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

The two children of an epileptic woman who underwent therapy with hydantoin during both pregnancies showed the characteristic findings of the fetal hydantoin syndrome: growth retardation, microcephaly, mental retardation, and a distinct hysmorphic pattern. Both exhibited a ridged metopic suture, hypertelorism, a short nose with a broad base, hypoplasia of the distal phalanges and nails of the toes, and inguinal hernias. In addition the 18-month-old girl exhibited epicanthal folds, strabismus, ptosis, and a small ventricular septal defect; she had been exposed in utero to 300 mg mesantoin daily. Her 6 1/2-year-old brother was more severely retarded, lacking speech and presenting with infantile autism. During pregnancy the mother had taken 400 mg mesantoin daily. About half of the offspring of epileptic women treated with hydantoin during pregnancy are mentally retarded, and 11% exhibit in addition the pattern of dysmorphic findings known as the fetal hydantoin syndrome. Hydantoin should therefore be strictly avoided in epileptic women of child-bearing age unless safe contraceptive measures are taken. In the event of pregnancy, therapeutic abortion should be considered if hydantoin therapy must be maintained.
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PMID:[Fetal hydantoin syndrome in siblings]. 10 83

Typically-developing (TD) children frequently refer to objects uniquely in gesture. Parents translate these gestures into words, facilitating children's acquisition of these words (Goldin-Meadow et al. in Dev Sci 10(6):778-785, 2007). We ask whether this pattern holds for children with autism (AU) and with Down syndrome (DS) who show delayed vocabulary development. We observed 23 children with AU, 23 with DS, and 23 TD children with their parents over a year. Children used gestures to indicate objects before labeling them and parents translated their gestures into words. Importantly, children benefited from this input, acquiring more words for the translated gestures than the not translated ones. Results highlight the role contingent parental input to child gesture plays in language development of children with developmental disorders.
J Autism Dev Disord 2016 Jan
PMID:Parents' Translations of Child Gesture Facilitate Word Learning in Children with Autism, Down Syndrome and Typical Development. 2903 80

Typically developing (TD) children refer to objects uniquely in gesture (e.g., point at cat) before they produce verbal labels for these objects ("cat"; Bates et al., 1979). The onset of such gestures predicts the onset of similar spoken words, showing a strong positive relation between early gestures and early words (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). We ask whether gesture plays the same door-opening role in word learning for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and Down syndrome (DS), who show delayed vocabulary development and who differ in the strength of gesture production. To answer this question, we observed 23 18-month-old TD children, 23 30-month-old children with ASD and 23 30-month-old children with DS five times over a year during parent-child interactions. Children in all three groups initially expressed a greater proportion of referents uniquely in gesture than in speech. Many of these unique gestures subsequently entered children's spoken vocabularies within a year-a pattern that was slightly less robust for children with DS, whose word production was the most markedly delayed. These results indicate that gesture is as fundamental to vocabulary development for children with developmental disorders as it is for TD children.
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PMID:Early gesture provides a helping hand to spoken vocabulary development for children with autism, Down syndrome and typical development. 3027 Dec 77