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Can brain scans help personalize autism therapies and supports? … Institute at George Washington University. An Autism Speaks Meixner Postdoctoral Fellowship in Translational Research supported the research Dr. Yang describes here. Autism brain scans I’m glad to tell you about the promising findings of the … he or she would benefit from a given behavioral therapy or social training program. We did this with two very different groups of people affected by autism: young children and young adults. And each group completed a very different intervention … – at least at the current time. In theory, this might suggest that the person would do better with a treatment that supports and enhances key brain responses to social information. Already, various research teams are exploring ways to do …

Autism and mental health in young people… to address the special needs of people with autism? Naturally, there is no one treatment for a mental health crisis in any group of people – including those who have autism. Mental health professionals draw from many types of treatments to address … crises in youth with autism. We found that psychiatrists who saw youth with autism felt they lacked the professional support they needed when these young patients were in crisis – for example, support from other mental health professionals with special expertise in crisis management or a crisis-evaluation center. …

Autism and ‘optimal outcomes’… to rethink what we mean by “optimal outcomes” For years, we’ve been using this term to describe a relatively small group of people with autism who, with therapy and support, experience such a marked decrease in autism symptoms that they no longer meet the criteria we use to diagnose the … re-defining “optimal outcome” as the best possible outcome based on each child’s personal characteristics and available supports . We find this as a much more suitable concept for developing autism services and setting goals for each child, …

Girls, genes and autism… , at the University of Washington, in Seattle. I want to start by saying "thank you" to the Autism Speaks community for its support of my research. My Weatherstone Fellowship launched my scientific career by helping fund my first big study – into … and I wanted to use a relatively new gene-sequencing technique – called exome sequencing – to sequence  all  the genes in a group of girls and women on the autism spectrum.  [Editor’s note: Standard genetic testing involves the sequencing of only a … disrupted the normal formation of synapses – the vital connections that link brain cells with each other. This finding supported earlier evidence that problems with brain connectivity are a root cause of autism. In addition, we found many …

Teacher seeks advice: Student with autism intimidates others … to get the materials he needs – demonstrating polite behavior toward the other students in the process. Use words or visual supports (picture cards) to remind the student of rules (waiting turns, no pushing, no grabbing, etc.) before starting an … firmly ask him to put the item down and give him a brief time out (set a timer for, say, a minute) before he can rejoin the group and try again at appropriate behavior.  If his behavior is more challenging or longer lasting, work with his … he needs to wait for his turn. Keep it simple. We suggest offering two alternate activities that you know he enjoys. Visual supports can be particularly helpful for this strategy. For instance, you can offer him two cards with pictures of the …

ATN@Work: Personalizing hospital care for children with autism… the lead author of an Autism Treatment Network study that helped develop a model program for tailoring in-patient care to support kids with autism At Mass General Hospital for Children, Dr. Sarabeth Broder-Fingert  discusses a patient’s … Right after that eye-opening experience, I thought there must be other hospitals that have developed ways to support children and families affected by autism when they come into the hospital. So I set out to find these programs and … would then go in the child’s hospital file for every member of their care team to see. One caveat, the clinicians in the group cautioned, was that if the document was more than, say three page, it might not get used. So we needed to create a …

Real world autism interventions… appropriate, with a qualified healthcare professional and/or behavioral therapist. For the last decade, Autism Speaks has supported the highly successful research of psychologist Connie Kasari, of the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. … Autism Speaks’ public health team to develop and deliver the World Health Organization Parent Skills Training program to support the development of children with autism in underserved communities worldwide, including the United States. In this … physically touching the device’s buttons to communicate. We have published several studies from our work with this first group of children. The successful results led to an Autism Center of Excellence grant that enabled us to enroll an …