Infant with autism

Jaundice is not uncommon in newborns and it is usually of little concern to pediatricians, but a recent study is raising concerns about the condition and its possible link to autism.

The yellow discoloration of the baby's skin and eyes, most common in neonatal infants, is a sign of excess bilirubin in the blood, indicating that the newborn's liver isn't up to the job of filtering sufficiently. Often, the yellow tint disappears within a couple of days, as the liver catches up.

"Treatment of infant jaundice often isn't necessary," according to MayoClinic.com, "and most cases that need treatment respond well to noninvasive therapy."

Researchers describe as "surprising," then, results of a 10-year study out of Denmark that indicates that jaundiced infants may be more likely to develop autism.

According to the study of 733,826 Danish children born between 1994 and 2004, "babies with jaundice ... were 67 percent more likely than other babies to be diagnosed with autism."

"The best guess as to how jaundice causes changes in psychological development is that bilirubin crosses the blood-brain barrier and destroys brain cells, as we know it does in cerebral palsy," Dr. Rikke Damkjaer Maimburg, the study's lead author, told Reuters.

In fact, "environmental exposures prior to, during and shortly after birth are emerging as important risk factors for the development of autism," Reuters Health cited Hannah Gardener, of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, as saying.

Of the 733,826 children born during the study from Denmark's Aarhus University, "35,766 were born with jaundice, 1,721 were later diagnosed with a psychological disorder of some kind and 577 developed autism," Reuters reported.

Autism researchers and advocates in the U.S. were quick to say that the findings of the Danish study "should be interpreted with caution by the public, by parents of children with autism -- and by parents of the millions of newborns who develop jaundice in the first few days of life," MSNBC reported.

"This study does not say that increased bilirubin caused autism," the cable station quoted Dr. Susan Levy, a developmental pediatrician and autism expert at the Center for Autism Research at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, as saying. "That may be a little piece of it, but it's not the whole thing."

By The Times Of India

An infant’s gaze may be an early, although subtle, marker for autism, says a new study.

Researchers at Kennedy Krieger, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Delaware, created a novel, multi-stimuli social learning task, where infants were seated in a custom chair with an attached joystick within easy reach, a musical toy located to the right and their caregiver on the left.

They evaluated how quickly the infant learned that the joystick activated the toy and the infant’s level of social engagement with their caregiver. 

The team found that high-risk sibs spent less time looking to their caregivers and more time fixated on the non-social stimuli (toy or joystick) when the caregiver was not engaging them, which could indicate a disruption in development related to joint attention.

Joint attention is often a core deficit for children with autism.”This study shows that there is a particular vulnerability in high-risk siblings at six months of age. They are not as socially interactive and engaged on their own as their peers, but still respond typically when engaged by their caregivers, making for a subtle difference that could be easily overlooked by both parents and some professionals,” said Dr. Rebecca Landa. However, the study did not show evidence of impaired associative learning in the high-risk siblings.
“Babies in both groups of the study learned the multi-stimuli task to the same degree,” said Landa.

The findings reveal that like older children, infants at high risk for autism may benefit from frequent exposure to simple cause and effect learning opportunities to aid in their development.
A follow up for the study will soon be published from the Center for Autism and Related Disorders at Kennedy Krieger Institute.