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People with autism, or those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), face some additional challenges in life beyond those that most of us deal with. Because so much of ASD is expressed through behavior, this often means that those diagnosed with ASD face difficulties when it comes to socializing.

Typical ASD symptoms such as an unwillingness to maintain eye-contact, repetitive behaviors, or unusual speech patterns can often prove to be a barrier to smooth communication with others, especially other children. And while there may be medical treatments available, such as stem cell therapy that can help to address some of the physiological components of ASD, that doesn’t address the more intangible aspect; the social component.

Medical treatment cannot automatically make ASD diagnosed children behave; all it can do is reduce the symptoms that may impair social integration. Social integration itself is still a learned skill, and this is where some forms of treatment, like autism therapy, can play an important role in helping children learn the social skills that will allow them to interact with others their age, rather than be alienated and isolated. Some of the forms of therapy that can lead to meaningful results include:

Occupational Therapy

Despite what the name suggests, occupational therapy is not training for working adults. What occupational therapy does have in common with work training, however, is an emphasis on learning activities that will be repeated daily.

Occupational therapy is a form of therapy that assess which daily activities a child may be receptive to learning, and then constructing a course of therapeutic treatments best suited to the predisposition of the ASD child. Occupational therapy activities range across just about every activity a child may need some assistance with, in developing productive coping skills, such as tying shoes, learning to sleep quietly, visual-motor skills, putting on clothes, walking, running, skipping, learning appropriate play behavior, or even emotional regulation or arousal.

All of this is entirely dependent on a careful diagnosis of the individual ASD child to learn where on the spectrum the child is, what needs are already met or mastered while determining which others may need further assistance or development.

Speech Therapy

While most children subconsciously learn and internalize the various audio and visual “cues” we use to learn how to communicate with each other, ASD children often experience challenges in this area. As a result, the way ASD children communicate is often unconventional, and, to those unfamiliar with the child, difficult to parse.

Speech therapy is a more focused form of therapy that teaches, in more concrete form, the communications “rules and cues” that other children internalize. Depending on the needs of the ASD child, tactics such as maintaining eye contact, consciously waiting for appropriate pauses in the conversation before responding, or other conversational skills might be employed. For more severe cases of ASD, alternative forms of communication, such as sign language, or using computers may be recommended as ways to bypass verbal barriers.

Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA)

Applied Behavior Analysis is an intensive form of therapy that focuses on specific behaviors and incorporates a strictly monitored, rewards-based system of training to create positive, long-lasting behavioral changes. Depending on the type of ABA required, this may be administered by parents, or professionals, or a mix of both to modify behavior to a new, desired mode.

ABA has many different approaches, depending on what the goals are. Verbal behavior intervention is one technique recommended when working on specific communication skills. Pivotal response treatment is another technique that is used in teaching certain types of social behavior when interacting with others. Early intensive behavioral intervention is what is used for younger children, normally under the age of five, if they have been diagnosed with ASD early.

Stem Cell Therapy

This isn’t a form of psychological evaluation and treatment but is instead a medical technique. Stem cell therapy, as the name implies, uses stem cells in the treatment of a medical condition. Stem cells are “master cells” that are capable of changing into whatever cell is needed for a body. Unsurprisingly, stem cells are most abundant in infants, before birth, as all the organs need to grow from basic cells. This is one of the reasons why stem cells are so abundant in mothers after giving birth to a child, in areas, such as the umbilical cord.

Stem cells, however, remain in people throughout their lives, just in smaller numbers. Bone marrow, for example, contains stem cells, which can be harvested, if required, and then injected into other parts of the body to replace damaged cells and grow into healthy versions of whatever cells are required. Leukemia treatment is one example of widely documented stem cell usage for therapeutic reasons, but autism is an area where a lot of research and results are being collected.

As always, not every form of therapy is going to be suitable for every child. Always take the time to get a professional evaluation, diagnosis and medical recommendation before going ahead with any kind of therapy.

Autism, better known as an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, can cause a lot of anxiety for parents if they suspect their child may have this condition. There are many good reasons to be concerned, such as the fact that even to this day, ASD is still not comprehensively understood. Medicine has documented the many symptoms of ASD and established that there is a spectrum for the disorder, with varying degrees of severity. But the primary causes of ASD are not yet understood, and no cure currently exists for the condition.

What medicine does know is that there may be certain genetic components to ASD, since ASD parents can give birth to ASD children. There may also be a pre-natal element to the disorder, as some pregnant women that have contracted illnesses such as rubella have then given birth to children with ASD. But what does it mean when a child is diagnosed with ASD? What are the symptoms and where does a family go from there once ASD has been diagnosed? Here’s what parents should keep an eye out for if they’re concerned about a child having ASD.

General Behavior

ASD is regarded as a range of neurodevelopmental disorders. This means that there are multiple symptoms, usually based in nerve-related activity and the way sensory information is received and processed. In general terms, this means that parents should be on the lookout for unusual behavior.

ASD symptoms largely fall into unusual communication and behavioral issues. Parents may notice these symptoms very early on in the development of a child. In many cases, children can be brought in for an ASD evaluation by the age of two, and get a reliable diagnosis. If you see any of the following issues, you may want to consider an evaluation.

Lack Of Eye Contact

Because of the way that children with ASD process information, a simple action like maintaining eye contact can, even in very young ASD children, cause stress. ASD children learn very quickly that the best way to avoid experiencing unnecessary stress is to avoid eye contact. If your child even after the age of one year, seems to be deliberately avoiding eye contact, especially if you try to maintain it aggressively, this is a big warning.

Avoids Physical Contact

Most children prefer to be hugged, carried and physically interact with parents. An ASD child, however, will find physical contact to be overstimulating, and thus stressful. If your child rejects physical contact, avoids being touched or picked up, and prefers no physical contact at all, this is another sign.

Nonverbal

In some cases, vocal communication can be challenging for some ASD children. If your child is still not verbally communicating at a time when average children are already attempting to speak, start monitoring your child, and thinking about getting an evaluation. Verbal communication with ASD children can vary; some are entirely non-verbal, others seem to learn to speak during infancy, but then regress and lose the ability as they grow older, while others learn to communicate verbally only much later.

Unusual Speech

Even when an ASD child does learn to speak, sometimes it can be very unusual compared to other children. Due to the way they process information, ASD children may find nuance and inflection to be too complex for them to understand initially, so they speak in flat, monotone voices, like robots. In other cases, the way they process speaking may mean they put an unusual emphasis on tone, and when they speak, it comes out lilting, almost like singing, even though they consider it normal, everyday speech.

Empathic Challenges

Empathy is the ability of one person to understand the feelings and emotions of another. For people with ASD, this can sometimes be too difficult to process and understand without additional guidance. As a result, ASD children may not understand emotional displays like pain, sadness, anger or fright. This doesn’t just apply to others; they may not even understand their own emotional reactions when they occur.

Repetitive Motions/Behaviors

Many people will have a personal “tic” they may not be aware of, such as unconsciously rubbing a ring on their finger, or touching an old scar. ASD children, however, may have a magnified version of this, with a frequent, repetitive motion that acts to soothe anxiety. The repetitive behavior can be small movements, such as a repeating hand movement, or it can be much larger, such as rocking the entire body back and forth.

Aggression

Finally, one of the least desirable ASD traits that may express is—at least to an average parent—what appears to be unprovoked, or easily triggered aggression. ASD children can sometimes become very angry over incidents that most people wouldn’t justify as warranting a hostile response. If you find that your child has seemingly unprovoked, or unpredictable bouts of aggression, it may be time to bring that child in for an ASD evaluation.

Autism or autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be an extremely challenging medical condition for families to deal with. For many years, ASD wasn’t even properly diagnosed, and many people with this condition grew up and were misdiagnosed under a variety of different conditions, from psychological disorders, such as being psychotic, to physical medical conditions, such as being diagnosed as intellectually disabled, what was once formally known as “mental retardation.”

The reason for this is that ASD’s biggest challenge lies in the word “spectrum.” Not only is there a wide variety of different symptoms that fall under ASD, but the severity of those symptoms varies widely. So a person that might describe themselves as introverted might be diagnosed as having ASD, but a person prone to bouts of aggression, with no ability to sustain communication with others, and a requirement to be on a series of medications to remain placid may also be ASD.

The biggest challenge with ASD is that it is not precisely understood. While some conditions, such as the common cold, or certain types of cancer can point to bacterial transmission, or genetics as part of the framework for understanding how a disorder works, and where it comes from, ASD is not yet at that level. A lot of research is still being done to document and understand the underpinnings of ASD, but there are still many blank spaces in medical knowledge about this condition. This is one of the reasons why stem cell therapy for autism is still being looked into.

No Known Cure

One thing that can be definitively said about the current state of medicine and autism is that no known cure currently exists for ASD. Specific ASD symptoms can be managed or reduced, but there is no way to eliminate ASD in the same way that an antibiotic can clear up an infection, and allow a patient to return to a normal life, from an illness. To one degree or another, someone diagnosed with ASD is always going to have to cope with it in some way.

However, because ASD lies along a spectrum, with different symptoms and different levels of severity for those symptoms, different treatments will be suggested based on an individual diagnosis of what an ASD child needs. Some ASD children, for example, may be recommended to take certain types of occupational therapy, to learn everyday activities, such as tying shoes or eating with utensils. Others may be directed towards speech therapy to learn to verbalize normally and interact with others while maintaining eye contact.

For others, however, there may be an alternative suggestion, and that is stem cell therapy for autism.

What Are Stem Cells?

Stem cells are sometimes referred to by their nickname, “master cells,” because of the versatility that stem cells posses compared to other cells. In a mature adult, as one example, brain cells do not grow and replace themselves at the same rate as other parts of the body, such as skin. This is one of the reasons why people become more forgetful as they age, with neurons in the brain dying off at a higher rate once the aging process gets beyond a certain point. In most cases, such as healing skin, or growing new brain cells, the cells must come from the same source; the skin or the brain.

Stem cells, however, are like “master keys” that can open any lock. No matter where a stem cell goes, it is capable of converting itself over to whatever cells required, and encouraging the growth of new cells in that area. Stem cells are what make it possible for babies to develop in the uterus without specialized organs such as the heart or liver already being present to “instruct” cells on how to grow.

Treating Autism

Stem cell therapy for autism is the cultivation of stem cells and infusing them into an ASD child. Stem cells, however, are not as easy or as common to harvest as other cells, such as blood cells, for example, which are everywhere, and can be easily collected. In most people, the only place where stem cells exist in any appreciable number is within the bone marrow, so some techniques do exist for extracting stem cells from bone marrow, but this is not where the greatest number of stem cells reside.

In some cases, stem cells are harvested from other sources, such as the blood contained in the umbilical cord of a mother that has recently given birth. Cord blood, as it is sometimes called, is rich in stem cells and it’s common for many mothers today to be prudent about storing cord blood for future use. If you have your cord blood stored, it may be suitable for use stem cell therapy for autism. If you don’t, there may still be other alternatives open to you for using stem cells to treat autism.

As always, it is first important to have an ASD child fully diagnosed, and then discuss the situation with medical experts to see if stem cell therapy for autism is even recommended for a child.