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

Children and adolescents with autism (autism group, n = 19) and those without autism (Nonautism group, n = 19) of similar age and IQ were asked to make judgments of the social appropriateness of 24 videotaped, staged scenes with adult actors. Each scene depicted an appropriate or an inappropriate interaction. Half contained verbalizations, and half did not. After each scene, the participant was asked: (1) Was that o.k. or was something wrong with it? If the participant judged the scene was wrong, she or he was asked: (2) What was wrong with it?; and (3) Why was that wrong? Both groups correctly identified inappropriate behaviors most of the time, and correct behaviors almost all of the time. However, the Nonautism group detected inappropriate behaviors significantly more often than the Autism group, for verbal but not nonverbal scenes. It was also significantly easier for both groups to identify inappropriate behaviors in the nonverbal than in the verbal scenes. Ratings of the explanations given for Question 3 differed significantly between the groups for verbal but not for nonverbal scenes, with Nonautism participants more likely to give explanations involving social norms and principles, and the Autism group more likely to give explanations that were irrelevant or idiosyncratic.
J Autism Dev Disord 2001 Aug
PMID:Judgments of social appropriateness by children and adolescents with autism. 1156 83

The controversy regarding the once widely used mercury-containing preservative thimerosal in childhood vaccines has raised many historical questions that have not been adequately explored. Why was this preservative incorporated in the first place? Was there any real evidence that it caused harm? And how did thimerosal become linked in the public mind to the "autism epidemic"? I examine the origins of the thimerosal controversy and their legacy for the debate that has followed. More specifically, I explore the parallel histories of three factors that converged to create the crisis: vaccine preservatives, mercury poisoning, and autism. An understanding of this history provides important lessons for physicians and policymakers seeking to preserve the public's trust in the nation's vaccine system.
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PMID:Mercury, vaccines, and autism: one controversy, three histories. 1855 96

The discovery of mirror neurons in macaques and of a similar system in humans has provided a new and fertile neurobiological ground for rooting a variety of cognitive faculties. Automatic sensorimotor resonance has been invoked as the key elementary process accounting for disparate (dys)functions, like imitation, ideomotor apraxia, autism, and schizophrenia. In this paper, we provide a critical appraisal of three of these claims that deal with the relationship between language and the motor system. Does language comprehension require the motor system? Was there an evolutionary switch from manual gestures to speech as the primary mode of language? Is human communication explained by automatic sensorimotor resonances? A positive answer to these questions would open the tantalizing possibility of bringing language and human communication within the fold of the motor system. We argue that the available empirical evidence does not appear to support these claims, and their theoretical scope fails to account for some crucial features of the phenomena they are supposed to explain. Without denying the enormous importance of the discovery of mirror neurons, we highlight the limits of their explanatory power for understanding language and communication.
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PMID:Language beyond action. 1847 4

The paper by Dr von Ehrenstein et al (Am J Epidemiol. 2020;000(00):000-000) adds to the large and growing literature on the potentially causal association between prenatal exposure to maternal smoking and neuropsychiatric health. In addition to statewide, prospectively collected data, a particular strength was their ability to perform a sibling comparison design, contrasting the rate of autism spectrum disorder in siblings discordantly exposed to maternal smoking. Unfortunately, the estimate from the sibling pairs could neither confirm nor refute the conclusions based on the full cohort. Interpretation was hampered by broad confidence limits, and even had power been higher, the authors acknowledge a range of potential biases that would have made it difficult to draw any firm conclusions from a similarity or difference in the sibling pair estimate and estimate from the full cohort. Was the addition of the sibling comparison actually worth the effort? In this commentary, I will briefly summarize the benefits and limitations of this design, and, with some caveats, argue that its inclusion in the study by Dr von Ehrenstein et al. was indeed a strength and not just an ornamentation.
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PMID:Sibling comparison designs, are they worth the effort? 3283 Aug 47