It’s hard to find a disorder in this world that is more tricky than autism. Unlike the having to flu for example, it has become much more trivial as to determining if someone has autism or not. Many people are aware of what autism is, but unaware of how it is diagnosed and how we can maybe treat it.
There are many odd sociological trends as to the diagnosis of autism that don’t really make sense in the realm of how diseases are generally diagnosed these days. Long story short, much of what is used in the diagnosis of autism is based on largely subjective criteria in my opinion instead of the hard scientific facts that we have become accustomed to. For example children with parents who are upper-middle class and higher are more generally diagnosed with autism. Now how can this be? Well it’s no secret that these families are able to afford top quality medical care as well as multiple opinions. Social status aside, I think that the real problem lies within the criteria that have been set out in diagnosing this disorder.
These criteria are fairly numerous as you can see below.
This figure just gives an example of some of the criteria that are used in determining if someone has autism. Granted this from the DSM-IV and not the DSM-V, it still gives you an idea of the things that medical professionals look for. Like I said before, these criteria are so subjective. Once doctor could pronounce a child to not have autism, but the next one could pronounce the same child to have autism. That is my problem with this system. Also, medical professionals are trying to diagnose children at a younger and younger age all the time. I think that it is unfair to judge a 2 year old child on “failure to develop peer relationships” among other criteria. I mean what are you supposed to do, watch the kid at daycare and see if he plays with building blocks effectively with the other kids? And how do you assess children who just have a naturally quiet personality? I can’t help but think that some perfectly healthy yet quiet kids would be unfairly diagnosed as well. I think that this is at least in part the reason why we are seeing such an increase in autism diagnosis in the past decade.
Now that I have vented a few of my opinions about the system I can explain some of the science that is behind autism. Limited science has shown that autism is linked to CNV’s in a person’s genome. These are copy number variants, which are basically just alterations to a few different genes in the genome. These alterations of genes make cell adhesion very difficult and in turn make it difficult to form synapses and achieve synaptic plasticity. Unfortunately there aren’t really any drugs that can change a persons’ genome back to a healthy one. With that being said treatment options with autism revolve largely around therapy, as no real medications have been tested with great efficacy. I think that this paper has made me more aware of autism above anything else. It has helped me to form the opinion that we definitely need to conduct more research to learn more about this disorder, as it seems that we don’t have too much to go on at this point when compared to other disorders.
The odd truths about autism and its diagnosis
