ADAM FEINSTEIN: One of the big
questions today is when specific biomedical markers may be discovered
for autism. How close so you think we are?
Professor RITA JORDAN: I think that, in some respects, we
are a long way off, but there may be some conditions that could
be realised within the next five years. Nevertheless, whenever
you are doing research into an individual - whether on a psychological,
biological or behavioural level - you are taking snapshots in time. And
just because you find an abnormality or a difference in one of those
snapshots, it may not tell you exactly what is underneath that. The
danger is we may be too excited about promoting a particular discovery
and we go down wrong routes prematurely. The science must be of good
quality.
AF: What about the possibility
of psycho-linguistic markers?
RJ: We have always known that it is very rare to have
"pure" autism. We are beginning to see where some linkages with other
conditions might be. There are certainly parallels with some forms of
language disorder. Some forms of the autistic spectrum, may form more
naturally with that group. We need to do research in that area. But
often labels are being used with very similar or very different
conditions. There is some interesting work looking at the way some
knowledge gained through the linguistic route can be directed towards
overcoming some of the difficulties on autism. For example, some people
with Asperger's syndrome with good structural language skills have been
shown to develop their ability to "mentalise" - to understand mental
states and real-world events - through their knowledge of language. For
instance, the very use of the word "that" triggers the knowledge that
we are not talking about something real but "as if." More
research is definitely needed on autism and language. Part of the
difficulty is that we are asking for retrospective accounts. Parents
will often report that a child was using language perfectly normally,
but the more one looks into it, there are difficulties. What tends to
develop is what is known as "right-hemisphere" language: the child can
name things, can have echolalic language (repeating whole set phrases
from television or a computer game). Children with autism tend - in
contrast to what we claim about other aspects of their cognitive
development - to come from a broad brushstroke. They remember chunks of
language, as a whole, and then break it up into patterns. I don't
know of any systemic approach that starts with chunks of words and
breaks them down - it might by a useful method ...
