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AUTISM FIRST STEPS
AUTISM DAILY NEWSLETTER
Wednesday December 19, 2001
INDEX:
* Toys for Kids with
Special Needs
* Drug no cure for autism
* Broward aftercare program serves disabled students
* NEW PICTURE OF INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS THE OVERLOOKED ROLE
OF VISUOSPATIAL ABILITIES
* A costly IDEA in many
ways
* Do you compute?
* Vaccines do not lead to serious illness,studies find
******************************
Toys for Kids with Special Needs
St.Petersburg Times
December 18, 2001
Walking through a toy store during the holidays seems like a visit to the sets
of Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings all rolled into one. With a dizzying
array of toys competing for our attention, finding just the right gift for a
child can be daunting -- especially if the child has a physical, mental or
developmental difficulty. But with forethought and careful evaluation,
grown-ups can often give kids with disabilities the same kinds of popular toys
and games as their friends, even a Luke Skywalker laser sword or Monopoly. And
these youngsters can reap the same benefits, too. The right toys encourage
learning, develop motor skills, coordination and balance, improve cognitive
ability and concentration and strengthen muscles. No matter what the child's
needs are, experts say, certain general principles apply in selecting a toy or
game, such as first identifying the child's abilities and interests and determining
what is age appropriate given his or her mental or physical impairments.
"Parents should use common sense," says Sherry S. Vinson, a
neurodevelopmental pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
"Just ask yourself: What will this toy require my child to do? And is he
or she capable of that?" Take an inventory of his or her skills and
limitations. Consider whether the child can sit up in a chair, complete a
sequence of steps or push a button. Some children, for instance, may have problems
turning knobs because their fine motor skills haven't developed. But if they
can press an object with an index finger, select a toy with large buttons
activated by a simple action. And figure out what the child enjoys, whether
it's listening to music, playing with dinosaurs or building things. Because
children may be delayed in their physical or mental development, parents should
select what is appropriate for their developmental stage rather than
chronological age. "If a 6-year-old only understands language at a
3-year-old level, for example, gear toys toward the 3-year-old level,"
Vinson says. Simplicity is important because it sparks imagination. If a toy
does everything, says Martha B. Bronson, a professor of developmental and
educational psychology at Boston College, "It doesn't stimulate the
participation and interaction that are essential to learning." And the toy
or game doesn't need to be costly to be fun. Play-doh and modeling clay are
often recommended for kids with attention deficit disorder because moving their
hands helps them to focus. Similarly, coloring books and finger paints can help
them develop fine motor functions. Balls, yo-yos, jump ropes and Hula Hoops
strengthen muscles and improve balance and coordination. Even familiar standbys
such as Lincoln logs, Legos, Tinker Toys and blocks promote fine motor skills,
visual acuity, problem solving and creativity, experts say. "Don't
capitulate to the whine factor and buy the expensive toy of the moment,"
says Claire Green, executive director of the Parent's Choice Foundation, a
nonprofit consumer group in Baltimore that evaluates children's toys and books.
"Look for something that will sustain an interest beyond ripping the paper
off the package." Help in choosing toys for kids with disabilities
National Lekotek Center, a nonprofit organization, sponsors a help line on how
to choose toys for children with disabilities. Toll-free 1-800-366-7529, 7
a.m.-3 p.m. Monday through Friday. Toy Guide for Differently Abled Kids,
developed by the National Lekotek Center and Toys R Us, is free at Toys R Us
stores or by calling the National Lekotek Center. Guide to Toys for Children
Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired, a catalog created by the American
Foundation for the Blind and the American Toy Institute, features toys and
games for children of all ages. Toll-free 1-800-232-5463 or www.toy-tia.org .
Toys for Special Children makes toys, robots, trains and scooters activated by
touch, sips or puffs of air. Toll-free 1-800-832-8697. -- Los Angeles Times
http://www.brainconnection.com/SITEWare/2001/12/18/eng-sptimes_floridian/eng-sptimes_floridian_070638_201_83983735973.php3
******************************
Drug no cure for autism
Study finds no evidence that secretin helpsBy Lois M. Collins
Deseret News staff writer Parents pinning hopes
on secretin to help their children who have autism are apt to be disappointed.
Research conducted by the University of Utah,
University of California-Irvine and University of Chicago found no evidence
that secretin helps children with autism.
"I've been involved in autism research since
1979," said Dr. William M. McMahon, director of the Utah Autism Program in
the Department of Psychiatry at the U. "Every three years there's a claim
for a new miracle cure. And it takes several years to test that claim with good
science. Unfortunately, we don't yet have any cure for autism. There are a lot
of discouraged parents and a lot of hope, energy and money spent trying to
address this problem."
University of Maryland researchers had reported that children with autism
improved after they had a radiologic study of their gastrointestinal function,
possibly because of the secretin given to test the activity of the pancreas and
the bowel. Soon, parents were swapping information over the Internet about the
improvements possible with secretin. It became so popular that supplies of
secretin were depleted.
McMahon noted that "claims of
improvement" are helpful to scientists because it helps guide research.
But such claims seldom take into account a placebo effect. And previous studies
have shown that "children with autism do respond to a placebo at the rate
of 30 to 40 percent."
He added that parents who are trying different
treatments, like diet treatments "where the parent goes to great lengths
to monitor the diet, bake fresh bread, etc., give the child more positive
attention. The environment has changed. Hope is a powerful remedy and hope is
contagious. The child catches it, too." That can change behavior some and
contribute to the illusion that a specific treatment is doing more than it is.
"Hope is a great thing, but if you're going
to claim a treatment has a specific positive effect, you have to do the
research to find out if the positive effect is really due to something specific
to that treatment or a more general effect of doing something new and different
and infusing hope," McMahon said.
The U. study involved giving each child both
secretin and saline placebo intravenously at different times. Researchers
measured different outcomes, including language and changes in the behaviors
associated with autism, as reported by both parents and teachers. Each child
also had a diagnostic test that's designed specifically for autism.
"The placebo and secretin have equal
effect," said McMahon. All the indicators point out there was no
change."
The best treatment for autism is still early
intervention aimed to improve language and social interactions, he said.E-mail:
lois@desnews.com
http://www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,355013326,00.html?
******************************
Broward aftercare program serves disabled
students
By Lona O'Connor
Education Writer
Posted December 18 2001
Just the thought that she might have to find a new after-school care program
for her son, Omar Wright, was enough to make Jennifer Ferguson cry. Wright had
just turned 13. A single mother, Ferguson needed aftercare for her son until
she could pick him up after work.
Complicating matters was the fact that Wright has autism and a hearing
impairment. As Ferguson found, there are few aftercare programs for students
with disabilities, who usually need greater supervision. Most aftercare
programs turn away such students.
"I couldn't envision that there was such a limit to the places we could
take our children," Ferguson said.
It took many phone calls for Ferguson to locate an aftercare program for
students with disabilities. Now 17, Wright is happily settled in at Cypress
Hammock Park in Coral Springs, one of 24 programs housed in schools and
recreation centers around Broward County. Many of his friends from the Bright
Horizons School in Pompano Beach also attend.
The aftercare program is a partnership of several community agencies, led by
the YMCA. About 250 children and adults get aftercare through the program.
"With 30,000 children in [Exceptional Student Education], we are only
hitting the tip of the iceberg with this program," said YMCA vice
president Irene Butcher.
Many aftercare programs for younger students with disabilities are called
"inclusive," combining regular students and those with disabilities.
The purpose of inclusive programs is to put regular students and students with
disabilities at ease with each other.
Other programs, like the one at Cypress Hammock Park, are called
"clusters." They are for older students or those with more severe
disabilities, which require greater supervision.
Joshua Horvith, 18, has Down syndrome and attends Bright Horizons in Pompano
Beach. After school, he and his friends ride the school bus to Cypress Hammock.
He enjoys spending time with them, his father said. Howard Horvith and his
wife, Ellen, said they would not feel comfortable leaving Joshua alone at home
while they work.
The after-school programs are particularly important as the students -- and
their parents -- get older. "They have to have the respite," said
Butcher.
"Thank God it's there," said Howard Horvith. While Joshua Horvith
goes to aftercare, his father, a restaurant cook, is able to run errands and
handle business for his condo association, of which he is president. When
there's time, Howard Horvith just relaxes.
The students arrive at Cypress Hammock Park in small school buses with sturdy
lifts for wheelchairs. Inside the recreation building, they play musical
chairs, socialize, stroll the room -- the usual after-school activities. They
have various disabilities: autism, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy.
Like most aftercare programs, Cypress Hammock Park is low-tech. Students play
with a few well-used games or do their homework. Between 5 and 6 p.m., parents
trickle in to pick up their children.
Aura Garcia arrives to pick up her granddaughter, Ileana Wegener, 21. Garcia
and Wegener's mother take care of her and two other grandchildren. Wegener, who
has cerebral palsy, is active in several sports, including track and field, and
has participated in Special Olympics games. She is on her way to a karate
lesson. Her grandmother, an average-sized but wiry woman, lifts first Wegener
and then her bulky wheelchair into a specially outfitted van.
Susan Goldstein, an advocate for children with disabilities, tells the story
about how she was able to demonstrate the need to add more after-school care
for older students.
"The parents of older children were aggravated because it seemed like
there were no programs for their kids," said Goldstein, who has a
9-year-old daughter with autism.
Several years ago, she said, a disabled youth lost his house key after a school
bus dropped him off at home. He was arrested for trying to find an open window
to get into his own house. Because of his disability, he was unable to convince
the police officer of what he was doing.
Goldstein used that incident to persuade Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne to provide a
grant to help the existing disabilities aftercare program. The purpose of the
grant, which also included money from the Broward school district and the
state, was to provide a pilot program that could be duplicated in other
counties. Those efforts have been stalled by the state's economic problems
since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Butcher worries that some sources of money might shrink, but says the program
will continue to manage somehow.
Lona O'Connor can be reached at lo'connor@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4604.
http://news.mywebpal.com/news_tool_v2.cfm?show=localnews&pnpID=811&NewsID=226136&CategoryID=9046&on=0
******************************
NEW PICTURE OF INTELLIGENCE HIGHLIGHTS THE
OVERLOOKED ROLE OF VISUOSPATIAL ABILITIES
Research Offers More Evidence That Intelligence Goes Beyond Verbal
SkillsWASHINGTON - When we say that people "know their way around,"
we really mean they're smart. Now, psychologists have evidence that strong visuospatial
skills and working memory may be at least as good as verbal skills and
working memory as indicators of general intelligence. New research correlates
visuospatial abilities, less extensively explored than verbal abilities in
intelligence research, with the brain's "executive function," the
central cognitive command and control that may lie at the heart of smarts.
These findings appear in the December issue of the Journal of Experimental
Psychology - General, published by the American Psychological Association
(APA).A five-psychologist research team from across the United States tested
167 participants on a variety of tasks to discern the relationships among
spatial abilities (abilities to solve visuospatial problems), visuospatial
working memory (an ability to temporarily store relevant visuospatial
information), and executive functioning (the brain's supervisory or regulatory
functions). The resulting pattern of interactions paint a clear picture.
Participants who were good at complex visuospatial tasks that involved visually
encoding items, maintaining those images, and manipulating them -- in other
words, people who had more effective "inner sketchpads" (useful in
everything from rearranging the furniture to fitting luggage into the trunk of
the car) -- also performed better on executive function tasks. Such executive
functions, somewhat analogous to the functions of company executives, included
coordinating multiple tasks, setting up and managing various goals and
subgoals, avoiding impulsive response tendencies and inhibiting automatic but
incorrect responses.Because psychologists are coming to view executive
functioning -- supported by the brain's frontal lobes and crucial in regulating
and controlling behavior -- as central to the concept of intelligence, the
results tie visuospatial ability to general intelligence.Miyake et al. also
looked at how well visuospatial working memory and executive function
correlated with three basic spatial abilities. Executive ability had the
strongest correlation with spatial visualization, which required complex
multi-step visuospatial reasoning, and the lowest correlation with perceptual
speed, which required quick visual matching of simple shapes. (The third
ability tested was spatial relations, which required mentally rotating a simple
figure quickly.) In short, participants who were better "visualizers"
and can solve complex visuospatial problems accurately and quickly also had
stronger executive function. This makes sense, say the researchers, because
spatial visualization tests are more complex than perceptual speed tests and
thus draw on the mental "executive" more fully, revealing the close
ties between the two.According to the authors, the implications are clear for
everything from measurement to education and training, with potential for
ensuring that the intelligence of visuospatially oriented people is not
discounted. These people have been viewed as having strengths limited to the
practical, mechanical and technical realms. "Traditional IQ tests have
more verbally oriented items than visuospatial," says the article's lead
author, Akira Miyake, Ph.D., of the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Understanding
the nature of visuospatial abilities and their relationships to general
intelligence or to general-purpose executive functions should contribute
strongly to more fair and comprehensive tests of intelligence." The study
also lends support to the emerging view that intelligence has both multiple
discrete components -- such as, for example, the independent verbal and
visuospatial domains -- and an over-arching general aspect, which Miyake et al.
believe may be "executive function," tapped when the domains
undertake more complex or novel tasks. Executive function may also coordinate
and modulate the domains' various lower-level processes. The article's other
co-authors are Naomi P. Friedman, Ph.D., also of the University of Colorado at
Boulder; David A. Rettinger, Ph.D., of Yeshiva University; Priti Shah, Ph.D.,
of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Mary Hegarty, Ph.D., of the
University of California, Santa Barbara. Article: "How are
Visuospatial Working Memory, Executive Functioning, and Spatial Abilities
Related? A Latent-Variable Analysis;" Akira Miyake, Ph.D., and Naomi P.
Friedman, University of Colorado at Boulder; David A. Rettinger, Ph.D., Yeshiva
University; Priti Shah, Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Mary
Hegarty, Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara; Journal of
Experimental Psychology - General, Vol. 130, No. 4. Akira Miyake can be
reached by e-mail at miyake@psych.colorado.edu
or by phone at 303-492-2305.Full text of the article is available from
the APA Public Affairs Office and at http://www.apa.org/journals/xge/press_releases/december_2001/xge1304621.html
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the
largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the
United States and is the world's largest association of psychologists. APA's
membership includes more than 155,000 researchers, educators, clinicians,
consultants and students. Through its divisions in 53 subfields of psychology
and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial
associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and
as a means of promoting human welfare.
http://www.apa.org/releases/visuospatial2.html
******************************
A costly IDEA in many ways
To listen
to the mutual backslapping from the Bush administration and Congress last week
over the passage of an "education reform" bill, one would think that
Washington had really hit upon some magical formula that will transform
America's educational system into something to be proud of. But there is good
reason to be suspicious of the premise underlying the overall bill: that, by
throwing billions of additional federal dollars at education and forcing state
and local schools to jump through a bunch of new regulatory hoops to get the
dough, Washington will magically transform schools into places where Junior
learns to read and write, and can even find the United States on a map. But the
bill is a cruel hoax in other ways, such as its failure to reform the
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a federal program that is
making it virtually impossible to remove chronically disruptive and violent
special-education students from the classroom.
IDEA, first enacted in 1975, defines a child with a
disability as one with hearing, speech or language impairments; visual
impairments; autism; traumatic brain injuries; emotional disturbances or
problems with social or emotional development. In most cases, IDEA only permits
the removal of disabled students from the classroom "when they cannot be
educated in that setting with supplemental aids and services," according
to the General Accounting Office. In practice, this has come to mean that
schools will do just about anything to avoid the threat of prolonged litigation
and other expenses they'll incur if they try to keep the most dangerous
"disabled" students out of a regular classroom.
There are legions of IDEA horror stories. In one
Louisiana case, two students, one of them disabled, beat a female student so
badly that she had to be hospitalized. The non-disabled student was expelled.
The disabled student was suspended for just 10 days, columnist Kenneth Smith of
The Washington Times reported in 1999. In another case, a 14-year-old
special-education student, who had already been suspended for threatening a
school aide, attacked her principal several times, knocking her down and
causing permanent nerve damage. The student was suspended for 45 days. The
principal missed eight months of work. In Alabama, an 11-year-old
special-education student with a history of throwing desks threatened to shoot
to death several other children, and subsequently threatened to kill the entire
third grade. But, when the issue of expelling the student came up, a school
administrator invoked IDEA to urge a go-slow approach. One special-education
teacher wrote Sen. Jeff Sessions that IDEA, "however well-intentioned, has
become one of the single greatest obstacles that educators face in our fight to
provide children with a quality education delivered in a safe environment."
Thanks to IDEA, parents of violent children can sue
their local system to ensure junior's "right" to a public education.
After a 10-year-old boy in Brandywine County, Del., brought a knife to class
and set fire to a restroom, the state, which spends approximately $8,000 a year
to educate a child, agreed to send him to an out-of-state private school at an
annual cost of $70,000. In Seattle, after a blind and autistic teen-ager
started a series of melees in which he head-butted a teacher, scratched a
school aide in the eye and injured a school bus driver and another aide, school
officials barred him from class. After a judge found out that the district's
efforts to serve the youth were "inadequate" under the IDEA and
ordered him reinstated, the district paid $180,000 to the boy's mother to
remove her son from school.
In May, the House voted 246-181 for an amendment
sponsored by Georgia Republican Rep. Charles Norwood that would have given
school systems greater authority to remove violent, disruptive students from
the classroom. The Senate subsequently voted for a similar amendment offered by
Mr. Sessions. But, conferees, bowing to pressure from the Bush administration
and disability-rights advocates, dropped IDEA reform language from the
education bill currently before Congress. So, disregard the self-congratulatory
pabulum from Capitol Hill and the administration about the wonders of the
education "reform" bill. Real reform of IDEA — a minimum condition
for making the politicians' rhetoric about "safe schools for all
children" a reality — will have to wait until next year.
http://washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20011217-496231.htm
******************************
Do you compute?
Our brains excel at all kinds of
things, but when neurobiologists and psychobiologists try to reverse engineer
certain brain functions in order to produce a machine or system that might
mimic some of the brain’s extraordinary abilities, more often than not they
fail (or at least engineer something that isn’t half so elegant). Now, researchers
funded by Dr. Harold Hawkins (Program Officer in ONR’s Cognitive and Neural
Sciences Division) think they’re on to something. By fusing engineering
techniques with neurobiology, they’ve been able to model mammalian brain
function using biologically realistic, highly detailed models of individual
brain neurons and their assemblies. They are learning how the architecture and
physiological properties of cells in the brain (the primary visual cortex)
integrate visual cues for target recognition. In other words… how the brain
computes. “Right now we’re building a cellular-level model of a small piece of
visual cortex,” says Dr. Leif Finkel, head of the University of Pennsylvania’s
Neuroengineering Research Lab. “It’s a very detailed computer simulation which
reflects with some accuracy at least the basic operations of real neurons.” His
colleague, Kwabena Boahen, is building VLSI computer chips that reproduce
cortical wiring and many of the properties of the cells. “He has a chip that
accurately models the retina and produces output spikes that closely match real
retinae. We hope someday that these can be used as retinal implants.” “We’ve
asked them to take a computational approach to neuroscience,” says Hawkins.
“They’re looking at object-recognition systems that mimic the brain's ability
to find patterns in highly cluttered visual scenes by integrating information
derived from bottom-up, top-down and horizontal connections among neurons in
the primary visual cortex. It’s precisely what the Defense Department is
interested in currently, and for obvious reasons… can we build systems that can
instantly pick out an individual face in a crowd? Or parse a visual scene into
its many parts? The goal is to use engineering analysis to discern the
principles of neural function, and then to use these principles in the design
of neuromorphic systems. Taken another step, we could use this same principle
to exploit motion information for target tracking in noise and clutter.”
Finkel’s team works closely with physiologists, and there's a lot of going back
and forth between the computer models and the real brains. “It's quite an
exciting time in the field, with a real sense of progress — Harold’s been
incredibly far-sighted about picking up on what's we’re doing and applying it
to what the Defense Department might find useful.” By making models of the
visual cortex using brain recordings, by putting neural networks on computer
chips, and by building mathematical models, these researchers are, in a sense,
"reverse engineering" the brain…developing hardware and software
systems that will have a similar ability to solve computationally difficult
problems. Precisely the stuff our real brains excel at without even thinking
about it.
Contact: Gail S. Cleere
cleereg@onr.navy.mil
703-696-4987
Office of Naval Research
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-12/oonr-dyc121701.php
******************************
ALERT ACTION Parents and Professionals
Please e-mail USA TODAY about this article (CDC Report was flawed):
Vaccines do not lead to serious illness,studies
find
By Anita Manning,
USA TODAYCHICAGO —
Concerns that vaccines may
occasionally trigger serious illnesses, including multiple sclerosis, diabetes
and autism, are not borne out in a variety of studies on vaccine safety,
researchers reported here Monday.
Experts at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology presented
summaries of safety data on vaccines that prevent measles, mumps and rubella
(MMR), hepatitis B and Lyme disease.In a study to determine whether the Lyme
disease vaccine causes arthritis, Arnold Chan of the Harvard School of Public Health
says interim results based on records of 5,000 vaccinated and 14,000
unvaccinated people show a slightly higher percentage of arthritis-related
diagnoses in vaccinated people (15.8%) compared with the unvaccinated
(13.9%).But a review of 25% of those reports found only five confirmed cases of
arthritis among vaccinated people; 15 confirmed among the unvaccinated.
"So far, there is no signal for an increase in risk" among the
vaccinated, Chan says.The reported link between the MMR vaccine, autism and inflammatory
bowel disease doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny, says Neal Halsey of Johns
Hopkins University. Some evidence suggests autism is caused by an abnormality
that occurs before birth in genetically predisposed babies, Halsey says, but
reports of symptoms appearing in toddlers shortly after they get the MMR shot
have raised fears of a causal relationship.Some parents and a handful of
researchers say there also is a link between the vaccine and intestinal
disorders, which they say are common in autistic children. But Halsey says
studies have been unable to establish a cause-and-effect connection between the
vaccine and autism, nor is the rate of gastrointestinal disorders higher in
autistic children than in others.The hepatitis B vaccine, which protects
against serious liver disease, has been linked to multiple sclerosis (MS) in
adults and to sudden infant death in babies and the onset of juvenile (type 1)
diabetes — and none of these associations appears valid, says Frank DeStefano
of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.A French study found
"persuasive evidence against an association" between the vaccine and
MS, he says. The CDC is doing a similar study that looks at patients with MS
and their vaccination history and "we're not finding any increased risk
(of developing MS) overall, or within a year of vaccination," DeStefano
says.The vaccine also is safe for kids, he says, noting a drop in incidences of
sudden infant death syndrome during a period when an increasing number of
babies were vaccinated against hepatitis B. And a study involving 252 children
with type 1 diabetes compared with non-diabetic kids found "no correlation
between diabetes and the hepatitis B vaccine," he says.In a separate
presentation, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin Medical School in
Madison reported promising results from early studies of a vaccine to prevent
recurring urinary tract infections in women. Walter Hopkins says 10% to 15% of
women experience three or more bladder infections every year, requiring
frequent use of antibiotics.The experimental vaccine, being developed with
funding from the National Institutes of Health, is given as a vaginal
suppository. In studies involving 54 women, 55% of those who got monthly
immunization had no infections for six months, while 89% of those given a
placebo experienced infections.Additional studies will begin soon.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/healthscience/health/2001-12-18-vaccines-usat.htm
******************************
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