TUESDAY'S TRAVELS...

...across the world of special needs and differences.  Our travels bring us several news updates today.  For example:

1] Research shows that prodigies and persons with autism share a genetic link:

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Researchers at Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital have found a genetic link between people with autism and prodigies.
The link shows up as a marker on one of the 23 chromosomes humans have and could provide more clues about how autism and prodigy develop in children.
The finding could help scientists understand autism. And down the road, it could help geneticists understand how to block autism from manifesting in children.
“It suggests that there’s something we might want to look at,” said Christopher Bartlett, a co-author on the study and principal investigator at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to pan out.”
Their findings were published online last month in the journal Human Heredity.
Joanne Ruthsatz is lead author on the study and a psychology professor at OSU’s campus in Mansfield, Ohio.
She became curious about a potential link when she was interviewing prodigies and their families for a book coming out this fall. Prodigies are children who develop professional-level skills before they hit puberty.
Ruthsatz had been with a child prodigy at a McDonald’s near his home, and they’d run into the child’s aunt and first cousin. The child’s cousin had severe autism, she said. “I thought, ‘What is the chance of his first cousin having autism?'”
Prodigies typically have exceptional working memories and exceptional attention to detail, Ruthsatz knew, characteristics they share with some people with autism. She wondered whether the two conditions could be related.
So she interviewed other prodigies’ families and learned that autism had been diagnosed in many of the prodigies’ siblings or first cousins. That’s when she joined with Bartlett and other OSU researchers to study the families’ DNA.
Ruthsatz collected saliva samples from the prodigies, their relatives with autism and relatives who were neither prodigies nor on the spectrum. The research team tested the DNA and found that prodigies and their relatives with autism both have a marker on chromosome 1 that other relatives don’t have.
The researchers don’t know exactly what the marker is or what it means — this study was relatively small, covering only 11 families — but they are conducting a larger study now.
Ruthsatz said she wonders if something about the prodigy gene keeps autism from manifesting.
Bartlett said he hopes the study will encourage people with autism and their families.
“To me, the hope doesn’t necessarily come from the finding,” he said. “To me, the hope comes from the fact that the scientific community has not forgotten that people with autism need help and that research needs to be done in this direction.”

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2] Sadly, at the same time, many young people with autism are struggling right now:

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Young adults with autism are facing significant challenges after high school, a new report suggests, with many on the spectrum finding themselves unemployed, isolated and lacking services.
More than a third of those with autism don’t work or continue their education in their early twenties, a circumstance shared by fewer than 8 percent of young people with other types of disabilities.
Meanwhile, 26 percent of young adults with autism receive no support services at all.
The findings come from a report this week from Drexel University’s A.J. Drexel Autism Institute based on data collected in two nationally-representative government studies — the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 and the Survey of Pathways to Diagnosis.
The 68-page National Autism Indicators Report paints a stark picture of a group of young people with little support.
Just a third of young adults with autism had ever lived apart from their parents and roughly 1 in 4 were socially isolated, having received no invitations for social activities within the past year, the report found.
Some 58 percent of those on the spectrum had worked for pay by their early twenties — a rate lower than individuals with other disabilities — and their jobs were typically part-time and low paying, the findings indicate. About a third engaged in postsecondary education.
Relatively speaking, however, researchers said that little is known about how adults with autism are faring and how to best meet their needs.
“While the picture looks bleak, we found that some of those who have the most significant levels of challenges do go on to find jobs and attend further education,” said Paul Shattuck, an associate professor at Drexel who worked on the report. “A critical next step is to figure out what facilitates connections to outcomes and what helps people to continue to succeed across their early adult years.”

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3] But if your child has autism, and if you are able to get some training, that might help with your child's behavior problems:

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Parents of children with autism could see vast improvements in behavioral troubles, including severe tantrums, if they learn and use techniques to help their children cope with the challenges of the disorder, according to new research.
The study, which was published online Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the largest randomized, multi-center study to analyze the impact of behavioral training.
The study included 180 families with children with autism 3 to 7 years old. Half of the kids’ parents were given one-on-one therapy, coaching and homework to help them learn behavior modification techniques.
Those techniques included such things as using timers to help children understand and respect rules and showing pictures to help them visualize positive behavior (such as using the bathroom properly).
The control group of parents received education only, which included information about autism without offering techniques to help manage undesirable behavior.
After the 24-week trial concluded, the researchers asked parents how things were going at home.
Disruptive behavior dropped by almost 48 percent in the training group and 32 percent in the education group, according to parent ratings.
An independent expert who evaluated the children (and didn’t know which group their parents were in) found that 70 percent of those in the behavior training group showed a positive response compared to 40 percent in the control group.
“These behavior problems are quite challenging to manage for parents,” said Luc Lecavalier, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center who led the research there. The site was one of six U.S. medical centers that participated in the study.
“They’re also quite costly to society because a lot of resources go to managing these children,” he said.
Kerri Doyaga of Bexley, Ohio went through the parent training — which included at least 11 in-person training sessions, telephone follow-ups and two home visits — and said it led to profound changes for her son Benjamin, who is now 7 and in first grade.
“The classes were life-changing for us, not only for Ben but for my other two children. They gave me great skills,” Doyaga said. “It helped me to understand what he was going through.”
Ben’s frustration and tantrums turned around when Doyaga and her husband, Justin, learned how to help their son with techniques including using pictures to guide him through such things as getting dressed, she said.
They used to miss birthday parties or scrap plans to go to dinner when Ben would become upset. Now, they can go as an entire family and Ben enjoys himself, too, she said.
“He is like a different kid. We go to parties. We go out to dinner. We do everything,” Kerri Doyaga said. “We don’t even think twice where before we would have had a conversation about not doing this or splitting the family.”
Lecavalier said he and the rest of the research team were thrilled to see such a significant response in the intervention group as well as interest in the benefits reported by the control group. While that group didn’t learn about behavioral interventions, basic support and education about autism seemed to make a significant difference.
“The idea here was to teach the parents how to intervene instead of relying on more costly interventions that would be implemented by professionals,” he said.
“We talk about how to praise and reinforce a behavior or ignore inappropriate behaviors … then we teach parents how to maintain the gains and involve different caregivers.”
Lecavalier said there’s promise in finding a way to disseminate the training program and find an affordable way to make it widely available.

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But remember--autism is sometimes, but is by no means always, associated with Moebius Syndrome.