Autism
According to the scientific definition, autism is one of the most serious developmental disorders that are known so far. It always affects the entire personality. Sensation, feeling, thinking and acting are heavily affected. People with autism, it seems, do no find a way to interact with their environment. These persons retreat into their own world and live like in a prison. They cannot escape by themselves. Information from outside cannot be processed accordingly.
Due to a dysfunction within the central nervous system, they lack the ability to connect various sensations to what we would call a logical whole issue. Instead of organized information there is chaos, which can result in considerable disorders in behavior, such as: temper tantrum, rage attacks, assaults, autodestructive behavior, obsessive ritualized behaviour. But the original cause of autism remains unknown. Currently, a range of factors are said to provoke autism. Among these, genetic elements are most likely to play a central role.
The origins of autism – disorders in cellular communication?
Current researchers agree that autism is, to a large extent, genetically determined. It is even likely that genetic factors are the sole origins of autism. One could imagine indirect influences from the environment to have additional effects that, given a genetic predisposition, could lead to autism. Three large-scale genomic surveys with some 12.000 test persons indicate that it is mainly altered genes responsible for the cross-linking of nerve cells in the brain that lead to this serious developmental disorder. Nevertheless, there is no precise location of this mutation – a number of regions on verious chromosomes can be linked with autism. In the surveys mentioned above, regions of chromosome number 5 have been studied.
Autism covers a whole range of symptoms, from the comparably light Asperger syndrome to very noticeable deficiencies in verbal and non-verbal communication. In all of its forms, social interaction with other people is affected.
Although it is becoming more and more apparent that autism has genetic reasons, the causes for the processes leading to these developmental disorders are still unknown. The search for a “messenger substance” has not been successful either yet. Its existence could be the key to a clear diagnosis and possibly even to a treatment method in the long run.
|
|
|
