Archived Webinar - Prevalence, Characteristics, and Health Care of School-AgedChildren with a Parent-Reported History of Autism Spectrum Disorder-ALook at Recent National Survey Data.

In this webinar, Dr. Blumberg presents data from the recently released 2011-2012 National Survey of Children's Health and the 2011 Survey of Pathways to Diagnosis and Services to help participants better understand the rise in prevalence estimates of parent-reported autism spectrum disorder.

This is a really interesting webinar and he wonderfully shows some of the factors which may (or may not) have influenced the 1/5- prevalence estimate. He also gets into the sub-data, including gender. (Doug says)

View it here.

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Archived Webinar - Autism 202- Addressing Challenging Behaviors Strategies for Families

Nancy Rosenberg, PhD, BCBA, a special educator and behavioral specialist from the University of Washington, presents a Positive Behavior Support approach to addressing challenging behaviors in children on the autism spectrum. Topics include the importance of understanding the function of a child's behavior, a toolkit of key strategies for preventing problem behaviors and techniques for teaching replacement behaviors.

 Click here to watch the webinar. 

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5 Steps to Separate Science from Hype, No PhD Required

3. Evaluate the data Once you find the data, it’s time to evaluate it. Check to see if the scientists behind the original claim, or another group of scientists, have repeated the experiments (and make sure the results were the same each time!). It’s also better if they analyzed hundreds or thousands of people (or monkeys, or cells, or anything else) instead of just two or three. Also keep an eye out for all the differences between two groups in a study, especially with humans. Things like income levels and access to health care can sometimes explain the reported results better than whatever the article is proposing. Think about it this way: if you were in charge of figuring out the height of the average American male, you would need to measure a bunch of people to get it right. If you only measured a few people, and they happened to be basketball players, you’d be way off. Also keep an eye out for misleading graphs. Graphs are great for communicating complicated information quickly, but they can also be misleading. Here are a few classic graphical tricks to watch out for:

Learn more here. 

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Social Story for Autistic Children: "Standing in Line at School"

Watch it here. 

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Archived Webinar - Prevalence, Characteristics, and Health Care of School-AgedChildren with a Parent-Reported History of Autism Spectrum

In this webinar, Dr. Stephen Blumberg, Acting Associate Director for Science for the Division of Health Interview Statistics at the National Center on Health Statistics, will present data from the recently released 2011-2012 National Survey of Children's Health and the 2011 Survey of Pathways to Diagnosis and Services to help participants better understand the rise in prevalence estimates of parent-reported autism spectrum disorder.

Register here. 

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The Top Five Autism Books for Parents and Educators

Parenting or teaching a child with autism spectrum disorder is both challenging and rewarding. The adults in the lives of children with autism have to organize their home or classroom environment to make it a pleasant place where these kids can thrive. Caregivers have to understand the characteristics of kids on the spectrum and know what the children are trying to communicate by their unexpected or different behaviors. Knowing all this is a tall order and there is no better place to start than with a good book. We often hear that knowledge is power. That information is power. Good books can arm you with the strategies and information you need. Helen Exley said, “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.” Add a parent’s love and a teacher’s dedication to the mix and we have folks that truly can make all the difference in a child’s life!

 Here are a few books about autism that I recommend

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In autism, age at diagnosis depends on specific symptoms

The age at which a child with autism is diagnosed is related to the particular suite of behavioral symptoms he or she exhibits, new research from UW-Madison shows. Certain diagnostic features, including poor nonverbal communication and repetitive behaviors, were associated with earlier identification of an autism spectrum disorder, according to a study in the April issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Displaying more behavioral features was also associated with earlier diagnosis. One challenge is that autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are extremely diverse. According to the criteria outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fourth Edition — Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), the standard handbook used for classification of psychiatric disorders, there are more than 600 different symptom combinations that meet the minimum criteria for diagnosing autistic disorder, one subtype of ASD. In the study population, the median age at diagnosis (the age by which half the children were diagnosed) was 8.2 years for children with only seven of the listed behavioral features but dropped to just 3.8 years for children with all 12 of the symptoms.

 Read more here. 

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Autism risk not increased by Too Many Too Soon

The idea that vaccines are a primary cause of autism has been around for some time. The idea took off in the 1990′s when Andrew Wakefield claimed that the MMR was causing autism, including suggesting that not only was MMR causing autism but was responsible for the rise in diagnoses observed. Later, the idea that the increase in thimerosal exposure in the pediatric vaccine schedule of the 1990′s in the US was proposed by some groups as causing the increase in diagnoses. Both ideas have since been shown to be invalid. As the evidence mounted that the idea that thimerosal and/or MMR caused an autism epidemic was false, the idea that the increase in vaccines themselves was causing autism. This idea was popularized by Jenny McCarthy of Generation Rescue in the slogan “too many too soon”. The study is in the journal Pediatrics (full version available free): Increasing Exposure to Antibody-Stimulating Proteins and Polysaccharidesin Vaccines Is Not Associated with Risk of Autism .

 Read more here.

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My 20 Faces Of Autism

April 2, 2013 is the sixth annual World Autism Awareness Day. To be aware of autism, you have to know what it looks like first. Here’s a hint: it’s a spectrum made of people. Here are my 20 faces of autism 5. Autism looks like the person who wears a shirt and tie while pitching a tent on a camping trip.

 Click here to see more. 

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Study: Women Abused As Kids More Likely To Have Children With Autism

Women who reported physical, emotional, or sexual abuse when they were young were more likely to have a child with autism compared to women who were not abused. The more severely the women were abused, the higher their chances of having a child with autism; compared to women who weren’t abused, those who endured the most serious mistreatment were 60% as likely to have an autistic child. Because it’s possible that a mother’s exposure to abuse as a child could also lead her to engage in behaviors associated with harming the fetus — such as smoking, drinking during pregnancy, using drugs, being overweight, having preterm labor or giving birth to a premature or low birth weight baby — the scientists also calculated how much these factors contributed to the risk of ASD in the next generation. To their surprise, these conditions explained only 7% of the heightened risk among the abused women. That meant that abuse was exerting more lasting effects on the women’s bodies that were translating into an increased risk of autism in their children.

Read more:

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