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10-04 KindTree FLASH ! July 29th, 2007 www.kindtree.org Now is the time to turn in your registration for KindTree's Autism Camp / Retreat, taking place on August 24 - 26 at the Baker Boy Scout Camp on Siltcoos Lake. Prices are reasonable, all your friends will be there, we have great food, games, crafts and water fun as well as tents, shared cabins, and a wonderful forest to play in. All the info is here. Cabins are first come - first served. Scholarship applications must be received by August 1, registrations by August 20. Don't delay, register today! Take a moment to visit kindtree.org.
You will find there three ways to participate in the autism
community. There is a special toolbar you can install on your
browser that keeps you up to date with additions, changes, new
events and more on our web site. It's unobtrusive and connects
you to a new Autism Chat Room. Try it! Click Wear a new "Autism Rocks" 10th anniversary T-shirt. See them here. We also have a survey seeking your thoughts on a Autism Community Center we have been working on since the Spring Autism Forum. We've had nearly 100 responses. Your opinion counts. Tell us how you feel, and stay connected. We're all in this together.
WHERE
ARE THEY NOW? NOW: At 26, Olson's world has blossomed even more since he was profiled four years ago. He still has a girlfriend and still works at Down to Earth, where he does cleaning and repackaging. But much has changed for Olson. He just celebrated his first year of living on his own. Has taken up the guitar; "I like playing the blues." And, on the recommendation of his instructor, is testing for a second-level black belt in karate. "I don't recommend people test unless I'm fairly confident they can do it," says Alan Best, chief instructor at Eugene's Best Martial Arts Institute. "He's been rock-solid with attendance. What he's doing takes a lot of courage." Olson has been involved in karate now for 14 years. "Very few people, autistic or not, retain a commitment for such a long time," Best says. "I figured it took me 10 years to get to the first level, so it's not likely I'm going to quit after that," Olson says. One other change: He's become an uncle. "He was at the hospital in Portland, which he found without any help, when his nephew was born and actually held him," says Carol Still, his mother. "He's pretty excited about being an uncle." Carol shakes her head at his independence. "Today (June 15) is the one-year anniversary of him living in his own apartment and the only help he's asked for is cooking advice," she says. "I couldn't be more proud of him." His ultimate goal? To work with autistic kids. "He can communicate with the normal world," says Carol, "but he also understands what it's like to be autistic and thinks he could do something to explain to adults what those kids need." New Program Could Change How You Email By Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express, July 16, 2007 EUGENE, OREGON--A communications professor and a computer science professor at the University of Oregon have developed a new way to email. McKay Moore Sohlberg and Stephen Fickas have dubbed their creation "CogLink", and say that even though it was designed specifically for people with intellectual disabilities or brain injuries, it could be helpful for anyone, particularly folks who are not familiar with the Internet. CogLink is a stripped-down email system that has reduced the number of icons and options at any given time. For example, it has replaced the familiar Inbox and Outbox and other icons, with a simple list of 'buddies'. Users simply look at their buddy list to see if they have written a message to a buddy, or if a buddy has written them. Only those on the buddy list can send email to the user, and vice versa. This keeps out unwanted messages and spam. The system was designed with the help of people who experience cognitive disabilities. It costs $10 a month, which includes ongoing "HelpDesk" technical support. Related: "E-mail service helps mentally disabled
communicate" (Eugene Register-Guard) http://www.inclusiondaily.com/news/07/red/0717b.htm Oregon families say state falls behind on special needs students 07/21/2007 from KGW Northwest News - By JULIA SILVERMAN / Associated Press Nearly every area associated with education got a significant budget boost from the Oregon Legislature this year, from pre-kindergarten programs to the state's seven universities. Except, that is, for a fairly obscure regional program that serves an estimated 8,000 or so families across Oregon whose children are autistic, or struggle with orthopedic problems, or were born deaf, blind or both. The ranks of such families are small, but growing fast, by 20 percent in the last two years alone. And their voices, they thought, were loud — but apparently not loud enough. Now, the program in question, which is collectively run by eight regional education cooperatives to provide local teachers the training and support on how to work with special-needs kids, is facing a funding plateau. Lawmakers put $31.8 million into the program, a $1 million increase, but still about $4 million short of the funding request from State Schools Superintendent Susan Castillo. That's enough to cover a cost-of-living boost for current staff over the next two years, but not enough to hire any new help to cope with the increasing student population. James Sager, an education policy adviser to Gov. Ted Kulongoski, said that in the end, the program simply slipped through the cracks. And toward the end of the session, lawmakers were reluctant to carve any money out of a $260 million fund slated to go directly to school districts for targeted improvements, like reducing class sizes. "We need to do a better job next cycle of showing where the increased costs have occurred and why there needs to be additional funding in that particular area," Sager said. The upshot of the essentially flat funding is that each employee will have more children to focus on, perhaps adding 10 or 12 more students and their families to already full plates, said Sue Mathisen, who directs the Lane Regional Program in Eugene. "The long and short of it is that caseloads will be much higher, we will continue to offer the same services, but staffing will be much more stretched," Mathisen said. "But we have experienced such large growth over the years, it has become normal — people almost expect it. It's kind of like here we go again." One reason the regional programs may have slipped under the radar is that most of their employees don't work directly and regularly with students and their families. Instead, the programs are intended to free individual school districts from paying for expensive specialists who work with such special needs children. Such specialists are hard to find and train, and there may be only a handful of children per school district who need their services. Regional program employees can help train local teachers in areas like Braille, language development, sign language, and how to help autistic children develop communication and social skills. Letters in support of the program poured in from families around the state as lawmakers were deciding on the pieces of the education budget, to no avail. Teri Durham, a Portland lawyer, wrote to say that regional programs staff have helped her second-grade son, Jaylen, cope with basic tasks like reading and writing, despite his profound hearing loss. "I am concerned that if funding for the program is put on the back burner, the future for my son and the other children served by the program will also be set aside," she wrote. "Their futures will suffer if their current services need to be reduced in order to meet the program's increasing demand." Krista Stromme, a mother of two autistic boys from Grants Pass, testified that she didn't know how to cope with increasingly aggressive behavior from her 15-year-old son, Bradley. A staff member from Southern Oregon Regional Programs stepped in, she wrote, and was able to work with Bradley's teacher to get her son some help. "Bradley's behavior has changed dramatically since the new interventions," Stromme told lawmakers. "I have high hopes for Bradley, and while it may seem like a small thing to most people, what she did made a huge impact on this family's daily life." Autism, in particular, has been on the political radar screen, after plenty of publicity about the sharp rise in the brain disorder among Oregon children. Doctors have said the rise partly stems from an expanded understanding of the disease's symptoms, while other researchers have tried to pinpoint environmental factors. Nancy Latini, who heads the Office of Student Learning and Partnerships at the Oregon Department of Education, said she has her worries about the program's future, even as lawmakers promise to take a closer look at it during upcoming sessions. "I worry about how are we supporting the districts and the kids who need these services, as money dwindles," she said. "Does that mean that the services have become so limited that it is less meaningful?" Two Autism Studies Find Clues About the "Social Brain" and Early Diagnosis Marlene Busko, Medscape Medical News 2007. © 2007 Medscape July 16, 2007 — Explicit instructions to attend to social cues seemed to "normalize" activity in the "social brain" of children with autism, and some toddlers at risk for autism might be diagnosable at 14 months, according to 2 studies published in the June and July issues of the Archives of General Psychiatry, respectively. Reading Affect in the Face and Voice In 1 study, led by A. Ting Wang, PhD, now at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York, when children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) — including autism and Asperger's syndrome — were given explicit instructions to pay attention to facial expression and tone of voice, this elicited increased activity in the brain's medial prefrontal cortex, the area that is important for understanding the intentions of others. Dr. Wang commented to Medscape that this is the first study to show that activity in a region that is a key component of the "social brain" can be "normalized" in children with autism, simply by providing them with specific instructions to pay attention to important social cues. She added: "This is important, because it shows that there isn't anything that’s inherently wrong with this region. It's not that individuals with autism cannot activate this region. They just require some direction to attend to the salient contextual cues, and this suggests a strategy for future intervention." High-functioning individuals with ASD often have normal or even superior IQs and can have an extensive vocabulary, Dr. Wang explained, but they can still have impairments in understanding the context of conversation, especially when sarcasm or irony is involved. She added that little is known about the neural basis of these communication deficits. Previous neuroimaging studies have shown reduced activity in brain regions that respond to face and voice. In an earlier study, the group found that giving cues about tone seemed to illicit more normal brain responses. Their goals in the current study were first, to examine the neural circuitry in children with autism who were asked to determine whether a statement in a conversational setting was sincere or ironic, and second, to see whether explicit instructions to pay attention to important cues would elicit more normal patterns of brain activity. A total of 18 boys with ASD (age 7 to 17 years) and 18 typically developing boys (age 9 to 15 years), all with full-scale IQ greater than 70, underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during the presentation of potentially ironic scenarios. The participants listened to conversations and viewed corresponding cartoon drawings of the scenarios. They were instructed to identify whether the ending comment in the vignettes was sincere or ironic (meant the opposite of what was said). When given neutral instructions, the typically developing children, but not the children with ASD, showed activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain. However, when they received explicit instructions to pay close attention to facial expression and tone of voice, the children with ASD also showed activity in this region. These findings demonstrate that "by instructing children with autism to attend to faces and voices in various contexts, we may be able to train the brain to use these cues to interpret the intentions of others and negotiate social interactions more successfully," Dr. Wang summarized. Her group will be investigating whether a cognitive behavioral approach could be effective for teaching social perception skills in autism. Diagnosis of Autism at 14 and 24 Months In a prospective, longitudinal study, Rebecca J. Landa, PhD, from the Kennedy Krieger Institute, in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues showed that among toddlers at high risk for autism (who had siblings with autism), of 30 diagnosed with autism at 36 months, 16 had shown atypical social, communication, and play behavior at 14 months (early diagnosis of autism), and 14 showed these differences at 24 months (later diagnosis). "We need to be screening for autism [early], certainly by 18 months, and if a child passes the screening, we still need to rescreen, because autism can come on board after toddlerhood," Dr. Landa told Medscape. The average age of diagnosis of autism is between 3 and 6 years of age, she explained. The group aimed to examine patterns of social and communication development from 14 to 24 months in children with early and later diagnosis of ASD. They evaluated development in 107 infants at high risk for autism and 18 low-risk infants from 14 months to 30 or 36 months, when an outcome diagnosis was made. The outcome diagnoses were autism (30), broader autism phenotype (19), and non-broader autism phenotype (58). "[Fourteen months is] the earliest that autism has ever been reported to be diagnosed, but not all children with autism are going to be diagnosable at this age," Dr. Landa cautioned. She added that in some children, symptoms appear gradually and begin to be present by 24 months. It is also important to note that skills are not completely lacking at 14 months, she observed. "So if you're expecting a child to have a lack of communication or a lack of smiling at people, you're going to miss a lot of the children. Rather, the picture is that there are multiple features, and those behaviors are very inconsistently and infrequently present — behaviors like social engagement, looking at people and smiling, and initiating communication for social purposes." Their study highlights the need for early intervention to target social and communication development in toddlers with ASD, the group writes. They add that further studies in larger samples are needed to replicate their preliminary findings and to develop reliable, validated diagnostic tools to allow accurate, earlier diagnoses in children aged 2 years and younger. "What it boils down to is that parenting
a child with autism is a difficult job; writing about it is
far easier. " Thanks for listening.
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