Autism Spectrum Disorders

Every April, Autism Awareness month is celebrated across the country to honor and pay respect to the fighters of Autism. Imagine you had to live in a world where “normal” is the inability to filter information and being unable to communicate with people in everyday life. Unfortunately for many, this isn’t a hypothetical situation; it’s their lives. This is a disorder called the “Autism Spectrum Disorder.” This disease can be classified and defined thousands of different ways, but the one thing connecting everyone on this spectrum is the fact that the reason why they have this disorder is completely unknown to scientists. There are theories that range all the way from genetics to cases of physical harm, but the most popular, and most researched,
Psychiatric disorders are disturbances in the circuits that affect mood and emotion, but these circuits act based on the “flow of these specific synapses and where they are located and affect the brain” (Anderson). Even though the causes and reasons for autism is so unknown, a dysfunction in a gene CNTNAP2 (or CASPR2) has been recently linked to a range of psychiatric conditions involving a dysfunction of the brain, including autism spectrum disorders. As important and dependent as we are on this protein, there is little understanding of the molecular function in neurons in the human body. There are some studies that link the CASPR2 protein to governing neuron development and synaptic transmission. There is another study, manipulating the CASPR2, that experiments upon juvenile and adult mice that “characterizes the alterations in [the cranium] due to neurons and the AMPA and the NMDA receptor, mediating synaptic responses” (Autism Speaks). The goals of these studies is to not necessarily solve the mystery of the CASPR2 protein, but to increase the general knowledge of the interactions between other molecules it is affecting. These studies have been found to possibly be one of the leading factors to help supply the world with possible strategies to one day treat autism as a curable
One in forty five kids are diagnosed with autism with kids ages three through seventeen. Some view the sudden spike in diagnoses as a sign that the new generations are trying to find an excuse for their children to be “acting up,” but in reality throughout the years, autism has been written off as ADHD or ADD rather than a developmental disease, and the definition of autism has been expanding over time to include several different symptoms. Several parents turned towards vaccines as the cause of autism because of a bogus article in the British Medical Journal, published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Then there was another article blaming GMOs in our food, saying that half of the children population will be diagnosed with autism by the late 2020s. These articles have been almost immediately debunked, but mothers and the world still chooses to accept them and become scared by the fake news. This is because although scientists have disqualified these doctors, they have no reason why or how autism is caused. Everyone has sort of come to a consensus that there has to be of genetic origin that imbalances the chemistry in the brain and body, but there is no evidence or testing that ever describes how the disease originates. There is more left to discover, but we get closer and closer every day to help find a “cure” for a disease that disrupts many lives in the