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Category: Autism treatment knowledge

19Sep

Treatment Options for Autism

Autism is an autistic spectrum disorder, a complex psychological disturbance that is evident in a child’s indifference to the outward environment and parents and in the child’s immersion in their own inner world.

On the surface, the disorder manifests itself in the fact that a child does not want to communicate with others, has no emotional contact with relatives, has a very limited range of interests, has dysfunctional speech and motor capabilities, and has impaired brain activity.

According to statistics, autism of varying severity is diagnosed in 2% of children. Today, this disease is completely incurable, but the life of a child can be greatly improved in the future with the help of the right treatment program.

Classic methods of autism treatment:

Physiotherapy presents methods of influencing the patient’s body with magnetic treatment, laser radiation, ultrasound, and various physical exercises that normalise motor activity.
Psychological correction is the stimulation of the brain and the activation of areas with arrested development.
Developmental education includes psychological methods, practices, and mental exercises designed for assimilation of the information that is necessary in later life, for self-service skills and learning, etc.
Social-psychological adaptation is work with a psychotherapist aimed at expanding a child’s range of interests, learning about the outside world, and establishing interpersonal relationships.
Drug therapy eliminates symptoms of the disease, such as insomnia, anxiety, aggression, apathy, low brain activity, etc.
Sanatorium-resort rehabilitation is prescribed to strengthen the immune system and maintain the results of treatment.

Goals and results of therapeutic intervention

Treatment is aimed at reducing the intensity and severity of the pathological symptoms and helping a child become socially active, sociable, and capable of learning. As a result of the implemented therapy program, a child perceives and assimilates new information more easily. Also, positive changes occur in the process of establishing control over the body and actions as a child develops self-care skills. Through stimulation of the brain, speech becomes clear and meaningful.

Start treatment for your child’s autism spectrum disorder at the proper time, and you will be sure to achieve the maximum possible therapeutic effect!

19Sep

History of Autism Treatment

by Staff

Autism is known under such terms as infantile autism, Kanner’s syndrome, early childhood autism, autism spectrum disorder, etc.

The word “autism” means self-absorbedness. It was first used by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911, and around 1940, other psychiatrists began using it actively. At that time, a basic treatment program had already been developed to eliminate the symptoms of the disease. At the end of the 19th century, thanks to the work of medical scientists, a classification of autism was compiled and is still used today.

Treatment of autism spectrum disorder

If previously the course of therapy was primitive and implemented in a psychiatric hospital, now children can undergo complex treatment in a regular clinic. The pathology is quite multifarious, so different approaches are used to suppress its manifestations: physiotherapeutic, psychological, socialising, and developmental. The set of methods is similar in developed countries around the world. Europeans tend to undergo therapy in clinics that use new, experimental methods of treatment along with classical ones. Such countries include Israel, Germany, and France; however, medical institutions in Georgia offer more affordable prices while maintaining the same quality level of medical services as in the above-mentioned countries.

Modern treatment of autism in Georgia

The capital of the country is home to several leading clinics with modern equipment that provide high-quality treatment for childhood autism, and therefore their doctors are popular with the citizens. A few more good reasons are:

Use of innovative treatment.
Affordable prices for the average European.
Advantageous territorial location of Georgia and favourable border crossing rules.

Goals and results of therapeutic intervention

Treatment is aimed at reducing the intensity and severity of pathology symptoms and helping a child become socially active, communicative, and able to learn. After a therapy program is implemented, a child perceives and assimilates new information more easily. Also, positive changes occur in the process of establishing control over the body and actions as a child develops self-care skills. Due to stimulation of the brain, speech becomes intelligible and meaningful.

Come to Georgia for treatment — the most effective methods are used here, and the country’s climate helps to strengthen the immune system!

10Feb

Autism Success Stories

by Staff

Autism, which is more properly referred to as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is a far-ranging medical condition that can be so mild a person is unaware of having the condition, or so severe it may require intensive treatment and therapy very early on life. But as with other medical conditions, having ASD is not the final arbiter of whether someone will succeed in life or not. Some aspects of ASD, such as the ability to focus on details and quickly process vast amounts of information, can even directly result in success in life.

That’s why while there may be cause for concern if a child is diagnosed with ASD, it should never be regarded as a fixed, non-negotiable limitation to a prosperous life. Some very talented people have succeeded despite—or even because of—ASD, and here are a few of the many examples in history and modern culture.

Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker is a unique figure in late 18^th-early 19^th-century history. He was a brilliant African-American scholar who lived as a free man in a time when slavery was still legal in the United States. While people were not diagnosed for ASD during his time, many suspect from historical records that he properly had an ASD condition, as he was known to fixate on minute details, such as the watch of a friend, which would then inspire him to create his own extremely detailed, intricate experiments.

During his life, he was a farmer, inventor, astronomer, naturalist, surveyor, and author, all during a period when the color of his skin should have been a huge limitation. Instead, he transcended all those limitations.

Alonzo Clemons

Alonzo Clemons is an African-American who is also widely regarded as one of the greatest technical sculptors on the planet. A brain injury during his youth left him with an IQ deficit of only 40-50 points, well below the average. However, Clemons has the incredible ability to look at an image of an animal, even if only for a few moments, and construct an accurate sculpture in less than an hour.

No one instructed Clemons how to do this; he is entirely self-taught in sculpting. However, it is his brain, which is somehow able to retain and process complex visual information, even from a two-dimensional photograph, and interpolate that into three full dimensions, perfectly translated from his mind to his fingers.

Kim Peek

Kim Peek was the inspiration for the film Rain Man, in which Dustin Hoffman’s ground breaking performance introduced the entire world to the more severe effects of ASD. Kim was one of the more unusual examples of ASD in that while he has difficulty with simple tasks, such as tying his shoes, his memory is perfect, and he has complete recall of any text he reads.

Peeks currently remembered over 12,000 books that he read, as well as performing extremely complex calculations based on the calendar. He died in 2009 at the age of 58, but was a crucial example of bringing more understanding of ASD, and the savant state, to the world.

Glenn Gould

A celebrated Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould was renowned throughout the world for his astonishing piano technique, which was widely unconventional by traditional music standards. Gould was a child prodigy of the piano, but where many musical geniuses improved their skill through practice, Gould improved himself through study. He claimed that it was easier to get better by reading music than it was to play it on the piano.

While he had never been diagnosed, since he died in 1982, Gould is now strongly suspected of having ASD. His characteristic rocking motions while playing, as well as his insistence on routine, and violent reactions to any disruption to routine are typical of some ASD symptoms. His focus on detail and his unusual ability to process musical information without even playing or hearing it, just reading notation, are other strong indicators.

Sir Anthony Hopkins

Hopkins is one of the most renowned elder actors of our time, but he was also diagnosed later in life with ASD. He is another of the people who appear to be on the “higher functioning” end of the spectrum, although in his case, he would likely argue that it was not that high.

Hopkins, like many people with ASD, experienced difficulty socializing and did not get on well with traditional schooling. As a result, he fell behind in some respects, but his inability to socialize didn’t deter him from having an innate ability to study human behavior and incorporate it into a performance. So despite not getting along very well with others in a normal social setting, Hopkin’s keen eye for observation has allowed him to integrate what he sees into some of the greatest performances in cinematic history, such as his stunning portrayal of the psychopathic Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs.

14Jan

What Is Atypical Autism?

by Staff

Autism, which today is clinically known as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is one of the more complex and largely still unknown conditions in medical science today. It is a disorder with so many symptoms, in a broad range of intensities, that for centuries, it was not even properly recognized as a distinct condition. In past years, some forms of ASD were misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, because of some behavioral similarities and the fact that some ASD patients did respond positively to some schizophrenic treatments like prescribing antipsychotic medication.

Today, ASD understanding has improved, but the knowledge we have of the disorder is far from complete. Over the decades, many iterations of our understanding of ASD have come and gone. This has left some people confused as to the exact state of an ASD diagnosis since many are now outdated and no longer medically classified in such a way. All ASD patients today, for example, are diagnosed on “the spectrum.” There is no longer any distinct classification such as one ASD patient having Asperger’s Syndrome, while another has Childhood Disintegration Disorder.

One of these classifications that are no longer used is Atypical Autism, and there are many good reasons for that.

The Early Classifications

There is one medical document that is often considered a central source for global medical references, and that is the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM, as it is more conveniently referred to, has been a touchstone of American mental health knowledge and reference since 1952. It is a “living document” in the sense that it is periodically updated to reflect discoveries, treatments and developments in the mental health medical space. So, the first edition of the text used is now referred to as “DSM-I.”

It was only in the 1980s, with the introduction of DSM-III, that ASD was given a distinct classification. However, unlike the current system, which defines ASD as one condition with a spectrum of different symptoms at different intensities, the DSM-III text created four different classifications for ASD and then tried to fit ASD patients into each of these categories. Atypical Autism was one of these four categories.

What Was Atypical Autism?

Atypical Autism, under DSM-III was not clinically referred to with this term. The technical term for it was Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified, or PDD-NOS. As the name indicates, PDD-NOS was a “miscellaneous” category where those diagnosed with autism who didn’t fall into the other three categories would go. Asperger’s Syndrome was the first category and considered the “mildest and high functioning.”

The other categories, “Classic Autism” and “Childhood Disintegration Disorder,” were considered more severe. This meant people with ASD symptoms more severe than Asperger’s, but milder than Classic or CDD went into the PDD-NOS category, which quickly showed how inadequate a four-class category system was as more and more people failed to fit into the other three categories neatly.

The symptoms of people formerly classed as having PDD-NOS included:

Anomalous/Unusual Social Interactions

This was difficult to categorize since so many potential symptoms could be included, but in general, if a child experienced difficulty smoothly socializing with other children, and it was due to specific behaviors, such as unprovoked hostility, or unwillingness to speak, these fell into the category.

Linguistic/Communication Issues

Those with PDD-NOS in the past were also characterized by having communication deficits that made it difficult for them to be understood by others. This may have manifested as delayed communication development, or other anomalies, such as speaking without inflection and sounding like a robot.

Repeating Actions

Like other former categories of autism, PDD-NOS also included symptoms of repetitive motions or behaviors. Repeating certain gestures, actions, or words would often be a soothing activity in times of stress. However, there was little discretion about when these repeating behaviors would occur, which could be interpreted as inappropriate given the timing and circumstance.

Atypical Sensory Experience

This can be difficult to diagnose properly since an objective measurement is difficult. Atypical sensory experience means people formerly diagnosed with PDD-NOS may have apprehended their senses in ways that differ from those without the condition. Colors, for example, may look different, smells may be stronger or weaker, the sensation of touch may feel different.

The New Classification

By the 21^st century, it was apparent that trying to fit the huge variance of autism symptoms into four categories wasn’t working as accurately as envisioned. In 2013, with DSM-IV, the four categories of autism were discarded. We now operate on a single system of Autism Spectrum Disorder, where individuals are diagnosed as being “on the spectrum.” From there, a more in-depth diagnosis is made to catalog and diagnose the specific symptoms and then treat each person in a customized, personalized manner that suits their needs, rather than classing them as Category 1 or Category 4 and using only treatments specific to that category. ASD is far more complex than that and requires a nuanced treatment strategy.

29Oct

ASD Explained Simply

by Staff

If you’re not a medical expert, then the world of diseases, disorders, and other medical conditions are both complex and confusing. While it is easy to follow directions from a medical expert when it comes to treating certain types of medical conditions, the understanding of what a particular condition is, how it works, and arriving at the best strategy for curing or managing a condition all require years of hard work on the part of medical professionals to attain the high level of proficiency and expertise required. Beyond that, however, decades of rigorous medical research are required to generate the data that medical experts can reliably use and refer to when it comes to diagnosing and treating medical conditions.

However, the understanding that doctors have of the entire range of possible medical conditions and ailments is far from complete. There are still plenty of conditions for which research is still ongoing. There’s no cure for cancer, for example, and autism spectrum disorder is still being researched, with discoveries and changes to evaluation and diagnosis still occurring even in recent years.

So what is ASD? How does it affect the people that have it? What can be done about it?

The Autism Factor

Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD, is a neurophysiological condition. This means that it combines elements of physical symptoms, neural—or nerve-related—conditions, and conditions for a complex “mix” of different symptoms. ASD does have some physical symptoms. For example, one common symptom often accompanying other ASD symptoms are gastrointestinal, or digestive issues.

However, most of the symptoms that define ASD are behavioral. Where other conditions have physical effects, such as a heart condition that puts people’s cardio health at risk, or diabetes, which affects blood sugar levels, ASD’s most visible are on the ways people behave. Someone with ASD may, for example, be unable to maintain eye contact when speaking, or have an insistence of performing actions in a very specific, detailed way, with little tolerance for disrupting the established routine, resulting in irritation, or even hostility should such a disruption occur.

This has presented some real challenges for the treatment of ASD, especially since it created obstacles for the most important step of any treatment, accurate diagnosis.

The Spectrum Of Symptoms

It was not until the 1980s that formal medical texts finally recognized ASD as a distinct medical condition with its own class of diagnosis and treatment. Before the 1980s, many misdiagnoses of ASD occurred regularly because there were so many symptoms that it took some time for medical experts to realize they were all tied into a single condition. This is why, for example, Asperger’s Syndrome was known for decades, but only in the 1980s was it finally associated with ASD, as opposed to being a unique condition by itself.

In the same way, some of the more severe ASD symptoms often required medication, like antipsychotics. As a result of this response to antipsychotic medication, some ASD patients were misdiagnosed as people with schizophrenia and didn’t receive appropriate treatment for their condition, despite the antipsychotics repressing some of the more extreme symptoms.

When it was finally realized that ASD had a variety of symptoms at a huge range of intensities, this is when more focused and accurate diagnoses became possible. At first, ASD was broken into four categories according to severity, starting with Asperger’s syndrome at the “high functioning” end, and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder at the severe, low functioning end.

Today, however, the four general categories have been removed, and ASD is considered a single condition, where the most important process is diagnosing each symptom on an individual basis, and then treating that person accordingly.

Managing ASD

ASD is not a disease, so it can’t be “cleared up” with an antibiotic the way catching pneumonia can. It is a condition, like diabetes, or a heart condition, where adjustments have to be made to lifestyle, and certain precautions are taken to keep the symptoms manageable.

In the case of ASD, the type of treatment for symptom management depends mostly on the symptoms displayed and the severity of those symptoms. On the mildest end, people who would formerly have been classified as having Asperger’s Syndrome may require no medical treatment at all, as their symptoms result in behavior that is regarded as introverted or eccentric.

On the other side of the equation, some people may be unable to maintain eye contact when speaking or speak in a flat, monotone, robotic voice, or even be unable to perform normal tasks like eat food properly or tie shoes. In these cases, some behavioral therapy for training and self-regulation may be required at first to get these patients to perform normal, daily activities.

In other cases, some medication or other medical treatment may be advised. Antipsychotics are recommended for violent behavior, while stem cell therapy has been showing promise in treating some aspects of ASD, such as hostility or attention deficit.

25Aug

What Are Atypical Autism Symptoms?

by Staff

Autism, today technically referred to as Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD is a condition that currently has no known cure. While it has some physical symptoms such as a higher occurrence of gastro-intestinal inflammation, ASD is most known for its wide range of different behavioral symptoms. It’s because of this range that, before the 1980s, people with ASD were often misdiagnosed as being schizophrenic, an error that is no longer made with today’s more nuanced understanding.

As the name implies, however, ASD’s different behavioral symptoms fall along a spectrum of different symptoms, with the symptoms themselves falling along a spectrum of intensity. Today’s diagnostic classification looks at the symptoms themselves, diagnosing whether the individual symptom is mild or severe.

In the past, however, the classification of mild to severe wasn’t applied to the individual symptoms but to the ASD patient. Different ASD intensities fell into different groupings, and one of them was known as “Atypical Autism.”

So what is it, and who would have been considered in this group?

According To The Book

An American medical document known as the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is considered the “guide book” of American medical professionals when it comes to evaluating mental disorders according to an agreed-upon national standard. The DSM, as it is more commonly known, has occupied this position in American mental health science since its first publication in 1952. Since that initial publication, the DSM has occasionally been updated to reflect the current understanding of mental health conditions.

It wasn’t until the 1980s, with the third edition of the book, known as DSM-III, that Autism was even recognized as a unique condition. Before this, it was misdiagnosed as just a specific version of schizophrenia. After the inclusion of Autism in DSM-III medical professionals followed the protocols laid out in DSM-III and categorized people with Autism into four different categories. Atypical Autism, as it was informally known, was one of them.

What Is Atypical Autism?

The formal DSM-III designation for Atypical Autism was Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Other Specified, or PDD-NOS. It was one of four categories, the others being Asperger’s as the “mildest” Autism condition, PDD-NOS as more severe, Classic Autism, and Childhood Disintegration Disorder as the most severe.

PDD-NOS was one of the factors in showing the inadequacy of trying to categorize Autism patients by going over a list of symptoms that belonged only in specific categories, rather than focusing on the symptoms themselves. PDD-NOS became the “miscellaneous” category, where any symptoms that didn’t neatly fit into the other categories would go.

The only thing people could agree on was that PDD-NOS wasn’t as “mild” as Asperger’s, and included symptoms like:

Atypical/Unusual Social Behavior

This was a fairly broad area, so while there were no clear-cut definitions of what it was, it was easy to categorize what it wasn’t, and that was average/normal social interactions with others. If a person experienced difficulty socializing, or others commented that the behavior was abnormal, it would fall under this classification.

Language/Communication Deficit

People with Atypical Autism or PDD-NOS are also often characterized by noticeable communication issues. This could manifest itself early on as delayed communication development, where an infant is speaking the way other babies are. Alternatively, later in life, it shows itself in unusual modes of speech. Some with this condition will speak in a flat, emotionless monotone, like a robot, for example, having never learned to change pitch to communicate feeling or intent.

Repetitive Motions/Behaviors

As with many types of autism, Atypical Autism was also characterized by a focus on repetition. An AA patient would find repeating certain words, actions, or rituals soothing, and repeat them over and over again. This was an immediate, short-term way to deal with stress and attempt to calm down in an upsetting situation.

Atypical Sensory Experience

A very unique symptom of PDD-NOS is a sensory experience that differs from that of others. People with this symptom can process sensory input in very different ways. Smells can be stronger and more overpowering, sounds can be overwhelming; there may be a greater sensitivity to temperature, or tactile sensations. Even patterns or colors may be too bright. In some cases, the sensory experience is because of deprivation, with the PDD-NOS patient unable to smell or taste.

As the incidences of PDD-NOS patients ramped up, and it seemed like there might be more that fell in this category than the others, it was eventually decided by DSM-IV, in 2013, to collapse the previous categories that had been established. Rather than try to pigeonhole patients into specific symptoms in specific groups, the categorizations were removed entirely, the Autism Spectrum Disorder condition and diagnosis was used instead.

This is a much more accurate form of diagnosis for better results in treatment, as it focuses on on the individual symptoms, and the severity of each symptom, rather than drawing arbitrary lines where one ASD patient, “mild,” while another isn’t.

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Category: Autism treatment knowledge

Treatment Options for Autism

History of Autism Treatment