From the Austin [TX] American-Statesman:

Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor whose research triggered a worldwide vaccine scare, says he expects to lose his British medical license soon but intends to continue his research in Austin.

In an interview, Wakefield said he is more convinced than ever that he was right to suggest connections between autism, vaccines, and gastrointestinal illness. Earlier this year, the UK’s General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield acted dishonestly and irresponsibly in research that led to the 1998 publication of a paper which claimed a link between autism and the vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella. The Lancet journal subsequently retracted Wakefield’s paper.

In his first in-depth interview since the council’s findings, Wakefield – hailed as a hero by some parents and a false prophet by many doctors – said the charges were unfair, false and pre-determined from the outset because he dared to take on the vaccine industry. He said he does not intend to fade away.

The interview with Wakefield came as researchers at the University of Rochester announced a small study failed to find an improvement in symptoms among children with autism who switched to a diet free of free of cereal grains and dairy products. (From USA Today.)

From the New York Times:

Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, disclosed in an interview this week that an experimental drug has brought about substantial improvements in the behaviors of people with Fragile X syndrome in a small clinical trial.

The research involved only a few dozen subjects and has not been published or peer reviewed.

The company refused to reveal many details, citing commercial interests, but a Novartis official cautioned against too much optimism. Dr. Mark C. Fishman, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, said the drug is likely to be years from commercial development and could fail further clinical trials.

If authenticated in further, larger trials, the results could also become a landmark in the field of autism research, since scientists speculated that the drug may help some patients with autism not caused by fragile X, perhaps becoming the first medicine to address autism’s core symptoms.

… “This is perhaps the most promising therapeutic discovery ever for a gene-based behavioral disease,” said Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, former research chief at Merck and now director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An excerpt from the Washington Post‘s obituary, by Emma Brown:

Stanley I. Greenspan, 68, a child psychiatrist who wrote more than a dozen parenting books and developed the popular “floor time” method for reaching children with autism and other developmental disorders, died April 27 at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda of complications from a stroke.

In a career spanning 40 years, Dr. Greenspan drew praise for his early research on infant development and later found a wide following as an author and public speaker. At the time of his death, he was a professor at George Washington University’s medical school.

… Trademarked as “D.I.R./Floortime,” Dr. Greenspan’s method focused on developing children’s underlying ability to form relationships and react to new situations. It received widespread attention as an alternative to more traditional methods that use rewards and punishments to shape specific behaviors.

“What he did was give us a way to begin to reach these children early and give them a chance to develop to their potential,” said T. Berry Brazelton, a noted pediatrician, author and Harvard professor who wrote “The Irreducible Needs of Children” with Dr. Greenspan in 2000.

From the [Toronto] Globe and Mail:

Parents and educators of kids with developmental disabilities offer high praise for the new Apple iPad. They say it can serve as an assisted communication device, can help kids focus on routine tasks, and is a great help at easing student anxiety.

“It’s just a game changer,” says Samuel Sennott, co-creator of the popular Proloquo2Go software. “It’s … [a] portable, table-top solution for people with physical impairments, people with visual impairments.”

Sennott’s speech-generating software, currently ranked at number 34 in the United States among more than 185,000 available apps, is available in an iPad version.

A plea for civility

Liane Kupferberg Carter, a writer who has a child with autism, writes in the Huffington Post that she’d like to see an end to the “war raging within the autism community.”

Angry arguments over such topics as vaccines, purported autism cures and neurodiversity are preventing the community from finding common ground, she says. An excerpt:

…whether you are trying to heal autism through genetic research, environmental studies, or are urging acceptance of neurodiversity, there is one thing on which everyone can surely agree: we love our children. They deserve greater awareness, acceptance and opportunity. We desperately need more research on promising treatments, and programs to meet the housing and employment needs of a population that is rapidly aging up.

On the eve of World Autism Awareness Day, I’m pleading for more civility in our community. Open debate that is not personal, petty or mean. There’s just too much at stake. How can we expect Congress to listen to us, when we are so divided among ourselves?

Our children deserve our respect. Our commitment. Our hope.

We aren’t the enemies.

Autism is.

Related post here.

As people with autism spectrum disorders take a more prominent place in society, Los Angeles Times reviewer Sonja Bolle finds a crop of books for kids and young adults that explore their world. These books can help, she says, by perhaps giving us all a better sense of the variety of human experience.

Among her selections:

• Al Capone Does My Shirts and Al Capone Shines My Shoes, by Gennifer Choldenko
• Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine
• Anything But Typical, by Nora Raleigh Baskin
• The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd
• Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork

An excerpt:

All these novels are worth reading just because they have fascinating characters. Readers might like to enter their minds at least in fiction, and who knows? Perhaps they’d be inspired to take a new look at some of their classmates.

Neil Greenspan, writing in the Huffington Post, says the fundamental problems facing adults with autism-related disabilities are rarely addressed by the media. Reasonably typical, he says, is a young adult of his acquaintance who lives alone and is unemployed and socially isolated.

Among the problems Greenspan sees for adults with autism:

• A lack of organized support for socialization or recreation;
• A lack of job prospects, coupled with a lack of effective help in finding and maintaining work;
• A lack of housing options for adults who need some supervision or support;
• A shortage of trained medical professionals and coordinated care.

An excerpt:

Current policies and practices usually condemn adults with autism to constricted lives of mostly sub-optimal choices. Progress on the core deficiencies identified above will have to be achieved if the majority of adults with autism are to have even a modest chance for reasonably fulfilling and productive lives. Continuation of the status quo will represent a moral as well as a policy failure, as warehousing should be for consumer goods, not people.

Greenspan is an immunologist in the Department of Pathology at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.