AUTISM
Autism originates from infancy; it is a permanent, stable and severe global developmental delay. Autism is one kind of infant developmental disorder that suffers are putting themselves inside a comparatively immobile and cramped environment as well as isolating from other people. The majority fall ill within their first three years of life and symptoms are usually found at 1-1/2 to 2 years old with minority after 3 years old. Some of the symptoms are various with each other and are easily mixed up with other diseases. In 1943, LeoKanner used “Autism” to define this syndrome. In developing countries, the percentage of people having autism reaches 1/1000 or above, and is greatly affecting the health of kids as well as bringing heavy burden to their family.
Reasons of autism
- Inheritance
- Congenital viral infection
- Asphyxia
- Factors affecting the central nervous system of kids
- Sudden gene mutation
- Imbalance of biochemical substances in the brain
- Other uncertain factors
Main clinical manifestation of autism
Lack of external perception and social interactions are clinical features of autism. Kids live in their own world and it is the origin of autism. The main clinical manifestation includes:
(1) Delay social development. Social knowledge defect is the core of autism. Symptoms sometimes occur in infancy. For example, reluctance to embrace and keep distance with their parents, lack of eye contacts is deemed to be the special performance of autistic kids.
(2) Delay development in speech. Language barrier of autism is an overall damage in terms of quality.
1. Mutes or seldom speak
2. Defects in language usage, inactive in communicating with others, reluctant to bring up ideas or to continue discuss with same topics, always talk to oneself but the contents are not understood by others; have their own small world and is proud of it, inattentive to the surrounding environment. Some kids do not know the application of pronouns resulting in making meaningless sentences.
3. Monotonous repeating wordings or echolalia
4. Barrier in pitch and rhythm of speech
5. Sometimes scream or speak out wordings that are not understood by others, which is named as “self-centered language”
6. Non-verbal communication damage
(3) Limited interest with monotonous and rigid behavior
1. No change or abnormal reaction to the environment requirement
2. abnormal interest and method, special likeness to certain objects or activities
3. monotonous and repeated behavior and special motion posture
4. special way of touch
(4) Unusual perception
1. poor response to light, voice and touch
2. love certain special stimulus and have drastic reaction
(5) Intelligence and cognitive defects (majority of autistic patients have this symptom)
1. poor attention
2. irrelevant attention to details:
- too concentrate on unimportant parts and neglect the important parts;
- some autism patients have stronger visual differentiation ability, can observe more detailed parts of the surrounding environment and neglect other activities;
- more attentive to soft and small voices due to sensitive hearing ability;
3. think in simple way
– can only understand concrete concept, difficult to understand conceptual ideas and composite different concepts.
4. cannot understand the behind rationale of life
– the world of autistic kids are usually made up with different and independent sections, they cannot link up various things into meaningful concepts and cannot understand the formation and their relationship.
– they cannot learn the correlation of things from daily life resulting in cognitive difficulties
5. difficult to finish work in a systematic and sequential way.
(6) Other problems
- one of the main symptoms is scatterbrained, empty and without content.
Autism Diagnosis
Autism is caused by physiological factors, not psychological factors. Either MRI or PET cannot provide a scientific and accurate diagnosis. Main diagnosis is made according to patient’s medical history and clinical manifestation.
Diagnosis Standard of Autistic Kids
- DSM IV 4th edition: Autism
- DSM-IV Diagnostic Criteria For Autistic Disorder
- DSM IV 4th edition: Asperger’s Syndrome
- DSM-IV Diagnostic Criteria for Asperger’s Disorder
- ICD10
Different terms of diagnosis
- Autism
- Autistic Features
- Pervasive Developmental Disorder PDD
Wrong concept in autism
Some people think that autism is mental retardation, mental illness, inverted personality, strange face, etc. but it is incorrect.
Incidence
The probability of having autism is 4-5 times higher in male than female.
Treatment method
Currently there is no very effective treatment to autism. However, children can overcome the barrier and difficulties of autism through education and training to meet the requirement of lessons and life adoption.
Tongue acupuncture to autism patients
In 1999 the Paediatric Neurology Conference of the Chinese Medicine Association, the world reputed pediatric neurologist and Professor Virginia Wong of The Hong Kong University pointed out that:
1. use tongue acupuncture to cure neurology disease, including autism, cerebral palsy, growth retardation, low intelligence, language development barrier, coordination problem, cortical blindness and functional disorder of nervous system, drooling of saliva, swallowing problem, spin muscular atrophy of respiratory problem.
2. We assume the pathway between acupoints and corresponding meridian and peripheral nerve and certain nervous system has very close relationship. We hope that the combination of tongue acupuncture and functional MRI and scientific rehabilitation assessment result can provide a successful clinical experience.
3. We expect through the reaction of acupoints of tongue acupuncture, a distribution map (like motion, body feeling, language, memory, attention, balance, hearing, visual, etc) of the brain can be drawn out, so that we can bring the mysterious acupuncture technique to the western medicine scientific region . The integration of Chinese and western medicine is a supplementary way in child neurology rehabilitation.
Throughout years of research, we have discovered new research achievement both in diagnosis or treatment in the world under the participation of Professor Virginia Wong by using the western medicine common research method “randomized double blind cohort study”.
According to statistics, after 20 tongue acupuncture treatment, there is improvement in sight concentration and intelligence level and 85.5% of the patients have improvement after 40 treatments.
From clinical practices, use tongue acupuncture to cure autism is mainly in the following three areas:
First of all, improvement in acceptability. Mainly in concentration improvement, improvement in accepting the external subjects and education, interest. If acceptability could not be improved, it was useless to talk other improvements.
Secondly, improvement in understanding ability, mainly in change of thinking method. After tongue acupuncture, they can understand more difficult, complicated or comprehensive ideas. Before treatment, kids can only understand simple, monotonous and concrete concepts.
Thirdly, there is improvement in expression ability. Expression ability is a high level form of perceptual cognition, it can be understood as direct cognition transits to abstract thinking; and that is, when patients have had tongue acupuncture, there is brain improvement in terms of image rebuilding and imaginative power as well as capability improvement in form, structure and language.
(1) Sublingual swelling is one of the obvious features of autism. Dr Sun is the first one in the world who discovered it. (see diagram 1&2)
Diagram 1 Diagram 2
(2) Sublingual swelling will be diminished when there is improvement in patient’s condition.
There is correlation between sublingual swelling and autism, it has material meaning to the cause and treatment of autism. It is also a long term mission for our centre and autism (neurology) researcher to study this mechanism.
Tongue acupuncture is a breakthrough to autism treatment
1. In the observation of tongue acupuncture treatment for autism to a group of 50 autistic kids by using randomized double blind cohort study, we have used the following assessment methods to measure the effectiveness before and after treatment.
a. Griffths mental development scale
b. Ritro-Freeman Real Life Scale
c. Reynell Language Development Scale
d. Symbolic Play Test
e. Wee Functional Independence Measure for children
Results:
There is significant improvement in treatment group compared with cohort group in WeeFIM assessment, other tests like understanding ability and perception ability, improvement in treatment group is also better than cohort group.
Conclusion:
After continuously having 40 treatments, it was proved that tongue acupuncture could effectively improve autism.
(see European Journal of Paediatric Neurology)
2. In view of 122 autistic kids clinical observations, 73.8% have improvement after taking 20 tongue acupuncture, 84.7% have improvement after taking 40 tongue acupuncture, 41.5% have significant improvement after having 20-80 treatments.
3. Use FDG PET scan to monitor the effectiveness of tongue acupuncture in autism treatment. The tester’s cerebral cortex SMV average maximum absorption rate increases 22.3% after having tongue acupuncture. Others only have 1.2%-1.5% increment.
(see The Journal of Nuclear Medicine, USA)
Hong Kong Jockey Club MRI Engineering Centre carried out a randomized double blind cohort study together with Hong Kong University Paediatric Professor Virginia Wong, which has proved the effectiveness of the tongue acupuncture treatment.
There were 21 kids participated in the study with age range of 3-16 years old. 12 were in treatment group and 9 were in cohort group. Each clinical measuring charts and PET scanning were used as assessment tools to study the result before and after treatment. The standard of PET is: by using cerebral glucose metabolism average maximum absorption and average absorption rate for comparison, if there were 10% or above increment, it was deemed to have significant change. 5 out of 12 kids (i.e. 42%) in the treatment group have improvement in both maximum and average absorption rate while there is no change in cohort group, the deviation is significant in statistics (P = 0.0023)
Side effect of Tongue Acupuncture
The treatment is safe so that most of the people including little kids can take tongue acupuncture with ease and even will not feel pain. Chances for little pain, bleeding and undesirable edema are slim. In case they occur, there is no need to care especially as they will get well themselves in a few days later, which will not affect the drinking and eating of the patients.