused by a common genetic defect.
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PMID:A family with fragile-X syndrome. 659 Jul 82

Compared 8- to 14-year-old children with either autism or receptive developmental language disorder (RDLD) to age- and IQ-matched normal controls in their ability to detect both frequent (p = .70) and infrequent (p = .30) randomly presented auditory stimuli under task and no-task conditions. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), behavioral reaction times, and target detection accuracy rates were measured. Although the three groups of children performed in a similar manner on behavioral measures, only the children with autism demonstrated an abnormally small amplitude of the P3b, a component of the ERP. This result is interpreted in terms of (a) the consistency of this finding with other ERP studies involving older individuals with autism; and (b) its significance with respect to the difficulty children with autism have in modifying their expectancies to contextually relevant sequences of auditory information.
J Autism Dev Disord 1993 Mar
PMID:Contextual probability evaluation in autistic, receptive developmental language disorder, and control children: event-related brain potential evidence. 846 1

Three groups of age- and PIQ-matched children (Autism, Receptive Developmental Language Disorder, and normal controls) participated in two event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments. Each of these experiments was aimed at evaluating whether either of the two clinical groups of children demonstrated abnormalities in two auditory ERP components, N1 and P2, which are known to be dependent on stimulus characteristics (frequency, intensity, and probability), and believed to be generated within primary and secondary cortex. Results of Experiment 1 provide partial support for the idea that both clinical groups failed to fully process changes in stimulus intensity as indexed by the N1 component. Results are discussed in reference to potential abnormalities in serotonergic regulation of auditory cortex.
J Autism Dev Disord 1995 Oct
PMID:Sensory modulation of auditory stimuli in children with autism and receptive developmental language disorder: event-related brain potential evidence. 856 97

Two groups of children with contrasting types of developmental language disorder (phonologic-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic) were compared with a group of children with high-level autism and with a control group of normal children on a broad battery of neuropsychological tests, known to be sensitive to left-right hemisphere damage. Significant differences found between the groups suggest contrasting forms of hemispheric dysfunction.
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PMID:Hemispheric function in developmental language disorders and high-level autism. 864 27


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