Six-year-old Jonathan Lewicky wasn?t able to follow simple directions or pick out the red item before he started intensive drills.
Now, Jonathan, who is autistic, has grasped those skills and spent time playing with typically developing preschool classmates.
“With a lot of children with autism, you have to drill these things in,” said Judy Lewicky, Jonathan?s mother.
Behavioral therapy for autism got a boost this week as Harvard researchers have found that the genes involved in autism weren?t all missing, but instead just hadn?t been turned on.
Therapies such as those that Lewicky?s son engaged in can help activate these genes, researchers say.
“If you had an absolute breakdown in the system, you wouldn?t be able to get around it by just working on it,” said Dr. Gary Goldstein, president and chief executive officer of Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, which specializes in treating and researching autism.
The defective on/off switch of a “sluggish” gene may be fixed through rigorous work such as practicing simple tasks, said Goldstein, who was not involved in the study.
Led by Dr. Christopher Walsh, chief of genetics at Children?s Hospital in Boston, researchers studied 88 Middle Eastern families with a high incidence of autism and marriages between cousins. It?s common for cousins in traditional Arab societies to marry, increasing the likelihood for rare genetic mutations.
In mapping the genes, researchers discovered six genes associated with autism ? five of which were missing DNA.
Autism is known as a spectrum disorder because it affects people differently, making the genes hard to identify.
In this study, published in the July 11 issue of Science, the affected DNA varied among families, but all the genes were related to the basic foundations of learning.
Now if researchers can identify the genes, they might be able to find medications to target those genes.
“It might spark the system a little bit [and make] our work out to be easier,” Goldstein said.
