INTRODUCTION - National Trust

A PHYSICIAN’S GUIDE FOR PARENTS
OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM
”AUSTISIC SPECTRUM DISORDERS”
You have been worried about your child for a long time, but it has been difficult to
describe “the difference” from other children; probably some people have told you not to
worry, others have been unable to decide just what was going on, and now you have been
told there is an “autistic spectrum disorder”. What does this mean?
Children diagnosed as having an autistic spectrum disorder (ranging from the most
severe form, early infantile autism or Kanner syndrome through to much milder types of
pervasive developmental disorder (“P.D.D.”) and Asperger syndrome) are all as different
from each other as neurologically intact children without such difficulties. Yet all have
real problems in communication and relating to other people, and all show unusual
behaviours, with odd habits and mannerisms. These problems will have been present before
the third birthday, and often parents will have sensed something “different” in the first
year of life. These children have severe difficulties in all of these areas. Some of these children
are very intelligent, others are mentally retarded; in young children it can be extremely
hard to judge or measure intelligence, and intelligence testing is not usually reliable (in
terms of forecasting the future) before the child is five or six years old.
1. What is the cause of autistic spectrum disorder ?
No single cause is known. There are probably many different causes. What seems to
be one disorder will someday turn out to be a group of quite different conditions all
producing the same symptoms. This is very common in medicine - thus there are
many different causes of cough, or arthritis, or anxiety.
All autistic spectrum disorders are due to some change in the way the brain works.
They are never, caused by poor parenting. If you meet professionals who blame you
for your child’s difficulties, have nothing further to do with them.
We know that there is a genetic influence in many cases of autism – it can run in
families -some parents have more than one child with autism or PDD. However,
other cases are clearly not genetic. In some genetic conditions - such as “fragile-X
syndrome” and tuberous sclerosis some of the children do have autism.
Some children have different brains; either they are made differently or something has
gone wrong with brain growth early in pregnancy, a variety of abnormalities have
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