THE idea that those with autism find faces harder to process than other visual stimuli has been challenged in a study by the University of Western Australia.

Research published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, assessed face selectivity and face-processing difficulties in children and adolescents with and without autism.

The team examined discrimination of, and memory for, faces, cars, and inverted faces.

Overall, typically developing children and adolescents without autism performed better than young people with autism.

However, all participants performed significantly worse with identifying pictures of inverted faces compared to upright faces and cars.

Crucially, children and adolescents with autism found cars to be just as difficult to remember as upright faces.

Previous studies have suggested that face perception is selectively, or disproportionately, affected in autism, and this is attributed to reduced social interest and motivation.

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For those of you not familiar with bipolar disorder, it’s a mood disorder once known as “manic depression.” Persons with bipolar disorder alternate between a frenzied state known as mania and episodes of depression. While some individuals experience only the manic episodes, many affected individuals rapidly alternate between these two states and experience great irritability.

As with other psychiatric disorders, studies suggest that bipolar disorder may be relatively common among children and adults with autism. Some studies have found that as many as 27 percent of those with autism also have symptoms of bipolar disorder. By contrast, its prevalence in the general population is around 4 percent.

However, we believe that bipolar disorder is mistakenly over-diagnosed in those with autism. In part this is because some of their symptoms can overlap.

If you have a picky eater with autism, know that you’re not alone. A recent review of scientific studies found that children with autism are five times more likely to have mealtime challenges such as extremely narrow food selections, ritualistic eating behaviors (e.g. no foods can touch) and meal-related tantrums.

Meanwhile, the lead researcher of this new project – psychologist Emily Kuschner, PhD, of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) – recommends the following strategies to gently expand the diet of picky eaters with autism. (CHOP is a member of Autism Speaks Autism Treatment Network.)

#1 Rule Out Medical Problems

If your child is clamping her lips shut when offered a certain food, it may be that she knows it will make her stomach hurt. Gastrointestinal distress is common among children with autism, many of whom can’t easily describe their distress. Your child’s doctor can help you figure out if this is the case and how to deal with it.

#2 Stay Calm

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There has been much discussion of twin studies in autism research for a long time. The reason is that if is found that “identical” (monozygotic) twins are often both autistic, that points to genetics as a major influence on the development of autism. For many years it was thought that this rate, the concordance, was about 90%. In other words, if one child is autistic, 90% of the time the other child is autistic. This was based on a number of older, small studies. More recently, a relatively large study showed a lower concordance: about 77% for ASD and 60% for autism. From this the authors claimed that the genetic contribution to autism risk was lower than previously thought, and that the environmental contribution was higher (about 55% environmental contribution).

A study just out from Denmark claims a concordance more in line with the older studies–95%. In A Danish population-based twin study on autism spectrum disorders., the authors write:

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Children with autism see simple movement twice as quickly as other children their age, according to a new study.

Scientists think this this hypersensitivity to motion may provide clues to what causes the disorder.

The findings may explain why some people suffering with autism are sensitive to bright lights and loud noises.

‘We think of autism as a social disorder because children with this condition often struggle with social interactions, but what we sometimes neglect is that almost everything we know about the world comes from our senses.

'Abnormalities in how a person sees or hears can have a profound effect on social communication,' says Duje Tadin, one of the lead authors on the study and an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

Babies born either very small or very large have a higher risk of developing autism, according to the largest ever study into the issue.

Researchers found that bigger babies - those born weighing over 9lb 14oz (4.5kg) - showed a higher incidence of autism, as did smaller infants who were born weighing less than 2.5kg or 5lb 5oz.

It is the first time that a clear link has been made between babies who grow to above average size at birth and risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

In the latest autism research, the first study compared visual scanning patterns in boys and girls with autism spectrum disorders. Scanning patterns were also collected for typically developing children.

"We used eye-tracking technology while the participants in these studies watched videotapes of social scenes that presented naturalistic stimuli," said study co-author Ami Klin, director of the Marcus Autism Center, in Atlanta.

The study, which was led by Klin's student, Jennifer Moriuchi, included 116 school-aged children with autism spectrum disorders. Eighty-one were boys and 35 were girls. The children with autism had varying degrees of social disability. The study also included 36 typically developing children.

"On a surface level, it appears that boys and girls with autism appear to spend equal time learning from the eyes. They did look less than other children," Klin said. But, when the researchers correlated the youngsters' eye tracking with their level of disability, a much different picture emerged.

"In boys, the more they looked at the eyes, the less socially disabled they are. In girls, the more they looked at the eyes, the more disabled they are," said Klin, chief of the division of autism and related disorders at Emory University School of Medicine and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.

"What the study is suggesting is that we should not automatically assume that boys and girls learn about the world in the same way," Klin said, adding, "we have to take gender as a mediating factor."

Dawson said "the study found that there are differences in the way girls and boys look at the eyes, so there may be differences in the way autism is manifested in girls than in boys." She noted that an important criterion right now for diagnosing autism is a lack of eye contact and using the eyes for social cues.

The second study looked at the genetics involved in autism, and potential differences in boys and girls. Yale University researchers analyzed samples from 2,326 families. Included in those samples were those of 2,017 boys and 309 girls with an autism spectrum disorder.

The Yale team found differences between the boys' and girls' genetic samples.

"The fact that autism does affect boys so much more frequently has been staring us in the face for decades. There's been a hypothesis that there's something in the extra X chromosome that girls have that may be protective," Dawson explained. "The idea is that if you have this protective mechanism in place you may need more risk factors to overwhelm that protective effect and cause autism, and that's exactly what they found."

"To develop autism in a girl requires more genetic mutations," Dawson said. The type of mutations they found are called "de novo" mutations, she added. This means that the genetic change occurs in the sperm or the egg. It isn't a gene that's passed down from the parents.

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Since 2008, when a group of physicians drew a hypothetical link between Lyme disease and autism, a growing number of patient activists have embraced the belief that the hallmark neuropsychiatric symptoms of autism may spring from the body's immune response to the bite of a deer tick carrying the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi.

Smiling is something 30-year-old Sarah Still constantly has to remind herself to do, especially when she is going into a job interview.

Still has Asperger's, a high-functioning form of autism. For the past 10 years, she has experienced the highs and lows of being on the autism spectrum while trying to work in professional settings.

It is not as though Still cannot get a job -- in fact, her resume is full of them, ranging from room attendant at Yellowstone National Park to receptionist at a massage parlor. It's keeping the jobs that has been the issue.

"Some days it is really hard to function ... things like fluorescent lighting can even bring my systems down," she said, meaning the lighting depresses her mood easily.

Still is not alone. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says as many as one in 50 children are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders.

Many of those children will grow up and eventually try to enter the work force.

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Tuesday, May 21, 2013 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM MDT