Brain Imaging May Improve Autism Diagnosis

It is getting fascinating as it gets researched more. Our son wasn't diagnosed until he was 5, mainly because his 2 pediatricians tended to benchmark his language development solely by the number of words he could say, despite our questions about why he seemed so far behind his peers in the use of structured language, beginning at 2 years old. Turns out he was parroting (echolalia). I never understood how vocabulary by itself indicated language development. He was only using 3 word phrases when peers were using 5 word sentences.

Also partly because his case his mild and he was always very high functioning. A lazy pediatrician playing the probability game would bet he was on the low side of normal and chalk it up to normal variation. I wouldn't have counted on 2 lazy pediatricians in 2 different states back to back.

We did attend a lecture by a doctor investigating something similar to the findings in this article. He was using PET or CT scans ( I can't recall) to discover that the frontal lobes of autistic kids seemed to mimic the frontal lobes of normal kids that had viral infections. And the benchmark autistic behaviors tended to be (temporarily) mimicked when normal kids had a cold or flu. He began treating them as if they had chronic viral infections and seems to have had some limited success. The correlation seems plausible, but still far away from establishing a direct connection.