This book seems to imply that it can. Are there case studies to support this postion?
There is little serious evidence that autism can be cured through any type of intervention. There is substantial evidence that early intervention can reduce or possibly eliminate negative social and linguistic difficulties in autism. I’ve seen it suggested that intervention should be started at the first suspicion of autism, as a true diagnosis cannot be obtained until it is too late for maximum efficacy (Myers, Plauché Johnson, & the Council on Children with Disabilities, 2007).
To the best of my knowledge, the only treatment modality for autism which has ever been demonstrated to be effective is the one developed by Ivar Lovaas, and it only appears to work in already high-functioning autists. I’ve been told that the lab at UCLA only accepts children with some form of expressive language capabilities. I get the impression from talking to people in the field that Lovaas and his colleagues bias their selection criteria towards those children with a higher probability of a favorable outcome. But it appears to actually work, and his results have been independently replicated.
I’m an ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) therapist. ABA is one of the few scientifically-backed therapies for autism. I would never say that ABA therapy cures autism. But it can make the difference between a child who stares out of windows all day (or spins wheels, or flaps his hands, or repeats meaningless phrases) and a child who can initiate and sustain human interaction. It can make the difference between a non-verbal child who screams, cries, or is violent towards himself and others, and a child who can communicate his wants and needs through language or signs.
There is no cure, but intensive ABA intervention can work wonders. The earlier intervention begins, the better, because the “bang for your buck” you get in ages 2-5 is much higher than in later years- much more progress is made in the same number of weeks/months.
My SIL used to work with Eric Lovaas, and IIRC his approach is similar to ABA.
Early, intensive ABA therapy gave us excellent results, to the point where even the neuros at UCLA no longer place our son on the spectrum when they test him.
ETA- I doubt like hell we can safely say there is a factual answer to this one… might be better suited to IMHO…
Early intervention can help a lot. We got my son Dweezil’s diagnosis of Autism/Asperger’s/HFA at age 3, and had him in therapy pretty much ever since. We never had to go the ABA route, luckily. (My only beef with ABA is that it looks like a lot of work.) He has made huge progress in the intervening years. He’s 14 now, and the biggest way he’s different from other boys his age is that he’s generally nicer. He’s downright nice!
Is he cured? I don’t think so. However I can see him graduating college, holding down a career, becoming a functioning and contributing member of society. He might be in therapy his whole life to get by comfortably, but he won’t be the only one.
That’s something I’ve always wondered about ABA - does it work on kids with classical autism too, or just high functioning? It seemed to help the boys I worked with, but both were high functioning at the age of 4 and 5, so I’m not sure how much of that was due to them being much more mildly effected that the kid in my high school who screamed all the time and never spoke.
Can early intervention “beat” autism?
For the profoundly impaired, probably not, but it could help quite a bit.
For the highly functioning with at /near/or above normal intelligence, probably yes. I wouldn’t say “beat” or “cure”, but this group is highly teachable so could show remarkable improvement.
I’m no expert. I’m just a parent and our case is a little different because of a complicating birth factor. I’m certain of the autism because I see it all over my family tree. I’m also certain it’s prematurity because he was born at 23 weeks.
My son got his formal Aspergers’s or high functioning autism diagnsosis at 5 but was in some kind of therapy since birth due to his extreme prematurity. Certainly, the thereapies directed at his prematurity issues were beneficial to his autism issues even though he didn’t get that diagnosis until later.
We did every therapy that didn’t seem wacky to me- no strange diets or chelation or holding therapy, etc., just normal stuff like PT,OT speech and social skills training. I never did brushing or joint compression therapy, but my son sort of did it on his own which I found both strange (at first) and interesting.
Some of his therapies, like speech (for pragmatic and reciprocol language, not articulation) and social skills, were primarily provided by professionals. This was a weak area for me and the therapist he had was very good, so I let her mostly handle that one. Still, we practiced what she taught at home. A lot.
Others like PT and OT were mostly provided by myself through more normal routes like gymnastics or martial arts classes for large muscles and art/craft things and keyboarding for fine motor.
Probably the biggest thing we did was to have a stay-at-home parent. Having someone available and interested in obtaining and implementing the therapies at home is probably the largest factor in my son’s good outcome. And that is intervention.
But ultimately, it’s hard to tell how sucessful this has all been for a couple of reasons.
First, we obviously would not be able to predict how he would be functioning now if he didn’t have the experiences he has had. My opinion is that he’s made huge improvements, but I’m not sure I could prove it to anyone. He’s not a case study, he’s just a kid with an intensively interested parent.
Two, I can’t know which of or how much his issues are related to extreme prematurity and which of or how much are autism. Did he outgrow his prematurity issues or did the therapies teach the austistic him to behave more normally?
And, we’ve been doing all this in a sort af a vacuum- except for speech, PT and OT at school, there are not any formal ‘autism programs’ around here. All we’ve done has been pieced together by myself with suggestions from the school district. I’m jealous of people who have these programs- I can’t even find a place to have him evaluated. Our local area hospital only has evaluations and programs for babies. So without ongoing evaluations, I can’t document improvement in any quantifiable way.
In her memoir “What Falls Away” Mia Farrow talks of working with her son who had “autistic tendencies.” She noticed her looked at another person for the first time when her mother picked him up while wearing bright pink lipstick. She took the child into a totally white room and painted her lips pink. He looked at her. She then started doing anything she could think of to interact with him, and eventually got him to play peek-a-boo.
Torey Hayden is a child psychologists who writes in one of her books about the “beauty” of autistic children. How they remind her of fairy children, the changlings who are spirited away from a beautiful world and trapped in ours and unable to reconcile themselves to it. She also notices that when she does manage to reach them, they lose some of that beauty.
So for high functioning very young autistic children, intensive early intervention can work in some cases.
In a paper published in 2007, Spencer indicated that ADHD symptoms decrease over time as the child enters early adulthood. Given that ADHD is part of the autistic spectrum of disorders and often co-morbid with Aspergers, it isn’t too surprising that some therapies may appear to help. Whether or not they really do is often difficult to untangle from natural progression independent from any intervention. To further complicate things, there are many subtypes of ASDs, some of which aren’t picked up by the behavioral inventories used to diagnose ASDs. I think early intervention does indeed help, but the outcome is often tied to the unique ASD traits displayed by that child, and how much those traits allow the child to benefit from a particular type of intervention.
Vlad/Igor
I don’t think that ADHD is on the autism spectrum, although symptoms of both can be present. Is it? I can’t read the link, I’m on my phone…
I have seen ABA work for “classically autistic” kids, if by that you mean non-verbal, stimming, prone-to-screaming-fits kids. Absolutely. By “work” I mean provide real alternatives to problem behaviors and enable kids to communicate their feelings and exhibit alternative behaviors.
I’s not.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/autism/what-are-the-autism-spectrum-disorders.shtml
ADHD has had some genetic hits that overlap genes associated with ASDs. There is also significant co-morbidity between ADHD and Aspergers. The current DSM does not show ADHD fully on the ASD spectrum, however I have been told that the next DSM will include ADHD in the spectrum. Dyslexia is also being considered as part of the autistic spectrum because of the (mild) information processing problems seen with other ASDs. The major point is that all of these syndromes involve some sort of processing problem, and that they lie on a large spectrum. That they have different names and ICD codes does not preclude them from co-occurring in an individual.
Vlad/Igor