The Autism Retort Blog

Dear Readers of Translating Autism,Translating Autism has merged with www.child-psych.org. The decision to end this project as a self-standing website was an extremely difficult one, but I believe that by merging with Child-Psych we will be able to reach a much wider audience and provide a better service to our readers. At Child-Psych, parents looking for autism information will also be able to

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This week Biomed central published a double-blind placebo study of the effectiveness of hyperbaric treatment for autism. The study was published in Biomed, which is an open access journal, so readers are invited to read the entire study here. In sum, the authors randomly assigned 62 children (52 boys, 10 girls) between the ages of 2 to 7 to either a hyperbaric treatment condition or a control

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Harold L Doherty, an autism advocate and parent of a child with autism, has commented on the limited amount of research conducted with kids with severe autism. Although this is an empirical question, and I have not seen data confirming this possible trend, Mr. Doherty is most likely right, in that it appears that children with severe autism are underrepresented in today's published research. For

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Last week I discussed a study showing that kids with low functioning autism identify noses better when these are presented upside down than when presented upright. In the context of that study, the authors suggested that these kids have an aversion to examining eyes directly and tend to focus on parts of the face away from the eyes.This week a group of researchers from Yale University published a

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A number of studies have shown that some parents of children with autism show mild autistic tendencies. This has been called the 'broader autism phenotype'. However, less is known as to whether such phenomenon also affects typically developing brothers and sisters of children with autism. That is, are non-affected siblings of kids with autism free developmental problems or do they show a broader

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A review of: Wood, J., Drahota, A., Sze, K., Har, K., Chiu, A., & Langer, D. (2009). Cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety in children with autism spectrum disorders: a randomized, controlled trial Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 50 (3), 224-234 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2008.01948.xThis is the second of a series of posts about recent studies on treatment interventions for autism.

This week I will be writing a series of micro reviews of recent treatment studies. Some of these articles are controversial for different reasons, for example below I discuss issues with single-case reports and later this week I will discuss issues regarding conflict of interest in the publication process. The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders just published a case report on the

A brief review of Annaz, D., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Johnson, M., & Thomas, M. (2009). A cross-syndrome study of the development of holistic face recognition in children with autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102 (4), 456-486 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2008.11.005Holistic face recognition is the tendency to experience and process faces as a “whole”

Today the National Institutes of Health announced the National Database for Autism Research. The system (http://ndar.nih.gov/ndarpublicweb/) was created to pool research data across research studies in autism and promote cross-collaboration between researchers around the world. From the NDAR website:NDAR stands for the National Database for Autism Research. The National Database for Autism

A review of: Golnik, A., Ireland, M., & Borowsky, I. (2009). Medical Homes for Children With Autism: A Physician Survey PEDIATRICS, 123 (3), 966-971 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-1321I’m usually extremely political when talking about other disciplines (pediatricians, speech therapists, neurologists, etc) since I think all of these clinicians have an important role in the care of children with autism.