Autism is a neurological disorder that severely impairs social skills in a person and autism normally afflicts persons within the first three years of life.
When it comes to infantile autism it is said that one in every 1000 children is having the disorder and this disorder affects more boys than girls. Further, infantile autism doesn’t discriminate between social, racial, or ethnic conditions and is known to affect people from all walks of life.
Autism Results in Impairment
Autism disorder interferes with the development cycle of an individual and causes impairment of language and social skills. Autistic people will be very poor in understanding non-verbal communication and normally avoid eye contact with others. They also retreat to solitude and are interested in repetitive actions. They also become unruly when their routine gets affected and doesn’t like comforting gestures such as touching or hugging.
Where It Starts First
The cause of autism is yet to be known and one school of thought says that the infantile autism is caused by brain damage. Few other experts opine that genetics play a vital role for the onset of autism in a child.
And still others put the blame on environmental aspects such as lead or mercuric toxicity in our atmosphere. The only common thing that you can observe in all these assumptions could be that autism is a condition that affects brain.
In fact, in one of the recent studies, it was proved beyond doubt that autistic persons, especially boys, have fewer number of neurons in the amygdala area of their brain that controls emotional and memory functions. However, researchers are yet to pinpoint the exact cause of causes for autism in children.
Therapies for Autism
The basic or fundamental treatment for the infantile autism aims at putting the afflicted child in a specific programme designed for development. They also will be given with speech therapy to improve both verbal and non-verbal skills.
In few cases, medicines were also used for treating infantile autism. Autistic persons undergoing such therapies have started showing remarkable improvements and they also live a self-sufficient, productive and a near normal life.
However, there are cases where autistic people do not respond to any kind of treatment and for them the only recourse will be to get into some institutes or autism communities for betterment.
The most important thing is that you should not consider persons afflicted with infantile autism as disabled persons. Autism disorder shows off in a variety of forms and severity levels and makes the afflicted people to respond in a different fashion. In he first instance, it is important to educate the general public first so as to make them aware of the autism and its associated disorders.
With such awareness we can make the non-autistic people to understand the behaviour of autistic persons better and extend help in a more professional way. As a responsible citizen we can extend all our cooperation for the autism research and one day we can have a definite cure that can see the world without any autism disorder at all.
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