Entries for March 2008

Could autism and schizophrenia be cousins? New research shows that people with schizophrenia have rare variations in genes that control brain development and that each person has a unique pattern of mutations. The finding is startlingly similar to new research on autism. Since April 2 is the first-ever World Autism Awareness Day, it's a good time to ponder what this odd conjunction says about building human brains—and, perhaps, how to fix them.

Tolstoy famously wrote that happy families are all alike, but that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist who heads the National Institute of Mental Health, calls the new understanding that disorders like schizophrenia and autism have unique origins in each person a "Tolstoy moment" in mental health. Until very recently, the theory on diseases like these that run in families has been that people who get the disorders have the same genetic mutations. Scientists have spent years looking for a "schizophrenia gene" and an "autism gene," but the search has been frustrating. They have ID'd genes that make people susceptible to the disorders, but none of those genes are shared by enough people that they have proved useful for diagnosis or treatment. Given that, it's no wonder that activists in the autism and schizophrenia communities lose patience with scientists' fixation on genes and accuse them of slighting research on possible environmental causes.

Think "autism," and the words that follow usually aren't "the musical." But my preview of Autism: The Musical, which premières on HBO tomorrow night and will reair several times in April, has won me over on the power of the theater to create a community—and a chance to shine—for autistic children. The program portrays how a group of kids with autism wrote and performed a variety show—with a little help from their friends. It also tells the stories of their parents, particularly Elaine Hall, an acting coach in Los Angeles who—determined to create a nurturing place for her autistic son, Neal, then age 12—used her talents and connections in the performing arts community to launch the Miracle Project, a theater workshop for autistic children and their friends and family. I talked with Elaine about her family's saga and about the documentary.

Tell me about Neal. He can't talk, and you were told when he was very young that he should be institutionalized. It sounds like it took considerable effort to figure out how best to help him.
We adopted Neal when he was 23 months, from an orphanage in Russia. When I brought him home, he was quite sick. He had liver toxicity, malnutrition, scurvy; we spent the first year just dealing with that. When he was good and strong and healthy, our pediatrician said, "Something is not right." He gave us a diagnosis of autism.

If you need more ammo to convince your teenager that body piercing has its downside, consider these two words: lead poisoning.

That's one point I hadn't considered among the pluses and minuses of piercing. (My thoughts ran more to nasty infections, nerve damage, lifelong scars, and chipped teeth.) Thanks to California—the trailblazer, as always, when the news concerns nipple rings or tongue barbells—I'm now aware that when puncturing body parts, I should demand 100 percent lead-free hardware.

As someone who loathed PE and would happily have spent her childhood in the school library, I feel a bit embarrassed to be lobbying for more dodge ball. But anyone who's observed the behavior of children who have been cooped up inside all day versus those who have been running and jumping outside for an hour doesn't need a study to know which ones are better equipped to learn.

For those who remain in doubt, two new studies indicate that what many schools now regard as expendable "extras"—gym class, music, art—may actually help children do better in academics like math and reading. Since the federal No Child Left Behind Act became law in 2002, school districts across the country have jettisoned what they consider expendable subjects in order to drill students on the basics. Now, scientific evidence is starting to accumulate that turning schools into kiddie gulags where tiny tots spend the day hunched over their desks in sad imitation of their parents' cubiclebound days is actually counterproductive.

Corrected on 3/3/08: The original version of this article incorrectly cited publication information for a new RAND study. It appears in the March Pediatrics.

Is there a parent alive who doesn't dread giving "the talk" about sex? And is there a teenager on this planet who doesn't cringe when the folks say it's time to "talk"? Parents, there's good news and bad news. Repeated conversations about tough topics like masturbation or condoms make teens feel closer to their parents and more able to communicate with them about sex and other hot topics, according to new research.

But once won't do it. "This very much contradicts the notion that you can have one big talk about sex and be done with it," says Steven Martino, a social psychologist with Rand who led the study, which is published in the March Pediatrics. "[That's] appealing, because you feel uncomfortable. But this study suggests that it's important to have those discussions repeatedly."