Autism’s New Hope
For a parent, it’s difficult to imagine a more distressing disease than autism, nor one that has caused more of an outcry for a remedy given its dramatic increase in diagnosis since the 1980s. Autism is a neural development disorder, greatly impairing the sufferer’s ability to communicate or interact socially. It affects the way nerve cells in the brain and their synapses connect and organize, often displaying signs before the age of two, robbing a child of normal parental or peer relations. There is a strong genetic basis to autism, but the exact nature of the mechanism is unclear. A…