“Dread. It permeated our home, seeped into the nooks and crannies of our lives,” wrote Nicholas Sparks — author of The Notebook — in his memoir Three Weeks with My Brother. “By late August, Ryan was coming on his third birthday. His evaluation showed little, if any, improvement. Now, instead of having the skills of a 14-month old, he had the skills of a 15-month old.”

Sparks' son was diagnosed with autism, a critical brain developmental condition.

April is Autism Awareness month. Since the first diagnosis of autism in 1943, the fraction of affected children in the United States mushroomed from one in 10000 to one in 150, affecting four times as many boys than girls. Today, autism is more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined.

“There is a public confusion about autism and ‘autistic spectrum disorders,’” said Prof. Matthew Belmonte, human development. Autism is one of a group of developmental conditions that display similar symptoms, while the term ‘autistic spectrum’ describes a number of developmental disabilities, including autism. Specifically, autism is characterized by three criteria: social impairments, communication impairments and repetitive behavior.

According to Belmonte, while clinical diagnosis of autism is entirely based on the psychiatrist’s impression, it is “very obvious” when a child is afflicted. However, other autistic spectrum disorders such as Asperger’s can remain undiagnosed well into the patient’s 20’s.

In the past, autism was largely believed to be a hereditary condition because most cases of autism are diagnosed before the child reaches age three. In recent years, however, researchers have shifted their attention to environmental causes, which may include mercury, vinyl flooring, organophosphates and organic chlorides.

The father of a son who completely recovered from an autistic spectrum disorder, Prof. Michael Waldman, economics, used econometric techniques to analyze the correlation between precipitation levels and autism in order to draw conclusions about television viewing and the prevalence of autism.

His hypothesis was that more rain meant more time spent inside watching TV.

“There is a very large literature suggesting negative consequences of early childhood TV viewing,” Waldman said. “Genes can be turned on and off by environmental triggers. There are several environmental factors being researched that may induce the display of autism. I think the most plausible one is maternal smoking,” he said.

“In the future, more research money should go into the search of environmental triggers,” Waldman said. “While the genetic causes are not clearly understood yet, environmental triggers can be removed and acted upon immediately,” he said.

According to Belmonte, autistic genes all seem to influence neural connectivity within the brain.

The human brain is composed of different compartments that perform different neurological functions. A non-autistic person is able to easily activate multiple areas in combination to aid problem solving, while an autistic child’s ability to perform this type of co-processing is impeded by errors in his or her neural connections. This lack of flexibility may explain why autistic children tend to perform repetitive behavior.

“Autistic Savantism” is an unexplained phenomenon where an individual with an autism spectrum disorder displays remarkable talent in a certain area, such as music or mathematics. Daniel Tammet, an Aspergers patient, learned Icelandic in one week and could recite Pi up to 22514 digits. Vernon L. Smith, a Nobel Laureate in economics, and Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokemon, are both diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders.

Autism is also statistically more common among the children of engineers. In fact, autistic children born to engineers outnumbers the total number of autistic children with parents who are not engineers, according to Belmonte.

“We tend to do what we are good at,” Belmonte postulated. Autistic individuals tend to be more detail-oriented and gravitate more towards logical, mechanical thinking rather than emotional processing. There is also a very large Asperger’s population on the online social network Second Life, where social interaction slows down from real time to a more manageable speed, according to Belmonte.

Sadly, there has been “very little” progress in the development of effective treatments, according to Belmonte. While more treatments are being developed, the number of children who fully recover from autistic spectrum disorders remain very low.

Although there are biological treatments on the horizon, various forms of behavioral therapy — which depends on repeated trials of behavioral reinforcement, as in physical rehabilitation — is still the only treatment option.

Belmonte and his colleagues are developing several therapy projects, including a communications treatment where non-speaking autistic children learn to type out words using a letter board, and a therapeutic videogame similar to Sim City through which they develop their social skills.

Currently, several existing medications can control the “symptoms” of autism, but nothing is available to remove the underlying condition itself. Kelation therapy, which aims to remove poisonous heavy metals from the affected child’s body, is extremely dangerous and has no scientific basis.

Part of why biological treatments are so difficult to develop, according to Belmonte, is that autism is entirely classified by behavioral symptoms. This is problematic because a symptom could be the result of several converging biological causes that work together. For example, a symptom like delayed speech could be caused by problems in the brain, neural connections, the larynx or the inner ear. Therefore, developing medications that target specific biological underpinnings remains extremely challenging.

Philanthropic foundations play a crucial role in funding autism research, especially in recent years. According to Belmonte, funding levels from national organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been so low that studies considered risk-free are supported.

“Although there are still uncertainties, we’ve come a long way [in autism research],” Waldman said.