The Causes of Epidemic Autism (and ADD)
There is no doubt that we are caught up in an epidemic of childhood brain disease. There are hundreds of thousands of autistic children in the late 1990s where only a decade ago there were seemingly only a few thousand. And there are millions of milder cases, which carry a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder, with or without hyperactivity, therefore ADD or ADHD for short. The ADD children often have delays in speech development and selective impairment of school learning and social behavior. In their areas of interest they are often very intelligent and accomplished; but as a group, ADD kids run into increasing trouble in their adolescent years as they struggle with school, conflict with family, experiment and get hung up on drugs, and run afoul of the law.
ADD is not a trivial condition and it almost certainly reflects damage to the process of brain development. In fact, research at Stanford University recently shed light on the process, literally, by demonstrating a lack of activity in the brain control centers, called the Corpus striatum, of children with ADD. This area failed to light up when visualized by PET scan. PET is an abbreviation for 'positron emission tomography,' and the injected glucose sugar tracer material gives off positrons that are recorded by a computer-linked scanner. ADD children failed to light up--until they were given Ritalin. This indicated that brain cells in that area, particularly the caudate nucleus, were underactive. The research gave visual evidence for the efficacy of this drug, which increases the action of the neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin. It is certain that additional research of this type will verify the benefits that parents report after the use of orthomolecular and herbal treatments, such as phosphatidylserine, Panax ginseng, deanol, caffeine, tyrosine, biopterin, vitamin B12, folic acid, hydroxy-tryptophan, piracetam, vinpocetine, and others.
The same can be said about autism, the more severe form of developmental brain injury, which is obvious by age 3 years old. Autistic children fail to develop speech and their social interaction and natural curiosity is replaced by repetitive behaviors, staring, posturing, head-banging and self-stimulating in ways that range from excess sleeping to frequent raging. As they improve they may become obsessed with specific objects, sounds, images, books, etc. and they can tolerate no interruption or change in their connection with it. Those that do develop speech may appear normal, but they often fail to develop comprehension and common-sense judgment. They seem to lack an intact sense of before-after, cause-effect--and right-wrong. And if these unfortunate children do improve to this higher level of recovery, there is the next challenge, context. This is the ability to predict the consequence of their own acts and be able to feel and believe them in advance. Those who fail at this stage are identified as Asperger's Syndrome, named for the researcher who described this phenomenon. There is no doubt that some of those who get in trouble with the law are actually victims of early life brain injury. This is especially prevalent in violent criminals who end up on 'death row.'