When James Pim was small, he struggled to express himself. His mom enrolled in a Stanford trial of an autism therapy called pivotal response treatment with the hope that she could help him understand how to use words to communicate.


When James Pim was small, he struggled to express himself. His mom enrolled in a Stanford trial of an autism therapy called pivotal response treatment with the hope that she could help him understand how to use words to communicate.
For most of her life, Alyssa Davilla has only been able to communicate a handful of feelings and phrases. But this is all changing thanks to a new app.
For pediatric gastroenterologist Bill Berquist, MD, the phrase “works with children” has a double meaning. Three of his grown children are following in his scientific footsteps.
What’s the first step in getting help for a child who may have autism? Discouragingly, the answer is often “A long wait.” But Stanford systems biologist Dennis Wall, PhD, wants to change that. His research team is using a big-data approach to devise simple questionnaires that enable parents and primary-care doctors to screen children for developmental disorders using a mobile device.
Girls with autism tend to have less severe manifestations of one of the disorder’s core features, repetitive and restricted behavior, and they show brain-scan differences from boys that help explain the discrepancy, a new Stanford study has found.
Finding autism caregivers and treatments is a daunting challenge for families facing a new autism diagnosis. But now there’s help. The Early Support Program for Autism, a free service with no waiting list, gives parents someone to call for up-to-date information about doctors, therapists, treatment programs and other community resources.
Autism is more than twice as common as it was 15 years ago. But the number of clinicians who treat the developmental disorder is growing more slowly than the number of new cases, prompting caregivers to look for novel ways to share their expertise as widely as possible.
How can you create a special day for hundreds of families from different backgrounds, whose… Read more »