My Dad told me about this story when we were on vacation. I knew I wanted to post about it, but only remembered to hunt up the information today.

First, this article talks about a neurologist who realized that when testing for autism, doctors rarely scan the brain to see what kind of activity is going on in kids displaying symptoms of autism. Rather, they study their behavior only. I was shocked to learn this. I had assumed that doctors would routinely do MRIs and other brain study to determine whether or not a child actually has autism and not some other physical malady.

One doctor in California is arguing that trying to diagnose autism without looking at the brain is like trying to diagnose a heart condition without looking at the heart, though the established autism community isn’t so sure.

[...]

Miranda, who runs the Bright Minds Institute in San Francisco, insists that you have to look inside the brain to determine what’s wrong.

“You have a child that comes to me and mom says, ‘Why is my child not talking?’” he said. “We know that speech is in the brain. What’s going on in his brain? I think we should answer that and I think we should answer that as objectively as possible.”

But that is not the typical method of diagnosing autism. Behavioral tests are the standard. Indeed, neurologists are often only brought in when cases seem unusual. Even then, high-powered MRIs and cutting-edge EEGs are only used selectively.

Miranda said that’s because neurologists have not been as fully involved in the field of autism as they should have been. He thinks that should change.

It turns out that maybe as many as half of kids diagnosed as autistic may not be autistic. Instead they may suffer from mini-seizures in the brain that are not visible to the eye, but manifest in behavior that looks like autism. Dr. Miranda diagnosed two children with seizure disorders and put them on anti-seizure meds. The results? Normal kids who quickly caught up with the skills they had not been learning like speech because of their misdiagnosis.

This link takes you to a related article where Dr. Miranda answers questions from folks who saw the story on Good Morning America.

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