Autism spectrum disorder is a challenging condition characterized by mental problems such as social skills, speech difficulty, and non-communication behavior. Medical reports of the year show that every 1 out of 40 children and 1 out of 55 adults are affected by autism spectrum disorder in the country.
Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental condition that affects the ability to learn, interact with people, communicate with others, and behave well. This is a complex condition that impacts brain function leading to developing social disconnection and strange behavior. It is a life-damaging disorder that appears before age 3 to 4 and affects your complete life. As its name reveals, it’s a spectrum disorder that impacts different areas of life in various ways.
Autistic people experience trouble in:
Learning: Autism causes underdevelopment of skills that may lead to poor learning abilities at an uneven rate. Autistic people have trouble communicating but are good at artistic things, such as music, math, or art that involves their memory. That’s why these people do well on the analytics or problem-solving diagnosis tests.
Sensory Stimulation: Autistic people have different sensory inputs from normal people. They react differently to external environmental stimuli, including temperature, light, clothes, and sound. SAD also appears with strong symptoms of overly focused interest in topics or actions.
Communication: People with autism feel difficulties in understanding and communication. Controlling the thoughts and emotions is a hard thing for autistic people. They experience severe difficulty in expressing themselves through words, touch, facial expressions, or gestures.
Transition: Autistic people have to face several transitions and changes in their daily routine.
Recent studies claimed that more children are being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder than ever before. However, the number of diagnoses has increased because of improved awareness and advancements in medical research. Now researchers are struggling to discover more about the relationship between ASD and biological, environmental, and genetic factors. Many people are diagnosed with autism symptoms in adulthood even though they’ve had the symptoms since their early childhood. However, this happens when autism symptoms are not severe enough to damage their daily life activities. It is important to learn that early intervention or diagnosis can improve development in people with ASD, especially in children, and may make their daily functioning easier in adulthood.
Types of Autism
Autism affects people in different ways. This condition looks different for every affected person and has a distinct set of challenges and strengths. For example, some autistic people experience difficulty in verbal communication. They use other ways to communicate. However, some autistic people can speak clearly. Some affected people are diagnosed with intellectual disabilities while some have no such problems. Sometimes, autistic people can survive on their own independently without any support but in awesome cases, they need significant support in their daily lives. Studies showed that in most cases autism is diagnosed at age 7 in the country while the signs appear by age 3 or 4. Medically autism is diagnosed in three phases or levels based on the required amount of support, referred to as level 1, level 2, and level 3. These levels can be distinguished based on the support level that people with autism need for social communication and developing improved behavior.
Level 1: People diagnosed at level 1 need mild support.
Level 2: This level of autism requires moderate or substantial support for autistic people.
Level 3: At this level, autistic people need very substantial or severe support.
In addition, if you talk about the range of how autism affects someone’s daily life, you may go through certain terms, like “less significant” and “more significant”. A professional healthcare giver can better explain these terms.
However, two more forms of autism are found that can help you understand the main difficulties autistic people experience throughout their lives.
High Functioning Autism
Some autistic people have less obvious symptoms. They perform well in schools and colleges and have fewer communication problems. Medical science such as autism as Asperger Syndrome or high-functioning autism.
Low Functioning Autism
This condition causes intellectual disabilities in people that make them completely dependent on their relatives or friends for their everyday tasks. They are not able to live alone.
Symptoms of Autism
Autism symptoms usually appear from the age of 3 years. However, some people show symptoms with their birth.
Common symptoms of autism spectrum disorder in children include:
- Not listening to other people.
- Not like to be held.
- Not looking towards things when someone wants to show them those things.
- A lack of eye contact.
- More sensitive to external environmental factors related to sound, sight, touch, and smell.
- An intense interest in some topics while a very low interest in certain topics.
- Repeating certain words or phrases over and over.
- Frequently fidgeting with objects or rocking back or forth.
- Find it difficult to adapt to changes in their routine.
- Talking in a robotic voice.
- The problem in speech.
- Have trouble with facial expressions, tone of voice, or gestures.
- Abrupt seizures at the adolescent stage.
Symptoms of Autism in Adults
- Adults show certain symptoms of autism that include:
- Being uninterested, blunt, or rude to others for nothing.
- Finding it hard to be friends with someone.
- Having trouble understanding what other people feel or think.
- Avoid social activities.
- Being upset by any change in daily routine.
- Having trouble expressing feelings or emotions.
- Lack of understanding sarcasm or taking things literally.
- Trouble in understanding social rules.
- Try again and again to plan this
- Notice every detail very carefully before doing any task.
- Be attentive to small details like smell or sound that normal people don’t.
- Avoiding direct conversation with someone.
Symptoms of Autism in Children
Signs of autism are different in children than in adults, such as children:
- Do not respond to their name for up to 9 months or more.
- Do not show Any facial expressions.
- Do not take an interest in playing simple games such as pat-a-cake.
- Do not show gestures.
- Do not have interest in playing with other children by 3 years old.
- Do not understand the emotions of other people by the age of 2 years.
- Do not want to enjoy, act, dance, or sing with others.
- Try to arrange their toys in a specific order and get disturbed by any change in that order.
- Often spin in circles or flap their hands.
- Odd eating or sleeping habits.
- Show obsessive interests.
- Show delay in learning language or movements.
Causes of Autism
The actual basic cause of autism is still undiscovered. Researchers found that it is a combination of prenatal events or environmental factors such as genetics, pregnancy, labor, and delivery. All factors interact with brain functions and lead to autism.
Certain things that play a role in causing autism in children include:
- Use of certain medications such as valproate while pregnant.
- Have gestational diabetes.
- Give early birth.
- Reduction in oxygen availability to the fetus during pregnancy.
- Intrauterine growth restriction in fetus.
- Bleeding during pregnancy.
- Being pregnant over age 40.
- Being pregnant before 24 months of having another baby.
These factors cause the changes in the bay’s brain development. They also impact the working of genes transferring to the baby and lead to brain differences. Why does autism occur? The answer is not clear but studies showed that it starts from problems in your brain that process language and interpret sensory input.
In addition, autism can happen to any person. Your race, social background, income, family, lifestyle, educational level, or ethnicity do not affect the risk of autism.
Some common risk factors are:
- Family history with autism.
- Very low weight at birth.
- Being born to older parents.
- Genetic disorders such as Down’s Syndrome or Rett.
- Being male.
Is Autism Spectrum Disorder Genetic?
Sudden changes in genes lead to an increase in the risk of being autistic because autism runs in families. According to studies, 50 to 60% of risk factors for autism are directly linked with genetic disorders. However, research also support the theory that the overall risk of autism depends on the combination of your parent’s age, birth complications at the time of labor or delivery, environment, and gene mutations.
Moreover, rare gene mutations or changes in chromosomes also increase the risks of autism. These factors also affect the other parts of the body like ADNP syndrome. In this condition, autism happens in a person with specific facial features. Anyways the studies conclude that autism symptoms tend to involve brain development issues. That’s why autism affects the abilities of socialization, communication, and cognitive function.
Diagnosis of Autism
Starting with a healthy discussion with you, your healthcare provider may proceed to observe and interact with the autistic child, to diagnose the autism symptoms. In this case, the diagnosis is not the work of a single person. A team of experts is usually involved in this procedure and the autistic child is the central member of the team that needs the attention of every team member.
A screening test in the form of some questions is carried out as an initiative step of diagnosis. The pediatrician asks questions about the autistic child. This screening is done within the age of 20 to 24 months. The pediatrician then forwards the patient to an expert after gathering essential data. The experts talk further with you about your autistic child and observe your child’s movements. They tried to find specific symptoms specialized for autism spectrum disorder.
Healthcare providers now collect the provided data and analyze it in the DSM-5-TR. The symptoms are categorized into two major types i.e. the actions of the autistic child and the social behavior of him.
Let’s dive deeper to evaluate the discreet information about the diagnosis procedure!
Healthcare providers and autism specialist doctors find difficulties in your child in the following areas of life:
Emotional-Social Reciprocity: This is a back-and-forth behavior of socializing. For example, the autistic child often doesn’t respond to questions asked by someone. Such children cannot give-and-take socializing, unlike normal children.
Development of Relationships: Providers strive to attach people with autistic children, who can develop relationships with them. So that they spend time together and share things of interest but the autistic children usually do not initiate conversation and are hesitant in developing a relationship.
Nonverbal Communication: Body language or eye contact are nonverbal communication ways that add meaning to your words and gestures. However, autistic children cannot use these cues as you expect. They often do not understand the nonverbal communication of other people.
Specific Test for Autism Diagnosis
Medical researchers have failed to design any lab test for specific markers for autism. However, Healthcare professionals perform certain genetic tests to check for gene mutations linked with autism. But don’t take these tests as an authentic way for autism diagnosis because genetic testing cannot help further to diagnose the cause of children’s brain differences. Therefore, you are advised to get help from a pediatrician to check for any developmental malfunction in the brain of an autistic child. They are trained enough to recognize such developmental deficiencies. Expert pediatricians used to administer an assessment test to diagnose autism in your child. The assessment is known as ADOS ( autism diagnostic observation schedule, which can help to diagnose ASD more feasibly.
Treatment of Autism
It cannot be treated like other brain disorders because autism is not a disease. However, it can be managed. Autism spectrum disorder is a way of a brain functioning and it makes their identity. Some symptoms go through life while some disappear over time. Autistic people can be helped by professionals to strengthen their efforts to minimize the effects of autistic symptoms. Management of autism involves different ways through which an autistic child can learn different skills such as language, nonverbal communication, or social communication.
In addition, there are therapies for the family members of autistic children that help them to support that child. This support may be started at the age of 3 or 4.
Common therapies for autistic children include:
- Occupational therapy.
- Family therapy.
- Applied behavior analysis therapy.
- Speech therapy.
Conclusion
Being a parent of an autistic child is like being a student because you continue to learn, grow, and change according to the needs of your child who is affected by autism. Autistic children also pass through the learning procedure throughout their lives. They also teach you about their interests, needs, and desires.
If you have an autistic child, your learning procedure might be different from others. Because in your case you are the student and your child is taking the lead and you should follow their cues. Healthcare providers should be with you to manage each new symptom or challenge.
