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1 in 56?

Don't be ridiculous. Where have you got this figure from?

Gillberg et al 9:10000
Lauritsen et al 4.7:10000
Ehlers et al 36:10000

They are European figures (mostly Scandinavian)

In the UK?

57:10000 and that's Autistic Spectrum disorders *including* Asperger's.

Even the National Autistic Society figures only suggest 36:10000

So I'd love to know where your 'reported' figure comes from.

Dan

(NT partner of AS girlfriend)

Possibly true. However, in this case, I base my comment on ideas from Spitzer's The Mind Within The Net. You can read more about this here (it's a pdf): http://www.his.sunderland.ac.uk/ps/farivar.pdf/

Interesting. The PDF, of course, is a review of the work and not the work itself. More suspicious (to me) is that since this is a published book (and a book that is a general work, as opposed to one focused on autism), the age of Spitzer's references is likely to be more than a few years old. This is almost always a problem in the study of autism, because much of the work done prior to the past ten years is heavily confounded.

Autism (and Asperger's for that matter) is a syndrome diagnosis. We don't have an underlying pathology that we can point to, and there are no imaging, genetic, or testing studies that are pathognomonic (that make the diagnosis in and of themselves). We basically say that if you have enough of the behavioral criteria and if there isn't any underlying etiology that better accounts for your symptoms, then you have autism. And with the symptoms not all that specific (as another poster noted, half of Slashdot's regular readers have some of them), it's an easy diagnosis to apply to a child with an unexplained developmental problem.

Prior to the genetic studies for Fragile X, and prior to finding the marker for Rett's syndrome, and prior to the FISH for Prader-Willi, a lot of kids with those diagnoses (in aggregate, more common than severe autism itself) wound up with diagnoses of autism. Biologic research on their brains poisoned much of the research into what we call "autism", because in fact they weren't really autistic and the now-recognized characteristic changes in their biology got mixed in and called part of the findings of autism.

I appreciate the reference, though, and I'll go check it out further. Spitzer might indeed be one of those myriad neuropsychoanatomy books that are more speculative than definitive, but I'm not so arrogant as to dismiss out of hand a book I haven't even skimmed.

Possibly true. However, in this case, I base my comment on ideas from Spitzer's The Mind Within The Net. You can read more about this here (it's a pdf): http://www.his.sunderland.ac.uk/ps/farivar.pdf/

My understanding is that autism is caused by a wide variety of factors. It's unlikely a single gene will be discovered that causes it. Even then, there's a good chance that a trigger of some sort to cause it to occur (virus, environmental factor). Finally, even if a child becomes autistic, there's a range of autism from mild to severe.

Deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a complicated thing, made even more difficult when the best a genetic councilor can say that there's a chance that this gene may lead to problems, perhaps severe and perhaps not.

Still, I feel that giving more information to parents is a good thing, even if it causes a fair amount of worries in the long run.

When my wife was pregnant with our second child, her bloodwork suggested that there was a one in twenty chance that she had Down's Syndrome. Fortunately it turned out fine and we got a karyotype of her chromosomes as a souvenir.

We're doing similar work at the University of Sunderland. See http://www.his.sunderland.ac.uk/. My specialty is 'batbots' - sonar-controlled robots that exhibit sensorimotor integration.

Another poster has answered this below..

Is this true? (Hopefully using the right term...I mean itemized lists with roman numerials, numbers, letters for each part)

If you mean "itemized" or "enumerated" lists then yes there is a limit it appears you can go 5 deep.

The following will give a "Too deeply nested" error. Due to the "sub sub sub sub sub sub item"

N.B. It it not very pretty due to having to get past the "comment compression filter"...

\documentclass{article} \begin{document} \begin{itemize} \item Item \begin{itemize} \item Sub item \begin{itemize} \item Sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub item \begin{itemize} \item sub sub sub sub sub item \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{itemize} \end{document}

As with many aspects of LaTeX however if you find it doesn't do something it probably means it's not prudent (from a structural perspective) to do it anyway. For example if you really need that level of deep reference you may well be better off with part,chapter,section, subsection, ... . . .,itemize etc... Ironically I tried posting this reply with some deep nesting, slashdot posts are limited to three levels deep! ;-) Of course if you wish to you can always override the builtins with your own "super list" or something.

Also, can ya'll post some good links to a newbie learning LaTex..and some good reference sites that have all the tags layed out with good explanations?

Sure, below are a list places I would reccomend starting, you havn't said if you use Windows, *nix or Mac so i've added both (sorry if you are a Mac man you'll have to Google yourself).

• Editing:
• • *nix If you are a *nix user I would reccomend the following editing combination.
  • XEmacs
  • AucTeX. A sophisticated editing mode for LaTeX
  • preview-latex. Places the rendered equations and images directly in the editor window making "equation tuning" and other tasks a snip.
• Windows
• • WinEdt. A very sophisticated text editor for Windows. Its forte is LaTeX. It is not free, but well worth the money.

• Learning resources:
• • Getting started
  • Good overview
  • A list of symbols
  • The not so short introduction to LaTeX2e
  • Tips and tricks
  • BibTeX help.

• Other random stuff
• • dvipdfm. For converting the output of LaTeX into PDF (highly recommended)
  • Prof. Knuth's home page(The author of TeX).
  • CTANThe Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. Here you will be able to download packages, utilities and tools that do not come by default in your LaTeX distribution.

-ed

My main reference was The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e.

There is some pretty compelling evidence that gluten, a grain protein, triggers autism. Many parents of formerly autistic (!) children swear that a gluten-free diet "cured" their child's autism.

For some unknown reason the medical/scientific community has been very resistant to studying this phenomenon.

-Peter

From France and the Final Solution:

The most infamous of these mass arrests was the so-called grande rafle du Vél' d'Hiv' which took place in Paris on the 16th and 17th July 1942. The Vélodrome d'Hiver was a large indoor sports arena situated on the rue Nélaton near the Quai de Grenelle in the 15th arrondissment of Paris. In a vast operation codenamed vent printanier, the French police rounded up 12, 884 Jews from Paris and its surrounding suburbs. These were mostly adult men and women but there were around 4,000 children amongst them. The rounding up was made easier by the large number of files on Jews complied and held by Vichy authorities since 1940. The French police, headed by René Bousquet, were entirely responsible for this operation and not one German soldier assisted.