In 1944, an Austrian pediatrician, Hans Asperger, wrote about some characteristics he was seeing in some people, such as clumsiness, repetitive routines or rituals, different speech patterns (monotone, overly formal), inappropriate social behavior, and difficulties with non-verbal communication.
Over the years, not much notice was taken until the 1980s when a doctor in the United Kingdom, Lorna Wing, noticed children with similar characteristics and she named what she saw as Aspergers syndrome. Since then,  the disorder was studied more, and in 1994, Asperger syndrome was labeled as an autism spectrum disorder. With that, it was officially recognized in the “bible” of …read more

Slate’s Erica Westly takes an interesting look at the increasing incidence of Asperger’s as a legal defense, citing the recent headline case of British computer whiz Gary McKinnon, who hacked into almost 100 U.S. government and NASA computers after becoming obsessed with the United States covering up UFO contact. “Criminal defendants in the United States have been using similar tactics with varying degrees of success in recent years,” Westly writes. “In fact, it’s not all that rare for criminal defendants with Asperger’s to argue for leniency in cases of computer fraud, sexual misconduct, and murder. Three years ago, the defense even made its …read more

Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have uncovered a new genetic signature that correlates strongly with autism and which doesn’t involve changes to the DNA sequence itself, a finding that may suggest new approaches to diagnosis and treatment. Researchers found higher-than-usual numbers of gene-regulating molecules called methyl groups in a region of the genome that regulates oxytocin receptor expression in people with autism. Previous studies have shown that giving oxytocin can improve social engagement behavior and it’s being explored as a potential treatment, and although the methylation status of the OXTR gene is not a definitive diagnosis of autism by …read more

I attended the first part of Dr. Tony Atwood’s lecture on Asperger’s and high-functioning autism today in New York, presented by YAI. Though I could only attend the first part of the day-long talk, I’d highly recommend Dr. Atwood as a speaker: clear, humorous, and engaging. In announcing how he had to stop himself for the the morning break, for instance: “The longer you spend living with and working with those with ASDs, the more aspects of an ASD you pick up yourself!”
Atwood, who has worked with Aspies for years and founded a clinic some 17 years ago to work specifically with …read more

The Net has certainly let loose the dogs of both support and criticism for some parents of children with ASD. In El Paso, Texas, parents and teachers around the world have chimed in regarding a 10-year-old with boy with Asperger’s who got a ticket for $260 for disrupting class. Students can be ticketed and their parents fined in the state for such actions, and the mom says her son kept falling asleep in class, made noise in the hall, and got down on the floor and refused to get up. She agrees the behavior is not okay and that he should be …read more

UCLA has a class that offers an instruction to ASD teens that’s often lacking from a menu of therapies: How to make friends. The teen years are tough enough, but for those with ASD this time could only be a nightmare in terms of interacting with peers. The UCLA program teaches its 33 students (28 of them male) to watch for all the social clues they might commonly miss — body language, hand gestures, facial expressions, speech inflections — and try to turn those improved interpretations into connections.

The class, called PEERS (Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational …read more

On October 12, while presiding as the honorary chair for an Autism Speaks walk on the campus of Ohio State University, President Gordon Gee made remarks including the statement that “‘It [autism] should not exist.’” Melanie Yergeau, a 2nd-year Ph.D. student in English, wrote this letter, which is posted on the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network blog. As Yergeau, who notes that she has Asperger’s Syndrome, writes:
Until very recently, I have felt incredibly welcome at Ohio State—due to the interdisciplinary work of the Disability Studies Program and the Department of English, the Office of Disability Services, and the programs for high-functioning/Asperger’s adults …read more

Emmett Doyle and Michael Wesely are students—a senior and a junior, respectively— at Apollo High School in Minnesota and are both acting in a school production of A Christmas Carol. Doyle is playing Scrooge and Wesely is playing Marley, who visit Scrooge in ghostly form. As noted in the December 6th St. Cloud Times, both have Asperger’s Syndrome and have found acting a way to work on their social and communication skills.
Elements of theater such as following a script (which enforces turn-taking in conversation), interpreting body language, developing empathy for their characters and working as a team all help with …read more

Sunday I wrote about singer Pip Brown aka Ladyhawke, who has Asperger’s Syndrome; a profile of her in the Independent noted how having Asperger’s is one reason that live shows aren’t the easiest for her.
Another musician, singer Craig Nicholls of The Vines, was diagnosed with Asperger’s four years ago: It’s been reported in Reuters via the Calgary Herald that the band has had to cancel their upcoming shows “due to a deterioration in the mental condition” and the “erratic behavior” of Nicholls. Some news sources refer to him as having a “mental illness” though what he has is Asperger’s syndrome—-the …read more

The November 13th Newsweek has an article, More Than Just Quirky, about girls and women with Asperger’s Syndrome: Are girls and women sometimes not diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum because they do not have the same symptoms as boys and men do?
Girls, it’s noted, have more “socially acceptable” obsessions—”horse and books,” perhaps, rather than “vacuum cleaners or oscillating fans”:
“Girls tend to get obsessed with things that are a little less strange,” says Elizabeth Roberts, a neuropsychologist at the Asperger Institute at the New York University Child Study Center. “That makes it harder to distinguish normal from abnormal.” …read more