Tag: autism

EAPS 2014 Day 3 – Plenary talk on Neuroembryology and Autism

Perhaps not an immediately clinically relevant talk, but the concepts may well ultimately provide meaning (and perhaps interventions) for families affected by autism.

Prof Jack Price of King’s College London described his collaboration with others in the exploratoration of how neuronal cells from children with autism (they make pluripotent stem cells from hair samples from affected children!), differ; morphologically, synaptically, and epigenetically from neuronal cells derived from healthy (neurotypical) controls. Amazing technology!
Although genetic abnormalities can be found in c20% of autistic children (the SHANK3 gene seems to be popular) , his laboratory has found that neuronal cells grown from affected children without a defined genetic mutation also show similar morphological changes to those of the autistic children with a known genetic defect. The implication is that autism might be a cell phenotype associated with the disease, which may have various underlying genetic or epigenetic (or other) causes.

EAPS 2014 Day 2 – Selected Posters

There are many poster presentations to view, and all are available online. The organisers have selected some to be presented orally, grouped with similarly themed sessions.

It was interesting to hear about the application of the “Social Capital Scale” (Looman 2006) in examining the association between SES/social capital and measures of maternal mental health as presented by Dr John Pascoe from the USA. I’ve sometimes wondered how we subjectively assess this concept in some of the families we care for, and whether we could do better.

Nice poster by Dr Marie Monaghan about effective paediatric cannulation teaching, which could be adapted here in WA.

Dr Guillermo Mendes from the USA looked at US national disease surveillance data to look at children who had recieved an autism diagnosis, but were subsequently determined NOT to have autism, and found that those children who (retrospectively) were initially incorrectly diagnosed were more likely to be from minority, low income backgrounds, and more likely to have a history of hearing problems. There was some brief discussion about whether DSM V criteria would have an impact on the number of diagnoses of children who are on the less severe end of the spectrum. Just interesting…