Monterey Bay Forum

Let’s imagine what might happen were President Obama given an ADOS assessment. An ADOS is administered one-to-one — not done here.

What the ADOS is: The ADOS assesses for autistic spectrum disorders. Adolescents or adults assessed with an ADOS are asked to do various tasks including: 1) play interactively with the person who is assessing; 2) demonstrate how to do an activity; and 3) tell a story based on a picture book which has no words.

One ADOS task is engaging in interactive play that involves joint attention and ability to change based on what the other person does. President Obama seems to engage in a lot of “my way or no way” behavior which is not interactive. When President Obama got the stimulus bill signed he immediately turned it over to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to figure out how to distribute the “pork”. President Obama did not wield his mighty pen and interactively “cut” out pork. Overall global assessment: As Obama’s abilities to interactively “play” appear low, he gets a score of 2 for the joint interactive task.

A second task on the ADOS: The person must demonstrate both verbally and non-verbally how to do something in daily life. Getting bills such as ObamaCare passed has been part of President Obama’s daily life. Can you imagine President Obama — without a teleprompter — explaining with use of gesture and words how he got ObamaCare passed? On the demonstrate a Daily Activity task Obama scores another 2. The total score is now 4 points.

A third task on the ADOS: The person assessed must tell a story based on a picture book that has no words. So, imagine a picture book showing the Tea Party movement at various rallies. How might Obama tell that story? Can Obama see a series of pictures and make a coherent story about a major political event, i.e. the Tea Party movement? Doubtful. Hence, on the Tell a Story task President Obama gets another score of 2.

On just three ADOS tasks Obama is already up to a total score of 6. There are about 12 or so tasks on the ADOS.

Let’s hypothetically assume that President Obama can meet the ADOS cutoff score for a possible diagnosis of an autistic spectrum disorder. More information is necessary to assign a diagnosis of autism or some variation.

The foregoing gives you an idea of the kind of tasks persons must perform during an ADOS assessment. (more…)

“Be sure to screen children for delays” said the first lecture at the Disability conference held in San Francisco March 11 & 12, 2010. One in five (1/5th) of all children have some kind of delay when they enter school – hence it is very important that physicians and other health professionals screen for delays.

One screening tool for autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) is the CHAT. The CHAT is just one of various tools available to screen for ASD.

Do you have concerns about your child? There are certain signs to watch for in children age six months to one year old. Many of these are non-verbal signs: not turning head when child’s name is called, lack of smiling and eye contact, not engaging in “joint attention” .

I will provide free screenings for autistic spectrum disorder. Contact Dr. Jackson at 831 688-6002 (Aptos, California phone) or email to DrCameronJackson@gmail.com

Identify autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) early. Treat it appropriately. And many children will substantially improve.

written by Dr. Cameron Jackson DrCameronJackson@gmail.com

Persons with autism often cannot make eye contact. They often will look at mouths rahter than focus on the eyes, Oxytocin increased the abilitiy of autistic persons to pick up non-verbal social clues. (more…)

How early can we catch autism? Looks like 5 months using “joint attention” as an important marker for assessing autism. That is something that pediatricians can do in their office with the assistance of a parent. The faster we can diagnose autism the quicker we can provide appropriate treatment and begin the healing process.

What is “joint attention” Simply eye contact with the infant and then looking at an object jointly — such as holding up a rattle and looking first at the baby (and smiling of course) and then looking at the rattle. That is “joint attention”.

written by Dr.Cameron Jackson www.freedomOK.net/wordpress See the article below:

“Children as young as five months old will follow the gaze of an adult towards an object and engage in joint attention, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council. The findings, published in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters, suggests that the human brain develops this important social skill surprisingly early in infancy.

Joint attention – where two people share attention to the same object – is a vital human social skill necessary for many types of human behaviour such as teaching, collaboration, and language learning. Impairments in this skill are one of the earliest signs of autism.

Dr Tobias Grossmann and Professor Mark Johnson from Birkbeck, University of London, used a technique known as ‘near infrared spectroscopy’ (NIRS) to examine which areas of an infant’s brain are activated when paying joint attention to an object.

NIRS, an optical brain imaging technique which involves measuring the blood flow associated with brain activation, is well-suited to study freely-behaving infants. With this non-invasive technique, near-infrared light travels from sources on a sensor pad located on the head, through the skin, skull and underlying brain tissue, and is then detected by sensitive detectors on the same sensor pad.

In the experiment, conducted in Birkbeck’s Babylab, the babies were shown the computer-animated image of an adult’s face. The adult would make eye contact with the baby, raise her eyebrows and smile, glance towards an object at her side, back to the baby and then finally turn her head to face the object. In the control conditions, the adult would look away from the object or would look at the object without making eye contact with the baby.

The researchers found that only when the babies engaged in joint attention with the adult, they used a specific region of their brain known as the left prefrontal cortex – an area to the front of the brain involved in complex cognitive and social behaviours.

“Infants engaged in joint attention use a similar region of their brain as adults do,” says Dr Grossmann, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow. “Our study suggests that the infants are tuned to sharing attention with other humans much earlier than previously thought. This may be a vital basis for the infant’s social development and learning.”

“In the future this approach could be used to assess individual differences in infants’ responses to joint attention and might, in combination with other measures, serve as a marker that can help with an early identification of infants at risk for autism.”