autism spectrum disorder symptoms

Autism Is Awesome

In 2010, Autism Speaks launched the Light It Up Blue initiative. Light It Up Blue sees prominent buildings across the world – including the Empire State Building in New York City and the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada – turn their lights blue to raise awareness for autism and to commemorate World Autism Awareness Day. In 2011 the first Autism Acceptance Day celebrations were organized by Paula Durbin Westby, as a response to traditional “Autism Awareness” campaigns which the Autistic community found harmful and insufficient. Autism Acceptance Day is now held every April. "Awareness" focuses on informing others of the existence of autism while "acceptance" pushes towards validating and honoring the autism community.


By providing tools and educational material people are encouraged to embrace the challenges autistic people face and celebrate their strengths. Rather than making autism into a crippling disability, acceptance integrates those on the autistic spectrum into everyday society. Instead of encouraging people to wear blue as Autism Awareness Day does, Autism Acceptance Day encourages people to wear red. Autism was found to occur more often in families of physicists, engineers and scientists. 12.5% of the fathers and 21.2% of the grandfathers (both paternal and maternal) of children with autism were engineers, compared to 5% of the fathers and 2.5% of the grandfathers of children with other syndromes. Other studies have yielded similar results. Findings of this nature have led to the coinage of the term "geek syndrome".

A 2009 systematic review and meta-analysis by Spreckley and Boyd of four 2000–2007 studies (involving a total of 76 children) came to different conclusions than the aforementioned reviews. Spreckley and Boyd reported that applied behavior intervention (ABI), another name for EIBI, did not significantly improve outcomes compared with standard care of preschool children with ASD in the areas of cognitive outcome, expressive language, receptive language, and adaptive behavior. In a letter to the editor, however, authors of the four studies meta-analyzed claimed that Spreckley and Boyd had misinterpreted one study comparing two forms of ABI with each other as a comparison of ABI with standard care, which erroneously decreased the observed efficacy of ABI. Furthermore, the four studies' authors raised the possibility that Spreckley and Boyd had excluded some other studies unnecessarily, and that including such studies could have led to a more favorable evaluation of ABI. Spreckley, Boyd, and the four studies' authors did agree that large multi-site randomized trials are needed to improve the understanding of ABA's efficacy in autism.

 A 2007 study that modeled autism incidence found that broadened diagnostic criteria, diagnosis at a younger age, and improved efficiency of case ascertainment, can produce an increase in the frequency of autism ranging up to 29-fold depending on the frequency measure, suggesting that methodological factors may explain the observed increases in autism over time. A small 2008 study found that a significant number (40%) of people diagnosed with pragmatic language impairment as children in previous decades would now be given a diagnosis as autism. A study of all Danish children born in 1994–99 found that children born later were more likely to be diagnosed at a younger age, supporting the argument that apparent increases in autism prevalence were at least partly due to decreases in the age of diagnosis.

A 1979 case report discussed a pair of identical twins concordant for autism. The twins developed similarly until the age of 4, when one of them spontaneously improved. The other twin, who had suffered infrequent seizures, remained autistic. The report noted that genetic factors were not "all important" in the development of the twins. Advocates of a thiomersal-autism link also relied on indirect evidence from the scientific literature, including analogy with neurotoxic effects of other mercury compounds, the reported epidemiologic association between autism and vaccine use, and extrapolation from in vitro experiments and animal studies Studies conducted by Mark Geier and his son David Geier have been the most frequently cited research by parents advocating a link between thiomersal and autism. 

This research by Geier has received considerable criticism for methodological problems in his research, including not presenting methods and statistical analyses to others for verification, improperly analyzing data taken from Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, as well as either mislabelling or confusing fundamental statistical terms in his papers, leading to results that were "uninterpretable". Some authors also credit the earlier work of autistic advocate Jim Sinclair, who was a principal early organizer of the international online autism community.

Sinclair's 1993 speech, "Don't Mourn For Us", mentioned that some parents considered their child's autism diagnosis as "the most traumatic thing that ever happened to them". Sinclair (who did not speak until the age of 1addressed the communal grief parents felt by asking them to try to take the perspectives of autistic people themselves:

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