Autism entered my life in 2003, in the form of Asperger’s Syndrome. When My older son was diagnosed, his perplexing behavior suddenly had a label. Life took on a whole new meaning! Nothing in life could prepare me for a child who often lived in an invisible box that no one could penetrate. Determined to find ways to help him with better solutions than those offered by the medical world, I began to search but I didn’t know what for.
STUDIES ON WHY MORE BOYS HAVE AUTISM THAN GIRLS?
When Hans Asperger originally described Asperger’s Syndrome in 1944 he didn’t believe that girls were affected by the syndrome at all. In 1943, Leo Kanner studied a small group of children with autistic syndrome disorders. He determined that there were four times as many boys as girls.
This data changed Asperger’s view point and set a course of study to determine why. Ehlers and Gillberg studied children in mainstream schools in Sweden in 1993 and found the same male to female ratio of 4:1. In 1982 Lorna Wing According researched people with high-functioning Autism or Asperger’s syndrome and found that there were as many as fifteen males as to one female with Autism.
Why? The diagnostic criteria for Asperger’s syndrome are based on the behavioral characteristics of boys, who are often more noticeably "different" or disruptive than girls with the same underlying deficits. Girls with Asperger’s syndrome may be better at masking their difficulties in order to fit in with their peers, and in general have a more even profile of social skills.
In 1964 Bernard Rimland pointed out that, overall, males tend to be more susceptible to organic damage than girls, whether through hereditary disease, acquired infection or other conditions. Since it is now almost universally accepted that there is an organic cause for Autism, it should not be surprising that boys are more vulnerable to it than girls.
In recent years researchers have put forward a genetic explanation for the differences with the suggestion that the gene or genes for Autism are located on the X chromosome. Girls inherit X chromosomes from both parents, but boys only inherit one, from their mothers. The hypothesis is that the X chromosome which girls inherit from their fathers contains an imprinted gene which "protects" the carrier from Autism, thus making girls less likely to develop the condition than boys.
This theory has been used to support Asperger’s view that Autism and Asperger’s syndrome are at the extreme end of a spectrum of behaviors normally associated with "maleness". Such behaviors can be extremely useful in areas of life such as engineering and science, where attention to detail and single-mindedness may be more valuable than social skills, for example.
However, researchers are still a long way from identifying a simple genetic cause for Autism. It is likely that several genes on different chromosomes will be found to be associated with Autism. This means that the X chromosome theory alone may not represent the full picture.
Various theories have been put forward for the excess of males with Autism and Asperger’s syndrome, but the picture is far from complete and until we have a fuller understanding of the causes of Autism, it is unlikely that a proper explanation can be reached.
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