Essay on Autism Spectrum Disorders: Causes, Diagnosis and Support

📌Category: Disorders, Health, Illness
📌Words: 564
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 22 June 2021

Autism spectrum disorder is an intricate brain disorder that affects the developmental condition that involves challenges in social interaction, speech, nonverbal communication, and repetitive behaviors.  Autism disorder refers to disorders that have the same symptoms but different levels.  There are several different forms and levels of autism.  It is an in depth disorder, doctors, and researchers have not discovered the exact causes and effects of autism.  It is different from most disorders, it isn't diagnosed with labs or genetic tests.  Autism is diagnosed through the behaviors of children. 

Autism is believed to have several different causes.  Several influential factors of autism are having an immediate family member with autism, genetic mutations, being born to older parents, low birth weight, metabolic imbalance, and exposure to heavy metals and environmental toxins.  People with Autism do not have any genetic alterations. ASD is unique in every aspect of each case researchers cannot find the exact causes but they do their best research to develop more knowledge. 

Autism is a disorder that affects Social interaction and Communication skills.  Testing their cognitive abilities and neurological development are just a couple of the tests to diagnose autism. Test normally shows that people on the autism spectrum disorder have normal or high IQs but struggle with communication often affects schooling. It's difficult for them to function well in highly stimulated environments and they are also not changed enough educationally. Many school systems are not equipped with the right help and put all autistic kids together and do not fit the needs of the individual kid due to the fact that every case of autism is uniquely different.

“We know that there is not one autism but many subtypes, most influenced by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Because autism is a spectrum disorder, each person with autism has a distinct set of strengths and challenges. The ways in which people with autism learn, think and problem-solve can range from highly skilled to severely challenged. Some people with ASD may require significant support in their daily lives, while others may need less support and, in some cases, live entirely independently (Autism Speaks).”

There are different functioning levels of autism, someone with autism cannot be more or less autistic. A spectrum is “to classify something, or suggest that it can be classified, in terms of its position on a scale between two extreme or opposite points (Spectrum).”  The spectrum is imagined as a circle that categorizes the different types of autism. The different ways Autism affects a person is where they lay on the spectrum; “Autistic disorder. This older term is further along the autism spectrum than Asperger’s and PDD-NOS. It includes the same types of symptoms, but at a more intense level (Quarantine Explained).” 

Labs are rarely used to diagnose ASD in people, however it's beneficial for labs to be taken for doctors to research.  Labs that often help researchers learn more are tested on the brain. They typically find that the brain is more symmetrical in atypical people but researchers are still unclear why this is.  Another difference in the composition of the brain affected is the left temporal and parietal lobes which register sound and light. This part of the brain may have more folds than normally found. Researchers believe that additional folds can more mimic the brain, causing light and sound to often trigger seizures in some cases. 

Autism is an extraordinary disorder that researchers can not pin point the causes or effects. In many cases an atypical brain has unhuman-like abilities when it comes to logical thinking but the ability to have an emotional connection doesn’t respond the same way.

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