Autism: It’s Not Just in the Head
pautrey
Autism: It’s Not Just in the Head
03.22.2007
The devastating derangements of autism also show up in the gut and in
the immune system. That unexpected discovery is sparking new
treatments that target the body in addition to the brain.
by Jill Neimark
“There were days I considered shutting the garage door and letting the
car run until I was dead,” says Colorado mom Erin Griffin, of the time
nine years ago when she learned that both her boys—not just her
firstborn—suffered from autism. Brendan, her angular, dark-haired
older child, was diagnosed in 1996 at age 4. Kyle, her round-faced,
hazel-eyed younger son, was diagnosed in 1998 at age 2½.
But Kyle and Brendan’s story does not have a tragic ending. After
interventions that included occupational and speech therapy, as well
as dietary change and nutritional supplements, both boys improved
significantly. Their tale of slow, steady recovery reflects the
changing landscape of autism today. The condition, traditionally seen
as genetic and originating in the brain, is starting to be viewed in a
broader and very different light, as a possible immune and
neuroinflammatory disorder. As a result, autism is beginning to look
like a condition that can, in some and perhaps many cases, be
successfully treated.
That is astonishing news about a disorder that usually makes headlines
because it seems to be growing rapidly more widespread. In the United
States, the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders has increased about
tenfold over the past two decades, and a 2003 report by the Centers
for Disease Control suggests that as many as one in every 166 children
is now on the autism spectrum, while another one in six suffers from a
neurodevelopmental delay. This explosion of cases has raised countless
questions: Is the increase real, is it the result of increased
awareness and expanding diagnostic categories, is it due to
environmental changes, or all of the above? There may be no single
answer. But the public concern about autism has caught the ear of
federal lawmakers. The Combating Autism Act, approved last December,
authorized nearly $1 billion over the next four years for autism-
related research and intervention.
Meanwhile, on the sidelines of that confusing discussion, a disparate
group—immunologists, naturopaths, neuroscientists, and toxicologists—
is turning up clues that are yielding novel strategies to help
autistic patients. New studies are examining contributing factors
ranging from vaccine reactions to atypical growth in the placenta,
abnormal tissue in the gut, inflamed tissue in the brain, food
allergies, and disturbed brain wave synchrony. Some clinicians are
using genetic test results to recommend unconventional nutritional
therapies, and others employ drugs to fight viruses and quell
inflammation.
Above all, there is a new emphasis on the interaction between
vulnerable genes and environmental triggers, along with a growing
sense that low-dose, multiple toxic and infectious exposures may be a
major contributing factor to autism and its related disorders. A vivid
analogy is that genes load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.
“Like cancer, autism is a very complex disease,” says Craig
Newschaffer, chairman of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Drexel
University School of Public Health, “and it’s exciting to start asking
questions about the interaction between genes and environment. There’s
really a very rich array of potential exposure variables.”
In one way, the field seems like a free-for-all, staggeringly
disordered because it is littered with so many possibilities. But one
can distill a few revolutionary insights. First, autism may not be
rigidly determined but instead may be related to common gene variants,
called polymorphisms, that may be derailed by environmental triggers.
Second, affected genes may disturb fundamental pathways in the body
and lead to chronic inflammation across the brain, immune system, and
digestive system. Third, inflammation is treatable.
“I can’t think of it as a coincidence anymore that so many autistic
kids have a history of allergies, eczema, or chronic diarrhea.”
“In spite of so many years of assumptions that a brain disorder like
this is not treatable, we’re helping kids get better. So it can’t just
be genetic, prenatal, hardwired, and hopeless,” says Harvard pediatric
neurologist Martha Herbert, author of a 14,000-word paper in the
journal Clinical Neuropsychiatry that reconceptualizes the universe of
autism, pulling the brain down from its privileged perch as an organ
isolated from the rest of the body. Herbert is well suited to this
task, a synthetic thinker who wrote her dissertation on the
developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and who then went to medical
school late, in her early thirties.
“I no longer see autism as a disorder of the brain but as a disorder
that affects the brain,” Herbert says. “It also affects the immune
system and the gut. One very striking piece of evidence many of us
have noticed is that when autistic children go in for certain
diagnostic tests and are told not to eat or drink anything ahead of
time, parents often report their child’s symptoms improve—until they
start eating again after the procedure. If symptoms can improve in
such a short time frame simply by avoiding exposure to foods, then
we’re looking at some kind of chemically driven ‘software’—perhaps
immune system signals—that can change fast. This means that at least
some of autism probably comes from a kind of metabolic encephalopathy—
a systemwide process that affects the brain, just like cirrhosis of
the liver affects the brain.”
In 1943 Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist Leo Kanner first
described autism as a now-famous collection of symptoms: poor social
engagement, limited verbal and nonverbal communication, and repetitive
behaviors. Back then, autism was considered rare; Kanner first
reported on just 11 patients, and Johns Hopkins still has records of
about 150 patients he examined in total. Even within this small group
of patients, other, less visible symptoms were evident. In his 1943
paper, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” Kanner noted
immune and digestive problems but did not include them in the
diagnosis. One reads with a shiver sentences lifted out of various
case histories: “large and ragged tonsils . . . she was tube-fed five
times daily . . . he vomited all food from birth through the third
month . . . he suffered from repeated colds and otitis media. . . .”
+++
Herbert believes that the clues linking the obvious behavioral
symptoms to more basic, but less obvious, biological dysfunction were
missed early on. “What I believe is happening is that genes and
environment interact, either in a fetus or young child, changing
cellular function all over the body, which then affects tissue and
metabolism in many vulnerable organs. And it’s the interaction of this
collection of troubles that leads to altered sensory processing and
impaired coordination in the brain. A brain with these kinds of
problems produces the abnormal behaviors that we call autism.”
Yellow regions (top) show the enlarged
white matter found in autism patients. Red
regions (below) show the gray matter
which is relatively smaller in autism
patients.
(Courtesy of the Center for Morphometric
Analysis, MGH-Harvard)
Herbert’s full-body perspective helps make sense of the confusion
surrounding the diagnosis of autism and helps justify the increasingly
common use of the plural “autisms” to describe the wide variations in
this disorder. As Newschaffer points out, “Children with Asperger’s
syndrome certainly share a lot of the behaviors of those with more
severe autism. But is it the same disease, and is it caused by the
same thing? A number of significant features of autism are not part of
the diagnostic schema right now, but eventually, those features may
end up distinguishing one causal pathway from another. How is a child
sleeping? Does he or she have gastrointestinal symptoms? By looking at
those things we may see risk-factor associations pop out that we’ve
never seen before.”
Herbert likens autism to a hologram: “Everything that fascinates me is
in it. It’s got epidemiology, toxicology, philosophy of science,
biochemistry, genetics, systems theory, the collapse of the medical
system, and the failure of managed care. Each child that walks through
my door is a challenge to everything I ever knew, and each child
forces me to think outside the box and between categories.”
Each child’s path to autism may be distinct, she says, but they may
share common inflammatory abnormalities. She has shown through
morphometric brain imaging that white matter—which carries impulses
between neurons—is larger in children with autism.
“It was the most absolutely outstanding piece of information in all
the brain data I looked at,” Herbert recalls of the years 2001 and
2002, when she was analyzing this brain imaging data. “People were
saying, don’t look at the white matter, look at the cerebral cortex,
but I knew we had an important finding.”
Could white matter become chronically inflamed? It may well be,
according to new research from Carlos Pardo, a neurologist at Johns
Hopkins. In a 2005 study in the Annals of Neurology, he found
inflammation in immune-responsive brain cells of autistic patients.
“Patients with autism report lots of immunological problems. We looked
for the fingerprints of those problems in the brain,” says Pardo. “We
had brain tissue from autistic individuals as young as 5 and as old as
45 and we found neuroglial inflammation in all of them. Neuroglia are
a group of brain cells that are important in the brain’s immune
response. This inflammatory reaction appears to happen both early and
late in the course of the disorder. If it happens early, it could
dramatically influence brain development. We’re very excited about
this research because one potential treatment approach, then, is to
downregulate the brain’s immune response.” To study that approach,
Pardo is collaborating on a pilot study funded by the NIH to test
minocycline, an anti-inflammatory antibiotic drug, on autistic
children. “Minocycline is a very selective downregulator of microglial
inflammation,” he says. “Neurologists already use it in multiple
sclerosis and Parkinson’s.”
“What we’ve got here is a far more comprehensive set of
characteristics for autism,” says Herbert, “one that can include
behavior, cognition, sensorimotor, gut, immune, brain, and endocrine
abnormalities. These are ongoing problems, and they’re not confined
just to the brain. I can’t think of it as a coincidence anymore that
so many autistic kids have a history of food and airborne allergies,
or 20 or 30 ear infections, or eczema, or chronic diarrhea.”
All this marks a Copernican-scale shift in our approach to the
disorder. I myself was irresistibly drawn to the subject when viewing
an online video of a heavily affected 11-year-old who, after a series
of chelation treatments to remove mercury, announced to his mother,
“Mom, I’m back from the living dead.” The statement was heartbreaking
in its simple eloquence. Mercury chelation, in this particular child’s
case, was a near panacea.
Lisa Beck, of Oviedo, Florida, tells a similar story. Her son Joshua
was diagnosed with autism in 2004 at about age 2. After 18 intensive
months of treatment that involved chelation—a treatment that draws
heavy metals out of the body—and dietary changes, among other
therapies, Josh appears neurotypical. “We took him to Dr. Leslie
Gavin, a specialist at Nemours Children’s Clinic, who administers the
ADOS test, a diagnostic test to see where on the spectrum a child
falls,” she says. “After the two-hour evaluation, Gavin said he did
not meet the criteria for autism. In her words, he was ‘responsive,
curious, and active, able to engage in the test without a problem,
able to express himself clearly.’ ”
But, fascinating anecdotes aside, does hard evidence exist of specific
vulnerability genes or how they might impair the immune system, brain,
and gut—and most important, do we have any rational, reliable
approaches to help repair the damage?
The answer is a provisional yes.
+++
“We’re beginning to understand that genetics is really about
vulnerability,” says neuroscientist Pat Levitt, director of the
Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. Levitt
and his colleagues recently discovered that a common variant of a gene
called MET doubles the risk of autism. The finding was widely regarded
as a breakthrough because MET modulates the nervous system, gut, and
immune system—just the kind of finding that matches up with the
emerging new view of autism.
“Everyone was focusing on genes expressed in the brain,” says Levitt,
“but this gene is important for repair of the intestine and immune
function. And that’s really intriguing because a subset of autistic
children have digestive and immune problems.” Equally interesting is
that the gene variant occurs in 47 percent of the population—in other
words, it is just one contributing factor, and it probably works in
concert with other vulnerability genes. And finally, in a twist that
intrigues other researchers, the activity of the gene is affected by
what is known as oxidative stress—the kind of damage one sees with
excessive exposure to toxins. “As we identify other vulnerability
genes like this,” says Levitt, who hopes to engineer a mouse model of
this gene variant for study, “we may be able to develop effective
interventions for children.”
(Click on each map to enlarge)
The Toxic Link to Autism:
The first two maps compare rates of autism in Texas
counties in the early 1990s (top) and in the late 1990s
(center). The blue map (bottom) shows pounds of
toxins released in each county in 2001. The darkest
patches in the blue map represent counties where
increases in autism rates over the past 10 years have
been in the top 20 percent. The correlation between
toxins and autism is suggestive, though not definitive.
(Courtesy of Raymond Palmer, University of Texas
Health Science Center, and Stephen Blanchard,
Our Lady of the Lake University)
In other provocative research, Jill James, director of the Autism
Metabolic Genomics Laboratory at the Arkansas Children’s Hospital
Research Institute (and professor of pediatrics at the University of
Arkansas for Medical Sciences) has found that many children with
autism do not make as much of a compound called glutathione as
neurotypical children do. Glutathione is the cell’s most abundant
antioxidant, and it is crucial for removing toxins. If cells lack
sufficient antioxidants, they experience oxidative stress, which is
often found with chronic inflammation.
In her most recent study, published in the American Journal of Medical
Genetics in 2006, James found that common gene variants that support
the glutathione pathway may be associated with autism risk.
Intriguingly, this pathway is linked metabolically to the methylation
pathway. Methylation is a fundamental biochemical process that helps
regulate which genes are expressed; abnormal methylation can cause
disease. Because the pathway provides the precursors to glutathione,
impairments in methylation can also lead to oxidative stress. “It’s
very provocative,” James says. “It suggests that some autistic
behaviors are a neurologic manifestation of a genetically based
systemic, metabolic derangement.” Some of the abnormalities James saw
in this study have already been associated with gastrointestinal and
immunologic dysfunction.
The good news is that oxidative stress in some autistic children may
be treatable with targeted nutritional intervention. James and her
colleagues have tracked eight autistic children who were taking
supplements of key nutrients in the methylation pathway—folinic acid,
trimethylglycine, and methyl-B12—and found a significant increase in
important markers of methylation and glutathione synthesis. The next
step is to see if the symptoms improve as well.
James and her colleagues just received a $2.4 million grant from the
NIH, part of which will be devoted to sorting out the relationship
between metabolism, genes, and behavior. ”What would be incredible is
if we could correlate individual differences in behavior with specific
abnormal metabolites,” James says. They will then look at children
between 18 to 24 months old, which is usually before autism is
diagnosed. That could help identify the causes of the disease, as well
as permit earlier intervention.
“We also plan to look at mitochondrial dysfunction,” she says. “Since
mitochondria are the energy powerhouses of the cell, they’re also the
place where the most free radicals (which play a role in oxidative
stress) are produced. If the electron transport chain in the
mitochondria is faulty and you’re not efficiently making ATP, you’ll
produce more free radicals and deplete your glutathione. If this
hypothesis turns out to be correct, we can give nutrients like
coenzyme Q10, magnesium, and acetyl-L-carnitine to help stabilize the
mitochondria. Now, this is just a hypothesis, but that’s the risk you
take with science. You make your best guess and you carry out your
study and you see.”
“It’s interesting to see metabolic abnormalities addressed this way,”
says Isaac Pessah, chairman of Molecular Biosciences and director of
the Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention
at the University of California at Davis. “I think glutathione balance
in the kids is potentially very important in terms of toxic
environmental exposures.”
There is a growing sense, Pessah adds, that our heavily
industrialized, chemical-soaked environment—and the way it acts on
vulnerable genes in some individuals—may be a major culprit. In
December 2006, Harvard researchers boldly announced in The Lancet that
industrial chemicals may be impairing the brain development of
children around the entire world. And at a November 2006 conference at
the University of California at Davis’s M.I.N.D. Institute, Pessah
gathered experts to discuss the clinical implications of environmental
toxicology in autism. Says Herbert, “We discussed the enormous number
of chemicals in our environment and how little we know about chronic,
low-dose, multiple exposures and their effect on diseases like autism.
Maybe the many autism cases we are now seeing are a new illness of the
current generation.”
+++
Several large-scale, federally funded epidemiological studies are
under way to pinpoint possible environmental triggers, as well as
early biomarkers of autism. “We have to build a large enough study to
be able to look at both genes and environment together,” says
Newschaffer, who is a principal investigator on a study by the Centers
for Disease Control that will look at 2,700 children over the next
five years.
“As far as the impact of chemicals on neurodevelopment, only about 20
to 30 of the 85,000 chemicals have been studied.”
In another ambitious study, called the Autism Birth Cohort, Columbia
University and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health will follow
100,000 pregnant women for 72 months, studying their health and
genetics and testing everything from blood to urine samples. The hope
is to discover environmental factors that contribute to autism risk,
from diet or infection to toxins like heavy metals, pesticides, and
the countless synthetic molecules in products today.
Top: astroglia inflammation (green cells) in the brain of
an autistic patient. Below: microglial inflammation
(brown cells) infiltrating the cerebellum of an autistic
patient. The blue cells are granular cells in the cere-
bellum.
(Courtesy of Diana L. Vargas and Carlos A. Pardo,
Johns Hopkins University)
Other large NIH- and EPA-funded studies are teasing out immune
abnormalities that may contribute to autism. In research on more than
700 families with an autistic as well as a neurotypical child, Pessah
and his colleagues have found in the autistic child a significant
reduction in immunoglobulins and an abnormal profile of cytokines,
which are critical to immune response. “The immune system is involved
in important aspects of neurodevelopment,” says Pessah. “We’ve found
the presence of immune antibodies that we think may influence brain
proteins. In the next five years, as the study continues, we hope to
reach about 1,600 families total. We need that many to get real
statistical power. We hope to find out what type of skewed immune
response the typical autistic child has and to isolate toxic
exposures, such as proximity to highways or toxic waste dumps.”
Herbert argues that “we can address the disturbed pathways now, before
the gene hunters have definitive information. Genes, after all, don’t
specify behaviors. They make regulatory factors that interact in
highly complex ways. And as far as the impact of chemicals on
neurodevelopment, only about 20 to 30 of the 85,000 chemicals made
have been studied. We can, at the very least, try to modulate autism
by treating the tissue inflammation.”
In other words, treat now, before the gavel of science strikes a final
judgment, which might be decades away. That’s what Erin and her
husband, Michael, did for Brendan and Kyle: They blended mainstream
treatments like speech and occupational therapy with the best
biomedical approaches available. “I was told to take my boys home and
love them,” recalls Erin. “The neurologist said don’t waste your time
on alternative treatments, nothing about them is proven. My boys could
have ended up institutionalized, or my husband and I would have had to
take care of them their whole adult lives. When your child gets a
diagnosis of autism, you lose the child you were dreaming about, the
one who will go to college, get married, become a parent. That just
wasn’t an option.”
The boys first saw an alternative Colorado practitioner who had been
trained by a group called Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!). DAN! was
cofounded in 1995 by the psychologist Bernard Rimland, whose own son
was autistic. DAN! treatments focus on intestinal issues,
detoxification, nutrition, and neuroinflammation. Recommendations
include dietary restriction, usually eliminating gluten (present in
wheat and other grains) and dairy.
“For weeks after Kyle stopped drinking milk, he had welts all over his
body,” Erin recalls, “as if he were going through a detoxification
reaction. At the same time, he had his first formed, regular bowel
movements. His sleep improved.”
Other DAN!-recommended treatments include detoxification to remove
heavy metals and other suspected pollutants, nutritional
supplementation, and sometimes off-label use of anti-inflammatories,
antivirals, and allergy medications. These so-called biomedical
treatments range from relatively inexpensive dietary changes costing a
few hundred dollars a month to doses of antifungal drugs that can cost
several hundreds of dollars. Many DAN! supplements play critical roles
in the pathways studied by scientists like Jill James. DAN!
practitioners are, of course, leaping into the deep end of the pool
before science has truly proved these treatments effective, but there
are many anecdotal cases of improvement.
Not surprisingly, there has been criticism of the biomedical approach,
especially when doctors promise too much or parents hope too
desperately for recovery. As James notes, one mother killed herself
after seeking every possible treatment for her autistic daughter to no
avail, causing a furor among parents with autistic children.
Some children just do not get better, no matter what the intervention.
Elizabeth Mumper is CEO of a group called Advocates for Children and
former director of pediatric education at the Lynchburg Family
Practice Program affiliated with the University of Virginia. Of the
2,000 children in her practice, about 400 have autism spectrum
disorders. She describes one boy whom “I have not helped despite my
best efforts. He is 17 and still nonverbal and has horrible, erosive
esophagitis in spite of the fact that he works very closely with a
gastroenterologist. He has to sleep standing up and leaning over his
dresser because of the pain, and he has very idiosyncratic reactions
to medications. And even though he is nonverbal, he can type anything
to me. He’s alpha-smart. The horror is that he’s trapped in a body
that doesn’t work.”
“I hate the term ‘full recovery,’ ” James adds, “because of this false
hope. Some children do lose the diagnosis, but that’s rare. I don’t
think that should be out there as a goal. We need to accept [the kids]
and love them for who they are—because they are lovable. They’re
quirky.”
+++
Erin’s boys benefited from their DAN! doctor, she says, but it was in
2003, when she switched to a highly unconventional molecular biologist
and naturopath based in Maine, Amy Yasko, that she began to see more
striking changes. Yasko blends the new findings on methylation with a
scientist’s background in the finer steps of fundamental
detoxification pathways in the body. However, she largely favors
herbs, dietary change, and nutritional supplements over prescription
medications. She monitors biomarkers of detoxification in the urine as
often as every week or two and tweaks supplements accordingly. Her
program is intensive and steeped in molecular biology; her twice-
yearly conferences are extremely dense, scientific, and intended to
help parents become at least semiproficient in the biology and
chemistry themselves. It is a far cry from the old doctor-patient model
—Yasko works primarily on the Internet now, with phone consultations,
to interpret test results. She decided to do this when her waiting
list for individuals stretched to five years, and, she says, she felt
she was not helping enough children. Erin e-mailed me about 40 charts
of metal “dumps” for both of her boys—urinalyses Yasko had ordered and
charted on a graph to show the excretion of everything from arsenic to
aluminum, mercury, and lead over time. “All these little things
started clicking after we started with her,” says Erin.
“I call this approach biomolecular nutrigenomics, after Bruce Ames, a
professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of
California at Berkeley,” says Yasko. “He said that someday it would
become routine to screen individuals for polymorphisms and that
nutritional interventions to improve health were likely be a major
benefit of the genomics area.” Yasko tests for common polymorphisms in
the methylation pathway, even though these findings are still
preliminary. This has made her controversial among her peers. Yet
several doctors and scientists with autistic children admitted
privately to using Yasko’s services while being unwilling to go on the
record to support her.
Yasko, who says she moved her husband and three daughters from
Connecticut to a rural area of Maine to “hear the snowflakes fall on
the snow and get to that quiet place inside where I can think,” seems
immune to the controversy. “I was in a research environment for a long
time, where you had to publish. Then I was in biotech for a long time,
where you had to keep everything quiet. When I began to focus on
autistic children, I made a decision that instead of publishing in
peer review journals, I was going to go directly to the moms and help
them. I knew in making that decision I was going to get flak. That’s
OK. It was like I was on those cliffs you see in the movies, and
you’re going to jump. You don’t know if there’s water below, or enough
momentum to get to the other side, but you just jump.”
Can we cajole a mysteriously shuttered brain and body back toward
normal? And if so, will autism give us new insight into other
disorders?
Today Erin’s boys participate in individualized programs at school and
are being monitored in two national studies of families with more than
one autistic child—one at the Duke Center for Human Genetics, another
at the University of Washington. Kyle has, in addition, been tested
three times at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center’s
toddler development program. Both are still on the autism spectrum—but
the incessant tantrums, digestive problems, and infections have
vanished. Brendan no longer chews on his shirt, flaps his arms, and
grinds his teeth. In fact, he made honor roll in his classes last
year. Kelly Swift, the boys’ schoolteacher since the autumn of 1996,
describes them as “sociable and on the whole very happy, with a great
sense of humor. Kyle is probably the most changed of any autistic
child I’ve ever worked with.”
Kyle, who stopped speaking entirely at age 2, is now a font of
creative language. I know this because Erin and the boys spent a
weekend at my house. At lunch, Kyle poured a Vesuvius of ketchup onto
his plate and began transforming his french fries into boats that
sailed across the ketchup before they were disposed of in his mouth;
he then began to entertain us by pretending he was an announcer at a
regatta, where he, of course, was winning the race. What had once been
autism had erupted into a geyser of quirky creativity.
The boys’ blossoming, according to their mom, is one not easily
measured on tests. “It’s the length of their sentences, their empathy
and sense of humor. Last night we went by a house that was all lit up
for the holidays and Kyle joked, ‘Does that guy want to be seen from
space?’ When we used to take Kyle to the dentist, he would scream
bloody murder and we’d try to papoose him—put him on a board and wrap
him in sheets, but even that didn’t work, so they put him to sleep
just to clean his teeth. Last year we went to the dentist, and he
heard a little boy crying, walked over to him, rubbed his back, told
him it wouldn’t hurt, and not to worry. My heart was melting.”
Can we cajole a mysteriously shuttered brain and body back toward
normal? And if so, will autism give us new insight into other
disorders? Martha Herbert thinks so: “A lot of these metabolic
pathways are pretty fundamental to life. If we can crack the puzzle of
autism and be clear about how we did it, that may have huge
implications for other chronic environmentally triggered systemic
illnesses. Autism could be a much-needed wake-up call to us all.”
Mark Probert
> http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/autism-it2019s-not-just-in-the-h...
>
> Autism: It’s Not Just in the Head
Correct. It is in the genes.
Mark Probert
Did you have a rational point to make? If so, please post it.
Arak
>
> The devastating derangements of autism also show up in the gut and in
> the immune system.
Am I the only one who takes issue with the term "devastating
derangements"?
Probably... I still find it insulting.
Arak /|\
Bob Badour
Only because you don't have the twit filtered.
Stephen Wilson
"Arak" <arak.t...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:88db0d81-f9a0-43ba...@b36g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
I find the entire post insulting. As for "devastating derangement", I guess
it depends on the individual. I have met some autistic people where that
term is fairly accurate. I agree that it's pretty demeaning for those on the
high functioning end of the autistic spectrum.
Arak /|\
Martijn Dekker
"Stephen Wilson" <stephen.wils...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I find the entire post insulting. As for "devastating derangement", I guess
> it depends on the individual. I have met some autistic people where that
> term is fairly accurate. I agree that it's pretty demeaning for those on the
> high functioning end of the autistic spectrum.
I don't disagree, but on the other hand, some of the happiest kids I've
ever met in my life are "low functioning" autistic.
- M.
Mark Probert
I find it more than insulting. It is de-humanizing.
pautrey2
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/autism-it2019s-not-just-in-the-head/?searchterm=autism
Autism: It’s Not Just in the Head
03.22.2007
The devastating derangements of autism also show up in the gut and in
by Jill Neimark
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/autism-it2019s-not-just-in-the-head/?searchterm=autism
earthpots
I find it deplorable, but since I killfiled the kook, I don't see the
typicaly insulting clap-trap it posts anyways. The NG is so much nicer
without seeing all of the conspiracy-theory nutcases.
--
Carol
Contessa of Consternation
Known to leave foes discombobulated
Autistic Spectrum Code v.1.0
AS? d- s--:+ a+ c+ p+ t-- f S+ p@- e+ h- r- n+(-) i+ P m-() M
http://www32.brinkster.com/ascdecode/
"I have run rings around you logically". Monty Python
Email at clay_p...@nospam.com, removing the 'nospam' and replacing
with 'msn'.
Arak
>
> Only because you don't have the twit filtered.
I read these online, so I have no access to a kill-file or a filter.
Which really sucks.
Arak /|\
Bob Badour
Mozilla newsreaders are free.