The Autism Diaries

Autistic kids laugh differently

According to a recent paper entitled “Laughter Differs in Children with Autism: An Acoustic Analysis of Laughter Produced by Children with and without the Disorder,” children with autism exhibit only one type of laughter, compared to two types of laughter for nonautistic children.

“We revealed that children with autism produce very engaging laughs that we call ‘voiced’ laughs,” said William Hudenko, the lead author on the paper and assistant professor of psychology at Ithaca College.

To reach the conclusion, the study recorded laughter during a series of playful interactions with an examiner. The results showed that children with autism exhibited only one type of laughter, compared to two types of laughter for nonautistic children. There was no difference in laugh duration, frequency, change in or number of laughs per interaction.

“We hypothesized that children with autism may be expressing laughter primarily in response to positive internal states, rather than using laughter to negotiate social interactions,” said Hudenko.

At the Eating Disorders Unit at the Maudsley Hospital in London, anorexia is not seen as a social disorder — or even primarily a psychological one. While most American treatment providers blame perfection-seeking parents and the media's idealization of hollow-cheeked actresses for eating disorders (among other dysfunctional behaviors), researchers at Maudsley believe the root cause has little to do with social pressure. Rather, they think anorexia is better explained by heredity — perhaps by some of the same genes associated with autism.

The London researchers have been studying the commonalities between these two conditions for several years. On the surface, they appear entirely different — in autism, patients have difficulty connecting with people in the outside world, while in anorexia, sufferers seem consumed by other people's perceptions — but Maudsley researchers point out that the salient characteristics of each illness are similar.

For example, both anorexic and autistic patients have a tendency to behave obsessively and suffer from rigid ways of thinking. Tic disorders, which commonly affect people with autism, are found in 27% of people with severe anorexia. And in both conditions, patients have difficulty with "set-shifting," or changing course mentally.

"Both autism-spectrum conditions and anorexia share a narrow focus of attention, a resistance to change and excellent attention to detail," says Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University, who is not involved in the Maudsley research.

In addition, says Janet Treasure, director of the Maudsley Eating Disorders Unit, past research suggests that about 15% to 20% of patients with anorexia may also have Asperger's syndrome, an autism-spectrum disorder. Research also shows that the conditions occur together in families more often than they would by chance. It's possible, she says, that the same genetic predisposition for autism and anorexia may be expressed differently depending on gender.

The most commonly used test to measure intelligence is underestimating the intellectual potential of autistic people, new research suggests.

People with autism often struggle with the verbal portions of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the test most often used to measure IQ, researchers said.

But when given another test of abstract reasoning abilities, the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, autistic people not only had scores equal to those of their non-autistic counterparts, but they answered the questions, on average, as much as 42 percent more quickly.

On the Raven's test, autistic participants scored, on average, 30 percentage points higher than would have been predicted by their scores on the Wechsler scale, according to the study, in the June issue of Human Brain Mapping.

Also, MRIs done during the testing showed that autistic people had more activity in different areas of their brains than those without autism.

As the quest to understand autism has grown more urgent, researchers have used brain scanners to peer into autistic minds, searched for faulty genes, and scrutinized the play of 1-year-olds.

The work has provided theories - but few concrete answers - about what goes awry to cause social isolation, repetitive behaviors, and communication problems that afflict an estimated one in 150 children with autism spectrum disorders. The hunt has focused on everything from "mirror neurons," brain cells some re searchers think enable people to understand other's actions and intentions, to an overgrowth of local connections in the brain.

Now a small but growing number of researchers see hope in a tool called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which lets scientists spark activity in specific areas of the brain and watch what happens to patients' behavior. The technology may illuminate some of the biology behind the disease, and some specialists speculate it may one day offer a treatment.

"There's a lot of mystery about autism - it's not as if there's a well-understood story of what's going on at all, and there's a huge variety of autism, too," said John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Transcranial magnetic stimulation "is fantastic for identifying brain regions that are essential for specific mental functions. . . . I think if we can start to use it more systematically with autism, one could hope we'd understand a lot more about what's going on."

Gabrieli said he hopes to team up with researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center who are already getting preliminary results with the technology, finding that autistic brains appear to be more malleable than those of other people.

Public services for Virginians with autism suffer from poor organization and limited resources and fail to offer help early enough. Many school systems also are unable to meet the needs of their autistic students, according to a report released yesterday by the General Assembly's lead audit review agency.

The study, by the Joint Legislative Review Commission, assessed services for Virginians with autism spectrum disorders and also found that many parents of autistic children waited more than a year to seek help for their children after noticing possible symptoms.

"To date, there hasn't been a central agency in Virginia that has handled autism. Autism systems in Virginia tend not to be coordinated, which makes it difficult for parents and families to figure out how to get help," said Nathalie Molliet-Ribet, project leader for the study. "And many in the school system lack adequate training to fully meet the needs of children who might require extra help and assistance."