The main mystery of autism: It impairs a person's ability to socialize, but often improves his mental potential
In 1866, the English physician John Langdon Down (1828-1896) described an interesting syndrome of mental retardation of people, noting that with this deviation, some aspects of the manifestations of human mental activity may not be affected. Twenty years later, Dr. Down told his colleagues about an amazing patient with mental disabilities, who recited huge passages from the popular work of the famous British historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
Another patient with autism, American Kim Peek (Kim Peek) was born in 1951. He amazed researchers with his abilities. For example, I read Tom Clancy's thick novel The Hunt for Red October in 1.5 Hours! And four months later, Kim easily called the name, described the Russian submarine captain and read out several pages of the book by heart. Peak suffered from impaired coordination, so in 1988 his head was "enlightened" with the help of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR, or MRI - magnetic resonance imaging). Doctors were struck by the fact that Kim was practically absent from the so-called corpus callosum, which is a plexus of millions of processes of nerve cells (axons) connecting the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
It is believed that it was Kim Peak who became the prototype of the hero of the famous film "Rain Man".
Autism first got its name in the writings of the American physician of Austrian origin Leo Kanner (1894-1981) in 1943. This is a poorly understood to date anomaly of cognitive functions, manifested in a violation of a person's ability to social interactions, but does not violate, and sometimes even improves his mental abilities. Autistic children are characterized not only by isolation and alienation, but also by the inability to participate in the games of their peers. Before the description of autism, such mental states were called childhood, or infantile, schizophrenia.
A prime example of an autistic person is shown in the movie Rain Man, in which the hero of Dustin Hoffman, who played autism, almost ruins the casino with his phenomenal ability to count. And in Mercury Rising, Die Hard Bruce Williams played the FBI agent who protects the autistic boy Simon, thanks to his ability to decipher the code of the top secret program "Mercury".
Scientists have long suspected that autism is linked to genetic disorders. So, if one of the twins suffers from autism, then in more than 90% of cases the identical twin will also be susceptible to this syndrome, while in fraternal twins the coincidence is observed only in 10-50%. Scientists today are studying not so much the genetic root causes of autism as the correlation of certain symptoms with certain mutations. Two genes are the most suspicious, one of which was discovered back in 1992 at the Southwestern Medical Center at the University of Texas in Dallas.
Scientists are close to solving autism
According to the theory of neuroscientists from Switzerland, autism in children develops not because of functional disorders, but because of the "overload" of the brain, writes The Telegraph
Kamila and Henry Markram of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne believe that the disease is due to the fact that autistic people perceive, feel and remember too much information. This theory, according to scientists, can explain the unpredictable nature of autism.
Faced with the richness of the world around them, children with autism try to isolate themselves from reality, as a result of which they develop social and linguistic impairments. Repetitive and inappropriate actions (head shaking, waving hands in front of the face, etc.) are most likely a child's attempt to make the world orderly and predictable.
Camila and Henry Markram drew their theory from a study in which their son, with borderline autism, took part. Scientists have found that all autistic people have abnormal brain growth. It is noteworthy that at birth, the brains of babies with autism are small or normal in size, but at some point they begin to grow unexpectedly quickly. At the age of 2-3 years, when the symptoms of autism begin to appear, the brain volume of sick children is 10% higher than the standard values.
In March this year, specialists from the Stony Brook University Medical Center, New York, USA, established that one of the causes of autism is mutations in the contactin 4 gene, which is responsible for connections between neurons. A mutation in which a child has either three copies of the contactin 4 gene or only one instead of two normal copies is responsible in 2.5% of autism cases.
