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Autism Statistics : The incidence of isle children with autism has increased
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Posted by Sylvia on Friday, March 12, 2004 (23:08:08)
Star Bulletin 11/03/2004
By Helen Altonn
Childhood autism in Hawaii is growing at an epidemic rate, according to Autism Society officials.
The state Department of Education has categorized more than 720 kids with autism out of about 23,000 in special education in 2002, or about 3.1 percent, compared with 1 percent nationally, said Naomi Grossman, Autism Society of Hawaii president.
"It's no longer just an alarming rate; it's an epidemic pace, and we're really concerned because it could be due to a lot of things, like the Brick Township in New Jersey," Grossman said.
In Brick Township the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in 1998 that 6.7 of every 1,000 children age 3 to 10 had autism disorders. The rate -- three times greater than in previous years -- suggested a possible geographic cluster. An investigation indicated the number of cases could be affected by environmental factors as well as genetic influences.
Usually diagnosed before age 6, autism is a spectrum of neuropsychiatric disorders affecting a person's ability to interact socially and communicate, causing unusual and repetitive behavior.
The number of Hawaii residents age 6 to 22 diagnosed with autism rose to 528 in 2002 from 64 in 1993, according to Fighting Autism, a research and advocacy organization.
Every state has shown a triple-digit or higher increase in autism cases in the past 10 years, said Lee Grossman, chairman of the Autism Society of America. Other countries are seeing the same growth rates, he said.
He said the incidence is climbing at 10 percent to 17 percent a year and is as high as one in 166 children in some communities.
Scientists cannot explain the drastic increase.
"I would hate to guess," Lee Grossman said, suggesting there may be "myriad reasons."
He said some attribute it to a broader diagnosis of autism, which might account for 20 percent to 30 percent of the growth.
"But what about the other 70 to 80 percent?" he said.
Dr. William Bolman, a child psychiatrist and retired University of Hawaii professor, said in 25 years of teaching he saw only three or four patients with autism. Now he has 200.
"It's not subtle at all," he said.
And it is not just autism that has increased, Bolman added, noting similar jumps in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and childhood depression cases.
"If you have three different clinical syndromes ... there's something underlying it, not just genetics," he said.
It costs an estimated $60 billion to $90 billion a year to serve the current autism population, and the annual cost in the next decade in the United States will be $300 billion to $400 billion, Lee Grossman said, but two-thirds of the cost can be reduced with early diagnosis and intensive intervention.
Bolman said the state Department of Education "is doing a wonderful job trying to prevent all these costs later on, but it's blowing their budget tremendously."
He said intensive services often involve a lot of people and are costly, but even severe cases can be helped.
"Early intervention is the key, hopefully as young as 2 years old and absolutely before the age of 5, if we can get them," he said.
The Grossmans, divorced parents of an autistic son, Vance, were part of a small group that brought a class action suit against the state in 1993, resulting in the Felix consent decree. The federal court decree orders the state to provide adequate mental health and education services for disabled children.
Naomi Grossman said Vance, now 16, was diagnosed with severe autism but has improved in school, and with support has a good chance of going to a junior college.
"He's a very, very good kid and a joy to all of us, our family, and we love him dearly," Lee Grossman said. "He hasn't had a lot of behavioral issues that a lot of children of autism have as a result of his condition."
He said Vance does not require services that perhaps 80 percent of families with autistic children need.
"These families are living in crisis, and, on a daily basis, trying to find services for a child who, because of disability, is out of control."
Dr. Margaret Koven, a developmental psychologist, said the huge upswing in cases in recent years cannot be attributed solely to changes in autism definitions or earlier diagnosis.
"People have jumped on all kinds of things for causes -- vaccines, water, chemical pollution. ... We don't have conclusive evidence about any cause."
Koven, who was psychologist for the state's Zero to Three intervention and development program, said there may be as many as 150 more Hawaii children with autism than the Education Department counts.
"There are plenty of kids out there with an autism diagnosis, but they're not counted as special ed kids because they're not getting services," she said.
Specialists also know that kids with autism might have a second diagnosis, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, depression, anxiety or a bipolar disorder, she said.
Koven said long-term planning is needed.
"It's a cost-shifting issue. If kids got intensive services four or five years upfront, the cost of taking care of adults with a normal life span would drop tremendously," she said.
The lack of services and support affects parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and professionals, as well as those with autism, he said.
"It's not 1 (million) to 1.5 million people with autism; it's tens of millions of people impacted daily," Lee Grossman said. "The only magic bullet I've seen is day-in, day-out working with a child to try to improve their living, their life."
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Autism Statistics : Precipitous increase in Autism cases may be tied to childhood vaccines
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Posted by Sylvia on Monday, February 23, 2004 (21:32:07)
Niagara Falls Reporter 24/02/2004
By John Hanchette
OLEAN -- The controversy swirling about childhood immunization was covered in this space about 13 months ago, but it's time to visit the subject again, specifically the possible link between certain vaccines and autism.
You'll be hearing and reading more about this soon, for various reasons explored below.
Autism is a neurological disorder -- first recognized half a century ago -- with varying degrees of severity that affects more and more children each year.
Classic autism symptoms include lack of speech, repetitive behaviors, little or no social interaction, withdrawal from parental and sibling contact, jerky body motions of specific limbs, head-banging, hand-flapping, and weird individual obsessions like eating cardboard containers or breaking certain specific objects each time the victims see them.
Back in the '50s, medical scientists -- who didn't have a clue as to cause -- tried to pin it on bad parenting by mothers. When that didn't fly, they shrugged it off and said it was defective genes -- luck of the biological draw, so to speak. There's a four-to-one chance the child affected will be a boy.
Not many Americans paid attention to autism, because 20 years ago, only one in every 5,000 kids in the United States was affected. By the turn of the millennium, that ratio was one in 500 children. By 2002, it was one in 250 American children. Last year, it approached one in every 155 male toddlers in the country.
Parents have heard about it now. The raw numbers are perhaps more shocking than the ratios, especially in certain states.
In California about 15 years ago, only 2,800 kids were afflicted. By 2002, that had increased to 20,400 in that state and now it's up to about 24,000. The number of autism cases has increased 440 percent in the last decade in that state. It's up 200 percent in the last decade in New York State; in Pennsylvania, almost 900 percent in that time.
There aren't enough special-ed teachers in any state to even begin to approach the problem. It costs states about $2 million for each child with autism for the first 18 years of life. The Department of Education disabilities data bank shows autism cases in school-age children rose from about 5,500 nationwide to an astonishing 79,000 during the 1990s.
Why?
Many parents, doctors, scientists and pediatricians think it's because as the 1990s rolled in and pharmaceutical companies brought new and promising vaccines to market, the number of scheduled shots your baby normally received in the first four or five years of life increased from about 20 to almost 40. And some of these vaccines contained an additive called thimerosal, a preservative that stops contamination of vaccines and preserves shelf-life.
Thimerosal contains mercury, a toxic metallic element that attacks neurons in the body. In drinking water, the Environmental Protection Agency limit for human consumption is two parts per billion. In landfills, it's 200 parts per billion.
Recent lab tests on some baby teeth have shown a content of more than 3,000 parts per billion.
Dr. Mark Geier, a Washington area geneticist and vaccine expert, studied autism rates among 85,000 children who had received mercury-containing vaccines against about 70,000 who didn't. He found the risk of autism in the thimerosal-receiving group was almost 27 times higher.
The thimerosal controversy came to public attention about five years ago, when the American Academy of Pediatrics announced federal health officials would begin phasing the substance out of childhood vaccines. Not to worry, said the doctors, just a precaution.
But Congress told the lethargic Food and Drug Administration -- which should have had the numbers handy, but didn't -- to find out how much of the potent neurotoxin was actually contained in vaccines. What the FDA discovered astounded the medical profession.
Despite drug company studies from 70 years ago that concluded mercury-containing serum was not fit for cattle or dogs, and with all the huge, expensive federal agencies to protect us from just such a mistake -- the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Medicine -- not one had taken the time to total up how much thimerosal and mercury had been added to the average child's intake with the new increased immunization schedule.
In essence, it was a grade-school math problem, but the nation's medical elite hadn't done it. The answer was about 120 times the amount allowed by the EPA for daily mercury exposure.
As Andrea Rock -- a terrific science reporter -- points out in the current issue of "Mother Jones" magazine: "During the 1990s, when some 40 million children were vaccinated, the number of thimerosal-containing vaccines given to children nearly tripled, while autism rates inexplicably increased tenfold."
Regulators, she notes in the "Mother Jones" article, "chose not to act aggressively to reduce infant exposure to thimerosal."
As a result, mercury-containing vaccines mandated for infants remained on the market until the end of 2002. Instead of yanking any trace of those mercury-containing vaccines off the market, the federal agencies we pay billions to support allowed about 8,000 children a day to be needlessly exposed over almost four years.
The federal government and medical establishment reacted as they almost always do -- by covering up. Despite the obvious parallel of usage increase and epidemic onset, articles were written in medical journals assuring parents that there were no direct links between thimerosal and autism.
When reporters, vaccine critics and congressional investigators delved into the medical literature, however, they found either the numbers were rigged, the data manipulated, or the writer secretly under the employ of a vaccine manufacturer.
The vaccine-medical-pharmaceutical establishment reacts this way for a variety of reasons: avoidance of liability, refusal to admit dire mistakes, and an altruistic fear that growing parental aversion to inoculations will destroy "herd immunity" -- what doctors call getting enough kids vaccinated to stamp out the spread of contagious diseases.
Dirtball politicians, of course, gleefully joined in the medical fiasco at the expense of injured children and parents. In November of 2002, while the final version of the Homeland Security Act was being voted, someone snuck in as the last four paragraphs of the 484-page document a provision that protected the Eli Lilly Company -- largest maker of thimerosal -- from future autism lawsuits.
Nobody owned up to creating the protective clause. The giant Eli Lilly firm, which insists it didn't ask for the provision, had just given about $1.4 million to federal candidates and parties in the 2002 elections, 75 percent of it to Republicans.
Dan Burton -- a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Indiana -- whose House Government Reform Committee has been investigating autism increases for three years, raised hell on the floor. He said that "the legislative process was hijacked" by lobbyists who pushed the Lilly protective provision into reality.
A year ago last week, the House and Senate -- impressed by the ensuing public uproar -- took away the Lilly cloak against liability lawsuits.
Parents who want to recover the immense costs for damage to their autistic children have to first go through a complicated and laborious process called the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program -- a federal rigmarole that is stacked against the parents, and a legal labyrinth that demands the damage claim be filed within three years of the inoculation. Yet, in autism, first symptoms often occur five or six years later.
Recent court rulings have gone against that provision, however, and about 4,000 cases are now headed for a special vaccine court of claims. If they fail there, the litigants can take on the vaccine makers and doctors and federal officials in open trial court. The wave of potential lawsuits could cost drug companies billions of dollars.
The early schedule vaccines for your baby that used to commonly contain thimerosal include DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis), hepatitis B and Hib influenza. Tell your doctor to make sure he's not using an old vial with mercury in it.
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Autism Statistics : Autism: Looking for answers to a growing problem
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Posted by Sylvia on Tuesday, February 17, 2004 (23:02:48)
Courier Press 16/02/2004
By Joan Lowy
It's one of the worst nightmares a parent can imagine - without warning, a child is abducted from his bed in the middle of the night, never to return.
Now, imagine that instead of taking the whole child, only his mind is stolen and his body - the hollow shell of his being - is left behind
That's the way parents of children with autism feel, said Hollywood producer Jon Shestack, whose 11-year-old son is autistic.
"If one in every 250 children in America were actually being abducted, that would be a national emergency," Shestack said. "But that is what is happening with autism, and it is a national emergency."
Autism - a devastating brain disorder that usually appears before age 3 and affects a child's ability to communicate, form relationships and respond to the world around him - used to be rare, but is now at least as prevalent as childhood cancer or diabetes. Although the disorder takes many forms, in most cases children seem to withdraw into their own worlds.
In the 1970s, autism was estimated to have affected about one in 2,500 to 5,000 children. Studies show it occurs today in one in 150 to 500 children. About 1.5 million Americans are autistic. Boys are affected three to four times as often as girls.
Although the phenomenon has been reported across the country and in much of the industrialized world, some scientists believe the increase is due to an expansion of diagnostic criteria and better identification of children with autism. However, a study commissioned by the California General Assembly concluded that the increase cannot be explained away by better data or past misclassification.
Some scientists, public health advocates and parents call it an epidemic. They are questioning whether some facet of modern society - toxic chemicals, vaccines, changes in lifestyle or diet - is stealing children's minds.
Relatively little is known about the cause of autism, first identified in 1943. Money for research was almost nonexistent until parents began lobbying Congress and raising funds themselves after autism rates began climbing in the 1990s.
"In 1993, there were probably 12 scientists in the whole country who were lonely and devoted and in a desert working on autism," said Shestack, who helped create the research foundation, Cure Autism Now, with his wife, Portia Iversen.
Autism has long been regarded as one of the most strongly inherited neurological disorders. Studies of identical twins show that if one twin has autism, the other twin will also have autism 60 percent to 80 percent of the time.
However, if genetics alone were the cause, the rate would be closer to 100 percent since identical twins have identical genes. Also, genetics alone cannot explain the apparent increases since, scientists say, there is "no such thing as a genetic epidemic."
"The only way you can explain the increase is if there are environmental factors that are strongly expressed and relatively widely distributed in the environment," said Dr. Mike Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California-San Francisco.
Scientists already know that chemical exposure during pregnancy can cause autism. A third of the children of women who took thalidomide - a drug used in the 1960s to treat morning sickness that is infamous for causing deformed arms and legs - were also autistic if the exposure took place between the 19th and 24th day of pregnancy, which coincides with the beginning stages of brain development.
"I think it's a fair assumption that it's probably going to be genes plus some environmental factor," said David Amaral, research director of the MIND Institute in Sacramento, Calif. The mission of the institute, founded by four fathers of autistic children, is to find the causes of childhood neurological disorders generally and autism in particular.
"Environmental factors could play on the brain at any point in time," said Amaral, a professor of medical psychiatry at the University of California-Davis. "It could be maternal ingestion of mercury or postnatal lead exposure - we don't have consistent enough facts about autism to know ... ."
About 30 percent of autism cases are accompanied by seizures. Infections, immune system problems and food allergies also seem to be involved, along with gastrointestinal problems and sleep disturbances.
Children with other neurological conditions such as attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities and anxiety disorders often have immune system problems as well, scientists said.
The immune system problems are "a very important clue," said Dr. David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at State University of New York-Rensselaer. "The immune system has functions that regulate the brain function that we hadn't previously understood. For instance, the dementia that comes with age is basically an immune system disease."
Scientists also note that toxic chemical exposure often results in damage to more than one bodily system. The immune system and the nervous system share similarities in that they are both signaling systems.
Likewise, viruses usually affect more than one system and are also a focus of research. Scientists know, for example, that mothers who contract influenza during the first trimester of pregnancy are more likely to have children who develop schizophrenia.
"What frightens me is the number of environmental toxins and environmental influences that we don't know anything about," Amaral said.
More than 80,000 new chemicals have been introduced into the marketplace since the post-World War II rise of the petrochemical industry. In most cases, there is no publicly available test data on their potential neurodevelopmental effects on the fetus and young children through long-term, low-dose exposure or at critical windows in development.
In the largest study of its kind, researchers at the University of California-Davis are preparing to study 2,000 children - including 700 children with autism - to see if there are genetic patterns or patterns of chemical exposure in autistic children that are not found in the general population.
Among the chemicals that children will be tested for are PCBs - chemicals widely used to insulate electrical equipment but banned in the 1970s because of their toxic effects. Tests also will be done on their chemical cousins, PBDEs, as well as a variety of heavy metals such as mercury and lead, pesticides, medications, and compounds found in cleaning products, cosmetics and other consumer items.
"We're trying to understand if kids with autism have significantly different levels of chemicals of environmental concern and whether they are more sensitive than the typical child to the same exposure," said toxicology professor Isaac Pessah, who is overseeing the research.
PBDEs are flame retardants widely used in the foam cushions inside furniture and car seats; the hard plastic casings of computers and other office equipment; and hundreds of other products. Little attention had been paid to them until five years ago when Swedish researchers discovered them in the breast milk of nursing mothers. The highest levels recorded by far have been in American women.
PBDEs are of special interest, Pessah said, "because that is what kids are being exposed to in relatively high levels in their homes. These flame retardants aren't off somewhere in a Superfund toxic waste site - they are incorporated into computers and many other conveniences of modern life."
Autistic children often show no sign of the disorder at birth and appear to develop normally until about 15 months of age when they suddenly regress, losing the few words and skills they have learned.
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Autism Statistics : Autism cases and costs on the rise
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Posted by Sylvia on Saturday, February 07, 2004 (22:01:13)
SM Daily Journal 07/02/2004
By Yunmi Choi
The number of autism cases is rising at a rapid rate around the world, and San Mateo County school officials are preparing to deal with the devastating impact it could have in coming years.
“These are literally million dollar kids,†said Jim Cox, director of special education in the San Mateo-Foster City School District.
From the age of 3 until they enter eighth grade, Cox said a child diagnosed with autism costs the district about $50,000 a year. And since intervention is most effective during a child’s formative years, he said the elementary district bears the brunt of these costs.
A few things autistic students require include speech and language therapy, occupational therapy and adaptive physical education — and that’s just for “functioning†autistic children. Federal guidelines dictate that public schools must provide such services to special education students.
Right now, there are more than 100 autistic students currently enrolled in the San Mateo-Foster City School District out of about 10,000 students total.
“The implication is that one out of every 100 kids is autistic,†Cox said.
When he first came to the district two years ago, Cox said there were only about 70 autistic kids. Around the state, there has been an 87 percent increase in the number of autism cases between 1997 and 2002. The trend is not isolated to California, but is taking hold of the nation and world.
“The rate is Japan is the same as here,†Cox said “What’s happening is a global difficulty.â€
Early intervention
Since children’s neural networks are about 90 percent developed by the time they’re 8, Cox said it’s critical to reach autistic children as soon as possible.
“If they get to be 8 and still can’t talk or go to the toilet by themselves, the likelihood of making strides beyond that is small,†he said.
On the other hand, getting to children early can make all the difference in turning “preverbal, cognitively low†autistic children into functioning autistics. By reaching them early, Cox said autistic kids can be taught to communicate verbally. The best way to teach autistic children early on is to reinforce certain positive behaviors, he said.
For example, he said some methods include rewarding students with M&M’s or Goldfish crackers for performing tasks correctly. Other times they are given physical re-inforcement — like a reassuring touch or hug. Praise can work for older children as well.
Getting to kids early doesn’t mean they’ll overcome their autism, however. Autism is an “existential state†that can’t be changed, Cox said — that’s just the way kids are glued together. That doesn’t mean these children’s ability to function can’t be improved.
The enormous resources being invested in autistic children is a revolution from just a few decades ago, Cox said, when autistic children were regarded as lost causes. Before 1973, he said it was widely believed that autistic kids couldn’t be taught.
Growing concern
As it preps to serve an increasing number of autistic children, the district is thinking about developing its own programs to serve this growing population, Cox said. Instead of outsourcing occupational and language therapy, for example, he said such services would be provided in-house.
In the meantime, nobody knows how to stymie the rising number of cases.
“Nobody really knows what’s happening,†said Pat Ptacek, a special education administrator with the San Mateo County Office of Education. “There are so many theories about the rising number of cases, but none have really been validated.â€
And it’s not just that more kids are being identified. In fact, both Ptacek and Cox said the method of testing for autism has remained virtually unchanged over the years. Some of the simpler explanations range from diet to new immunizations, Ptacek said.
Other theories can get more complicated. Cox said the leading theory right now is that autism is the result of a “build up†of genetic defects over several generations, combined with environmental causes.
Whatever it may be, Cox said the real reason is probably more complicated than anything that’s been proposed so far. One thing’s for sure.
“The increase in cases is very real and troubling,†Cox said. “And it should be troubling to policy makers.â€
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Autism Statistics : Cause for concern
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Posted by Sylvia on Tuesday, February 03, 2004 (14:14:27)
Rocky Mountain News 03/02/2004
By Susan Glairon
In a small room in a Longmont home, 4-year-old Ashe Vogan is hard at work.
"What's the weather like today?" his therapist, Angele Tatem-Juth, asks.
"It's cloudy," Ashe says.
"Do you think it's cold? Let's touch the window."
"Touch the window," Ashe repeats, sliding the window open.
"What do we need to wear?" Tatem-Juth asks.
"A hat," Ashe says. He pauses. "Gloves."
Hat, gloves, window, cloudy - typical preschool chatter. But to Ashe's family, his simple words are nothing short of a miracle.
Ashe is one of a rising number of children diagnosed with autism, a baffling neurological condition that increased 172 percent in the 1990s, according to the Autism Society of America.
The syndrome impairs language and social skills and is characterized by poor eye contact, difficulty in making friends, abnormal interests and repetitive body movements such as hand-flapping. It affects boys four times more often than girls.
Autistic children often show no sign of the disorder at birth and appear to develop normally until about 15 months of age, when they suddenly regress, losing the few words and skills they've learned.
Despite the fact that autism is estimated to affect two to six of each 1,000 children, the cause remains elusive. There's no known cure.
Federal and private sources have begun to respond to the alarming numbers with funding, which has helped to build impressive research centers in Denver and Boulder.
But desperate parents, well aware that early intervention is key to keeping an autistic child connected with the world, don't have time to wait.
They're reading journals, searching the Internet and networking with professionals and other parents about therapies. They're placing their children on special diets and giving them nutritional supplements while spending tens of thousands of dollars on an array of behavioral and occupational therapies, most of which aren't covered by insurance.
Money for research was almost nonexistent until parents began lobbying congress and raising funds themselves after autism rates began climbing in the 1990s.
Nationwide, $90 billion will be spent this year on autism treatment, education and services, a figure projected to grow to $300 billion over the next decade, according to the Autism Society of America.
"In 1993, there were probably 12 scientists in the whole country who were lonely and devoted and in a desert working on autism," said Hollywood producer Jon Shestack, whose 11-year-old son is autistic. Shestack and his wife, Portia Iversen, helped create the research foundation Cure Autism Now.
The societal costs are staggering. The average child with autism will require $4 million in lifetime supervision and care. Personal financial resources are drained to pay for doctors, behavioral therapists and treatments. Instead of saving for college, parents worry about how to provide care for their child after they're gone.
"We've had people lose their homes, mortgage everything they have . . . trying to take care of their kids," said Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., who has an autistic grandson.
Kathleen Berry and her husband, Michael McIntire, of Sacramento, Calif., have spent as much as $50,000 a year of their own money on behavioral therapy and other treatments for their two autistic children, Stewart, 9, and Caroline, 4.
Individual therapy relies on a system of rewards for learned behaviors, such as how to brush teeth or sit properly at a table. It's been shown to make a dramatic difference in whether an autistic child is institutionalized or is able to attend school in a mainstream classroom and eventually live independently.
"This isn't going to go away," says Theresa Wrangham, president of the 100-member Autism Society of Boulder County and mother of a 12-year-old, Rachel, who has autism. "The numbers are rising. In your lifetime, you are going to know someone with it."
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