How to understand autism: from causes to recovery

Author: Du Yasong, Chief Physician of the Mental Health Center affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine

What is autism?

Autism was originally called a rare disease in my country, but now it has become a common disease. This is related to the diagnostic concept of the disease.

The so-called autism actually refers to a type of children who, from birth or in the early stages of life, that is, before the age of 3, have insufficient language skills. Some children may not have language and cannot communicate with others; some children's language development is relatively late; some children cannot communicate with others even if they have language, and cannot correctly use language and general language rules to communicate with others. At the same time, these children will also have some stereotyped behaviors, such as waving their hands in front of their eyes, walking on tiptoes, and looking at people with squinting eyes. These two major symptoms are called autism.

Autism has been called autism spectrum disorder in the American Classification of Mental Disorders since 2013. The World Health Organization's Classification of Diseases has also called it autism spectrum disorder since 2022. Modern autism has been replaced by autism spectrum disorder in academia.

Such cases are indeed increasing. In terms of prevalence, in 1966, the UK conducted an epidemiological survey with a prevalence of 4/10,000 or 5/10,000, and now it has basically reached about 1%, that is, 100/10,000, which is basically a 25 to 30-fold increase. So it is no longer a rare disease, but a very common problem.

The prevalence of autism in recent years

Regarding autism, genetics is a very important factor in its onset. At present, research on autism in the fields of psychiatry, biomedicine and life sciences at home and abroad is all done from the perspective of genes, and many candidate genes have been discovered. However, it is still difficult to explain the occurrence of autism with a certain gene or a group of genes.

In addition, there are organic factors. According to clinical studies, about 90% of children with autism have some viral infection during the first three months of pregnancy, which is a critical stage for the development of the brain and circulatory system. For example, threatened abortion, viral infection, cold, etc., will also affect the child's embryonic development.

In addition, early recognition and identification of autism are very important. As young parents, how to understand your child's interactions with others, his eyes, whether he responds when you call him, etc. Early identification of some early symptoms may also be helpful to the child.

Of course, many of our current scientific research focuses on the impact of environmental factors, such as environmental pollution, air pollution, and even some local food pollution. These factors are issues we cannot avoid, so now we take autism factors into consideration, but it is difficult to say how a certain pollutant causes autism in children, and there is still a long way to go.

How to help autistic children recover

One of the principles of medicine is early detection and early treatment, and the same applies to children with autism.

So I appeal to all young parents that after you have children, you should learn to interact with them. For example, when they are two months old, you may need to interact with them, talk to them, and let them hear your voice, because their eyes can see their mother's face and they can recognize whether she is smiling or frowning. So you should start to interact and communicate with your children now.

Generally speaking, when the baby is 6 months old, he will be more flexible in communication, and it is easy to find that he is less communicative, etc. These phenomena may be exposed. When the baby is about 12 months old, you can basically see some clues, such as less communication, less response when you call his name or smile at him, which may be the signs, which we call early warning signs.

By the time a child is 18 months, or one and a half years old, you can basically tell whether the child can socialize and whether his language has developed.

So 12 months is a watershed. At 12 months, the child must learn to speak and respond to his mother’s call. At 18 months, he can communicate with others in his own language. So at this time, we need to find out if there is a problem. Once we find some problems or early warning symptoms, such as not looking at people, responding very slowly or not responding when you call him, and sometimes staring at his hands, we should go to the relevant medical institutions for diagnosis as soon as possible. This is the second link, early diagnosis.

Early diagnosis is very important. Of course, this is done by doctors, not parents. After early diagnosis, you have to accept it. Many parents deny or do not accept the diagnosis. There may be a process of denial at this time. After going through this process, the next step is to help the child.

How to help?

First of all, we must understand the child’s problems, accept him and help him.

Generally speaking, there is no drug treatment for autism, so the main thing is behavioral training. Early training is to train the child, to induce his language without language, to let him use language correctly with language, and to correct his stereotyped language with stereotyped language. In general, changing his abnormal language and behavior and letting him enter our normal or so-called popular language rules is to help the child.

In addition, we can also have other intervention methods, such as taking him to play games. This game is the process of communication between people, just like children in kindergarten playing over there, this is interpersonal communication. For children with autism, game therapy and interpersonal communication therapy are very important.

This article is a work supported by the Science Popularization China Creation Cultivation Program

Team/Author: Deep Science - Du Yasong

Reviewer: He Lingfeng, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor, School of Psychology, Shanghai University of Sport

Produced by: China Association for Science and Technology Department of Science Popularization

Producer: China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Xinghe Culture Media Co., Ltd.