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How Scientists Are Changing Life With Autism – Transcript
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Summary
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- Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD, has experienced a 3,000% increase in diagnoses over the past 30 years.
- Researchers and technologists are developing new treatments like Autism Glass and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
- Scientists are also exploring the underlying biology of autism through genetic research on primates and CRISPR gene editing.
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We're in front of the Rebecca School in the middle of Midtown Manhattan and we're here to meet some kids all different ages who all have autism. What's the experience of being in this classroom or being on the street for these children?
Most of these kids don't have an integrated sense of the world. So it's a fractured experience. So you wonder why kids walk around with their fingers in their ears or they cover their eyes. It's because they're trying to shut down channels because the world is really overwhelming.
If you don't know what the important data is, everything might be important. So a car horn might actually be the thing you have to pay attention to or the humming of a light bulb might be the thing you have to pay attention to. If you can't figure out what's important, you have to pay attention to everything.
Hey! Look! Over here? No, no, no! Look! Do you see this? Over here. No! These! Who are these people? I actually have no idea.
Sol is one of those guys who is always regulated up here. Everything happens quickly. What he doesn't have a chance to do is really process what he's going to put back out. I can't believe I need to be on the show!
What would your show be called, Sol? I have no idea. What would it be called? I've seen a movie called Coop on the Two Strings. I haven't seen that movie. What about Iron Man 3? Oh yeah, that's a good one. Did you see that movie?
I did. Did you? Yes! The movie Goober. I'm not movie Goober. Like the expert. Just can't take it.
You can't take it. Ready? Grab on.
Way to go. Thank you! You did it! Man, you did so great. Thank you for letting me out. You're welcome. Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ASD, has seen a 3,000% increase in diagnoses in the last 30 years.
You can't talk about autism as a disease. It's many, many different things and it's a range within each of those things. We sat down with Dr. Jeremy Veenstra-Vanderweal, or Dr. V, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, where he devotes most of his time to pursuing new treatments for autism.
Autism spectrum disorder captures difficulties with social communication and restricted repetitive behaviors that sometimes have the sensory quality that when they are occurring in the same person can be approached with common assessments.
Why has there been an increase in identified cases? We don't completely know. I mean, that's one of the things about being in science that you have to admit when you don't have complete knowledge. Honestly, I think part of the increase is a real increase and that may be kids who are surviving neonatal intensive care units who wouldn't have 20, 30 years ago.
We know that those kids are at higher risk. It may be things like advanced paternal age, which we know is a risk factor. Some of it is a decrease in stigma. So when I first started sitting in with people, families didn't want to hear autism.
They wanted to hear anything but autism. And now because people understand that early intervention can make a substantial difference, families are more willing to hear it and more likely to hear it for that reason. Griffin, good morning.
Griffin Jacomo was diagnosed with autism five years ago at the Center for Autism in the Developing Brain, where Dr. Veen treats children with ASD. No. Come on, let's go have some breakfast.
Okay. Anyone want to do bubbles? No, we're not standing.
Okay, lift up. Want to brush your teeth? Let me see the bottom. Yeah. Good job. What's wrong? You know what we can do? We can go outside later. Would you like to go outside?
Here's your talker. Okay. What do you want? Great. What would take a typical family 10 minutes? It takes us 45 minutes.
You know, and so these kind of things are difficult, but it's getting better. You know, at least now he can put his head through his shirt, which may not seem like a big deal to a typical family, but to an autistic child it's like, you know, trying to have an eight-year-old, seven-year-old do algebra.
It's incredibly difficult. Watch this. This is sort of fun. Want to play ball? All the sounds and all this vibration, and he's like in heaven now with that. He's got the sunshine, he's got his ring pop. Yeah.
When did you first see signs that something was different about Griffin? For me, it really was like somebody had turned off the switch. I left the house one morning, and I came back after work, and I went to have an exchange with my child, and it was as if he was looking right through me.
From that point, I really knew that something was not right. Your friend encouraged me to go and have him tested because she had had challenges with her own son, and I took her advice, and I thank God that I did. The first signs of autism can be terrifying for parents, but they can also vary greatly from one child to the next.
Griffin was diagnosed at age two by the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, or ADOS, which involves therapists observing and scoring different behaviors and sets a numeric threshold for an autism diagnosis. Standardized tests like ADOS have created more reliable and earlier autism diagnoses that our assessment methods are a key reason for the rise in autism cases, and that rise is pushing the scientific community to develop a whole new set of ways to treat the condition.
Angry? Surprised? Sad? Scared. The Autism Glass project is one effort from the tech sector that builds on Google's technology to teach children with ASD how to perceive basic emotion they often miss in social interactions.
Autism Glass uses artificial intelligence to analyze facial expressions and then visually and verbally describes the emotion. Happy? Good. We went to Stanford University to meet its creator, Catalan Boss.
What's running behind us is a computer vision system that recognizes emotions. It's based on a face tracker that tracks up to 100 fiduciary points within your face and then uses a machine learning classifier to predict whether you're happy or sad or something like that.
So this is essentially how you developed Autism Glass. Yeah, exactly. I was working on emotion recognition and face tracking software and we realized, hey, this could help people who struggle to identify social cues.
You know, we're spending time building software that can teach machines how to recognize emotions. There happen to be people who struggle to identify social cues in people's faces. The Glass project is focusing on these fundamental emotions that everybody must know, must learn.
Kids with autism don't necessarily look to faces. They're not getting those neurons developed, those layers of the onion peeled backs. They can proceed into more complex social scenarios on their own. Why was it so important to create a device that parents could take home with them as opposed to use it in a therapy session?
It creates these opportunities for natural engagements between parent and child, care provider and child in ways that we almost didn't initially anticipate. Moms and dads of children with autism are by far the best suited to teach their kids.