Autism

You have to believe in cosmic justice when you hear about the case of Mark Geier, the doctor whose license to practice was suspended recently after the Maryland Board of Physicians ruled that his bizarre treatment regimen "endangers autistic children and exploits their parents. " If, like me, you don't know much about autism, let me explain where the cosmic justice comes in: One form of the wide-ranging developmental disorder, on the high-functioning, high-verbal end of it, is Asperger's syndrome, which among other things is characterized by a tendency to obsess on a single subject.

Dr. Alejandro Rodriguez, former director of the division of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who also conducted pivotal studies on autism and other developmental disorders in children, died Friday of heart failure at his Palm City, Fla., home. The longtime Ruxton resident was 93. "He was my teacher many, many, many years ago at Hopkins. His teaching was patient-oriented and fundamentally bedside. He'd say, 'Let's go to the bedside and see the patient,'" said Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., who is director of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Hopkins School of Medicine.

They were children considered to be beyond help, destined for a lifetime commitment to a state institution, sedated by morphine injections. They were autistic, but in Jeanne Simons' eyes they deserved better -- a place where they could be helped instead of hidden. Simons gave them that place in 1955 when she opened the Linwood Children's Center in an old stone mansion perched on a hill above historic Ellicott City. The psychiatric social worker saw beyond the hand-wringing, the temper tantrums and the self-destructive behaviors when she established one of the first educational and therapy programs for autistic children.

Nearly 1 percent of children nationwide have autism - with the disorder more than four times more common in boys than girls, according to new figures released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report, which is in keeping with recent studies that tried to put a number on the puzzling neurobiological disorder, finds an average of one out of every 110 8-year-olds showed symptoms of autism, a sharp increase from the widely cited 1 in 150 figure from the CDC's study on autism's prevalence issued two years ago. Another recent report, based on parent surveys, found autism in 1 in every 100 children.

Getting the diagnosis of autism for a child is just one step down a long, rough road -- a step that too often comes late. It takes time for parents to realize something's wrong with their child. It takes more time still for professionals to agree there's a problem and figure out what it is. A pediatrician might suspect a hearing disorder: You can clang two pots and Johnny won't even turn his head. A speech therapist might think it's a language problem: Jenny isn't talking at age 3 except to echo the words of other people.

In recent years, autism research has been a battleground. A vocal group of parents, advocates and a few scientists focused on vaccines containing traces of mercury as the lead suspects in the disorder. But most autism researchers were suspicious, arguing that the theory didn't fit the evidence. Now, with a new Danish study offering the strongest evidence yet against the vaccine theory, the controversy may give way to a more baffling question: If vaccines aren't the culprit, then what is?

One day, they'd like to go on a vacation, out West, just the two of them. Spend some time alone, without having to worry what's wrong, or wonder where he is, or watch what it is he's doing this very second. For Columbia's Anna Burns and Steve Fine, that may or may not ever happen. But since their 12-year-old son, Michael - who is autistic - has been at the Kennedy Krieger School in Towson, there have been flutterings of hope that one day Michael might not need his parents quite so much.

Having found their way through a sea of opinions, options and opportunities to find the right care for their autistic triplets, Randy and Lynn Gaston are preparing this weekend to provide some illumination to other parents facing the same daunting task. The Ellicott City couple has spent more than six months organizing Autism Expo 2007, which will bring autism experts and support organizations together at Howard Community College on Saturday so families can start to sort through available resources.

MARJORIE Shulbank, a disabilities specialist in the State Department of Education, holds up a bar graph that looks like one side of a very steep mountain. "Every state in the union can show you the same thing," Shulbank says. The graph shows the 1,500 percent increase in the number of Maryland public school children found to have autism over the span of a single decade: 260 in 1993, 4,084 in 2003. And that, says Shulbank, doesn't include 500 or so very young children classified as "developmentally delayed."