The aim was to study a broader phenotype of language-related diagnoses and problems in three generations of relatives of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Our study is based on a family history interview of the parents of 59 children with SLI and of 100 matched control children, exploring the prevalence of problems related to language, reading, attention, school achievement and ...

Although high-functioning individuals with autistic disorder (i.e. autism and Asperger syndrome) are of normal intelligence, they have life-long abnormalities in social communication and emotional behaviour. However, the biological basis of social difficulties in autism is poorly understood. Facial expressions help shape behaviour, and we investigated if high-functioning people with autistic di...

how to cite this article: mohammadi mr, salmanian m, akhondzadeh sh. autism spectrum disorders in iran. iranian journal of child neurology2011;5(4):1-9. objective autistic disorder, asperger syndrome, and pdd-not otherwise specified are subsets of autism spectrum disorders (asds), which are characterized by impairments in social communication and stereotyped behavior. this article reviews the p...

More than 60 years ago, two very similar descriptions of children displaying severe social deficits and unusual behaviours were published, one in English, one in German, both using the term ‘autistic’. Leo Kanner (1943) in Baltimore, USA, described 11 children with ‘early infantile autism’ in his seminal paper ‘Autistic disturbances of affective contact’. In the same year, October 1943, Hans As...

Kanner opens his pioneering 1943 paper on autism by making a mysterious mention of the year 1938. Recent letters to the editor of this journal have disagreed over a particular interpretation-does 1938 refer to an early paper by Asperger, effectively meaning Kanner plagiarised Asperger? I argue 1938 refers to a paper by Louise Despert. This was not plagiarism but a case of building on Despert's ...

BACKGROUND We aimed to determine whether there was a decrease in the number of children diagnosed on the autism spectrum after the implementation of the new diagnostic criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders Fifth Edition published in May 2013. METHOD We reviewed 1552 charts of children evaluated at the Women and Children's Hospital of Buffalo,...

Previous work suggests children with autism show superior performance (in relation to their general mental age) on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT). Frith interprets this as showing that they have "weak central coherence". In Experiment 1, using an adult level version of this task, we aimed to replicate and extend this finding, first, by collecting response time (RT) data; second, by testing adu...

Using the Swedish Medical Birth Registry (MBR), obstetrical and demographic information was retrieved for 250 children with autism or Asperger syndrome who were born in Malmoe, Sweden, and enrolled at the local Child and Youth Habilitation Center. The reference group consisted of all children born in Malmoe during 1980-2005. Obstetric sub-optimality (prematurity, low Apgar scores, growth restri...

We report a study comparing the narrative abilities of 12 adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger Syndrome (AS) versus 12 matched controls. The study focuses on the use of referential expressions (temporal expressions and anaphoric pronouns) during a story-telling task. The aim was to assess pragmatics skills in people with HFA/AS in whom linguistic impairments are more subtle tha...

This study investigated the relation between friendship, loneliness and depressive symptoms in adolescents with Asperger's Syndrome (AS). Thirty-five adolescents with AS and 35 controls matched on chronological age, school year and gender distribution, completed questionnaires designed to ascertain the quality of their best-friendship, motivation for developing friendships, feelings of loneline...