Everything from how to deal with wrap around services for your child with autism, to how exercise and yoga benefits those with ASD. This section contains all the blog posts and articles pertaining to medical health, treatments and services for those with autism.
I am starting to see more mental health reporting in the news over the effects of social distancing and isolating at home. The current COVID-19 circumstances effect the autism community in ways that are unique in comparison with the rest of the population. I’ve been writing weekly on various aspects of life at home during COVID-19 for parents, educators and…
I can remember vividly the first time I heard about autism-related catatonia. It was at my Saskatoon, Saskatchewan conference in October 2017. Dr. Ruth Aspy spoke about it in her presentation on self-regulation. I had only heard of catatonia being associated with schizophrenia. Her explanation and description of autism-related catatonia got my mind turning about the parents whom I’ve talked…
The connection between autism and gut issues has been known about for over a decade, but until now, while the connection has been clear, the causes have been unknown. Up to 70 percent of those with ASD have gastrointestinal (GI) abnormalities at some point during childhood or adolescence. They are also more likely to have constipation or chronic diarrhea than children…
The first year of a child’s life is normally a non-stop daily or weekly celebration of “firsts” – first smile, first crawl, first steps, first words…first full night’s sleep (with any luck). But what if your baby doesn’t seem to be reaching these milestones? Every child is different, and meets these milestones at different times, so when should parents start…
Regular exercise is essential to good health, but did you know it can help a person with autism self-regulate and manage stress? Coach Dave Geslak has created exercise programs for people on the autism spectrum using structure and visual supports.
I have talked with many parents who, like me, have placed their autistic child on a special diet eliminating mainly dairy products and gluten. The elimination of dairy and gluten from the diet is also known as the GF/CF diet.
If you have a child who is newly diagnosed with autism, or are thinking of starting a new therapy program for an autistic child, I highly recommend reading the article Which Therapies Can Help with Autism. The learning curve for therapies to help your autistic child can be daunting. Not every therapy works for every child, and it can take…
A topic that is getting a lot of coverage in the news this past year is the discovery that autism research may have gender-skewed results leading to high functioning girls on the spectrum going undiagnosed. The main reason for this discrepancy is that girls and women haven’t been represented sufficiently in scientific study, and so the diagnostic benchmarks have been set by boys, and then assumed to be the same for girls. This assumption has been dramatically questioned in the past year through research that began to look at the brain development of boys and girls on the spectrum separately. Below are the three main ways that girls with autism have slipped through the cracks, and gone undiagnosed.
A new study from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden recently published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, revealed that the risk of premature death is about 2.5 times higher for people with autism spectrum disorder than for the rest of the population. The mean age of death for someone with autism is 54 compared with 70 for the general population. For…
As most of you know World Autism Awareness Day was on Saturday, April 2nd. Every year, the United Nations determines a theme for this day and this year it is Inclusion and Neurodiversity. Most people understand the concept of inclusion, but neurodiversity is a relatively new topic that is gaining traction. What is Neurodiversity? Neurodiversity is the concept that humans don’t come…
I’ve written about the difficulties I have had getting my own children to recognize and use washrooms that are not the ones from our home. It can be a real challenge for a child with autism because there is a tendency to represent, understand, and remember things in an extremely specific way. This tendency towards specific or inflexible learning is…
Historically children with developmental disabilities were excluded from pain research, but this past month a new (as yet unpublished) study showed conclusively that people with autism exhibit abnormal brain responses when a painfully hot object is placed against their skin. The brain’s response to pain has three phases – early, intermediate and late. In an experiment with 17 people with autism and 16 people without, a small piece of metal was taped to the skin and heated to the point of causing discomfort/pain but not injury. The people without autism were still responding to the pain ten seconds after it stopped, but the people with autism had no brain response after the ten seconds.
Feeding a child on the autism spectrum can be a great challenge for parents. Creating healthy meals, eating a variety of foods, eating too little or too much food, focusing on only one texture or food presentation, and gut/digestive issues are just some of the worries parents have when feeding their children. Here are a few helpful hints that I have learned as a mother of two children with autism who are both on specialized diets and struggle with eating.
I am an avid reader of Judy Endow’s blog because she highlights issues that many of us are not even aware of. Her recent post about the differences in self-advocacy if you are poor or middle income was eye-opening.
Judy has been both poor and middle income as an autistic adult and has observed that “self-advocacy is typically geared toward middle-income status. This could be problematic since many autistic adults live in poverty.”
Many of us have had uncomfortable moments when a person with autism “acts out” or does something inappropriate. Sometimes these behaviours can be aggressive and downright scary for a parent or caregiver. While it might be easier to imagine that prescribing a drug could minimize these events or make them stop altogether, new research out of the UK suggests that many people with intellectual disabilities are overprescribed medications in an effort to treat problem behaviours such as aggression and self-injury, despite there being little evidence of any benefit from these medications.