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

Childhood autism, the most characteristic subgroup of the broader PDD (pervasive developmental disorders) category, is the consequence of genetic or typically prenatal, organic factors causing cerebral damage. The resulting mental handicap lasts for a lifetime. It is characterized by a behavioural syndrome, that becomes recognizable between the 2.-3. year. The core of the syndrome is a deviant and/or retarded development of cognitive capacities and skills necessary for social relations, communication, fantasy and symbolic thinking. Almost all autistic people (95%) would not reach independence as adults, and most of them (75%) is mentally retarded as well. According to our calculations about 16,000 people are affected in Hungary, in a more or less serious degree, 2000 children among them. Their condition would require intensive, early and long lasting intervention: conditioning, training, education, and special social services. Today we do not possess the necessary organisational background, nor the professional training, and knowledge. For the early diagnosis, proper care and services the competence of child- and general psychiatrists, also of family doctors is indispensable. The author summarizes the most important available informations on the field first of all for those, who work in the general medical services.
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PMID:[Current concept of autism]. 176 60

Of 135 autistic and/or mentally retarded youngsters, 30 with pervasive developmental disorders and 2 with nonautistic mental retardation showed school refusal according to its modified definition. School refusal was significantly more frequent in other PDDs than in nonautistic mental retardation. The intellectual level was significantly higher in PDD children with school refusal than those without it. A certain level of mental development and obsessive tendency appear necessary for PDD children to develop school refusal. In order to treat school refusal in PDD, it is important to make school a pleasant place to go and to encourage the child to attend.
J Autism Dev Disord 1991 Mar
PMID:School refusal in pervasive developmental disorders. 203 46

Clinically, adult autistic and PDD individuals appear to have an uneasy relationship with their social environment no matter how much developmental progress they make. Many can work at modest jobs, many more do not, and even fewer are interested enough in the human environment to cohabitate and/or marry. A conversation with a young autistic man of 20 about a trip to visit a relative focuses more on the time the train left and how late it was in hypermnestic detail, including all details except the affective environment or the relationships to human beings. This is the human significance of the term autism. Autistics can speak and reference, but they seem not to understand the social requirements of a human interchange. If they do know it, they know it in a fragmentary or rudimentary way devoid of subtlety or nuance. Whatever we mean by social intercourse and whatever functions subsume it, they seem to emerge in interaction with cognition and language. They develop apace as human traverse those first 3 years of life and as they reach social maturity in adolescence. Autistic children appear not to integrate their knowledge of things in a representation that includes emotional and cognitive elements. They do not seem to understand that words necessarily refer to things of this world that others are also referencing in their words and sentences--shared reference is not natural to them. Intersubjectivity as a feature of common code use is not tacit or explicit in their behavior. They similarly do not use social referencing in the way in which normals do, and although they show some attachment to people, they seem to do so without benefit of affective display leading to reciprocity. There is little notion of the external that makes another human being distinguishable from a thing. Their treasured objects in early childhood are hard and lack comforting proximal receptor attractiveness as in normals. Hobson's extensive studies have elaborated a notion about the autistic child's knowledge of person. He comments on the lack of integration of the verbal and visual situational ties in which affective expression emerges and functions. He also comments on the deictic inabilities, inferring that the "I," "you," and "he" references do not have any significance for such children. We would like to note that while Vygotsky and others have observed that speech comes from the world of people, language comes from the maturing organism as an innate propensity.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
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PMID:Social deviance in autism: a central integrative failure as a model for social nonengagement. 204 30

DSM-III and DSM-III-R diagnoses of 112 developmentally disordered preschool children were compared. There was no significant difference between the DSM-III and DSM-III-R diagnosis of the inclusive category of pervasive developmental disorder, but nearly twice as many cases (58) were diagnosed as autistic disorder by DSM-III-R criteria as were diagnosed as infantile autism (31) by DSM-III. Thirty children met both DSM-III and DSM-III-R criteria for autism (IA/AD) and 23 received a DSM-III diagnosis of atypical PDD (A-PDD) and a DSM-III-R diagnosis of AD (A-PDD/AD). All of the IA/AD children and none of the A-PDD/AD group displayed a marked lack of awareness of others. DSM-III-R criteria have specifically broadened the concept of autism to include children who, although socially impaired, are not pervasively unresponsive to others.
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PMID:DSM-III and DSM-III-R diagnosis of autism and pervasive developmental disorder in nursery school children. 229 64

Assessed differences in sex ratio, severity of associated mental retardation, and various metrics of severity of autism in autistic, PDD-NOS, and developmentally disordered (non-PDD) cases. Males with autism were more frequent than females, particular at higher IQ levels. The three clinical groups differed, in expected ways, in the various measures of severity of autism with the PDD-NOS cases being intermediate between the strictly diagnosed autistic group and the non-PDD developmental disordered group. Sex differences were primarily confined to IQ; sex differences in other metrics of severity of autism were not prominent. Implications for future research are discussed.
J Autism Dev Disord 1993 Dec
PMID:Sex differences in pervasive developmental disorders. 810 1

This study compared four systems for the diagnosis of autism (DSM-III, DSM-III-R, DSM-IV, and ICD-10) with two empirically derived taxa of autism, and with three social subgroups of autism (Aloof, Passive, and Active-but-Odd) in 194 preschool children with salient social impairment. There were significant behavior and IQ differences between autistic and other-PDD groups for all four diagnostic systems, and a significant association was found (a) for Taxon B, diagnoses of autism, and the Aloof subgroup, and (b) for Taxon A, other-PDD, and the Active-but-Odd subgroup. Findings offer support for two major overlapping continua within idiopathic Pervasive Developmental Disorder.
J Autism Dev Disord 1996 Feb
PMID:Diagnosis and classification in autism. 881 71

Sib, twin, and family studies have shown that a genetic cause exists in many cases of autism, with a portion of cases associated with a fragile X chromosome. Three folate-sensitive fragile sites in the Xq27-->Xq28 region have been cloned and found to have polymorphic trinucleotide repeats at the respective sites; these repeats are amplified and methylated in individuals who are positive for the different fragile sites. We have tested affected boys and their mothers from 19 families with two autistic/PDD boys for amplification and/or instability of the triplet repeats at these loci and concordance of inheritance of alleles by affected brothers. In all cases, the triplet repeat numbers were within the normal range, with no individuals having expanded or premutation-size alleles. For each locus, there was no evidence for an increased frequency of concordance, indicating that mutations within these genes are unlikely to be responsible for the autistic/PDD phenotypes in the affected boys. Thus, we think it is important to retest those autistic individuals who were cytogenetically positive for a fragile X chromosome, particularly cases where there is no family history of the fragile X syndrome, using the more accurate DNA-based testing procedures.
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PMID:Lack of expansion of triplet repeats in the FMR1, FRAXE, and FRAXF loci in male multiplex families with autism and pervasive developmental disorders. 884 91

This study explored the claim that superior disembedding performance in autism reflects "less capture by meaning" and/or reduced "central coherence" [Shah & Frith, Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 24, 613-620 (1983); Shah & Frith, Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 34, 1351-1364 (1993)]. Meaningless as well as meaningful disembedding contexts were used, and memory for contextual information was examined. Neither qualitative (search strategy) nor quantitative (RT or accuracy) data indicated that high-functioning individuals with autism/PDD were superior to younger, developmentally matched controls. For both groups, disembedding was slowest from meaningful contexts, which generally were remembered best. No evidence was provided for "less capture by meaning" or reduced "central coherence" in autism/PDD, raising the possibility that earlier findings reflect a developmental, rather than a stable autism-specific, phenomenon.
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PMID:Disembedding performance and recognition memory in autism/PDD. 892 29

To test the validity of Asperger syndrome (AS) as defined in ICD-10, 26 patients (age range, 3.5 to 12 years) with AS and 16 patients (age range, 3 to 11.5 years) with high-functioning (IQ > 90) ICD-10 atypical autism (HAA) were compared on 64 clinical variables including obstetric risk factors, early developmental landmarks, IQ, autistic symptoms on the CARS-TV, epileptic EEG abnormalities and epilepsy. AS did not differ significantly from HAA on all but total and four item scores (i.e. imitation, visual responsiveness, auditory responsiveness and non-verbal communication) on the CARS-TV, in which AS scored significantly lower than HAA. A discriminant function based on imitation and auditory responsiveness predicted 76.2% of the 42 cases. The small difference from HAA indicates that AS is better to be regarded as the highest-functioning end of the PDD spectrum, rather than a valid subtype of PDD. However, the autistic symptom profile less distorted in AS than HAA may warrant a further study on its validity.
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PMID:A comparative study of Asperger syndrome with high-functioning atypical autism. 914 Nov 43

It has been hypothesized that deficits in theory of mind (ToM) and emotion recognition abilities in subjects with autisticlike disorders are independent. We examined the relationships between deficits in the various social cognitive domains in children with an autistic disorder (N = 20), in children with a pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDDNOS) (N = 20), and in psychiatric control (N = 20) and normal children (N = 20). The clinical groups were matched person-to-person on age and verbal IQ. The clinical children were 8-18 years old, the normal children 8-13 years old. The test battery included tasks for the matching and the context recognition of emotional expressions, and a set of first- and second-order ToM tasks. ToM and emotion recognition functioning proved to be better integrated in the non-PDD children than in the PDD children, but also in the PDD children significant correlations were found between ToM and emotion recognition measures.
J Autism Dev Disord 1997 Oct
PMID:Are deficits in the decoding of affective cues and in mentalizing abilities independent? 940 71


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