Mark's Story

The personal story of Mark Kent is not an easy one to read or to ignore. This chapter shares the difficult life story of Mark's journey from an individual who was sexually and emotionally abused as a child to one where he is currently in a healthy and happy marriage with four children. Mark attributes this success to his Asperger's Syndrome and the support of his family, but he also realizes he is an exceptional case study. He advocates for much better awareness, sexual education, and overall acceptance on the part of society to ensure others can overcome the same challenges he has faced.

Aesthetic and functional advantages of early orthodontic treatment in a child with Asperger's Syndrome: case report

Angle Class III malocclusion results in aesthetic and functional concerns, thus it is essential that this malocclusion is treated as early as possible, so that dentocraniofacial development occurs properly. A 7-year-old male patient with Asperger's syndrome had a Class III subdivision right malocclusion, anterior and posterior crossbite. To gain the patient's trust and collaboration, we used the behavioral management technique tell-show-do, in addition to the behavioral analysis method. Orthodontic treatment started using the Hyrax palatal expander, but the patient was not able to adapt to it. Correction of the crossbite was achieved using a removable expander with digital springs, which was better accepted by the patient and provided aesthetic and functional improvement.

Pleiotropy between language impairment and broader behavioral disorders—an investigation of both common and rare genetic variants

Background Language plays a major role in human behavior. For this reason, neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders in which linguistic ability is impaired could have a big impact on the individual’s social interaction and general wellbeing. Such disorders tend to have a strong genetic component, but most past studies examined mostly the linguistic overlaps across these disorders; investigations into their genetic overlaps are limited. The aim of this study was to assess the potential genetic overlap between language impairment and broader behavioral disorders employing methods capturing both common and rare genetic variants. Methods We employ polygenic risk scores (PRS) trained on specific language impairment (SLI) to evaluate genetic overlap across several disorders in a large case-cohort sample comprising ~13,000 autism spectrum disorder (ASD) cases, including cases of childhood autism and Asperger’s syndrome, ~15,000 attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) cases, ~3000 schizophrenia cases, and ~21,000 population controls. We also examine rare variants in SLI/language-related genes in a subset of the sample that was exome-sequenced using the SKAT-O method. Results We find that there is little evidence for genetic overlap between SLI and ADHD, schizophrenia, and ASD, the latter being in line with results of linguistic analyses in past studies. However, we observe a small, significant genetic overlap between SLI and childhood autism specifically, which we do not observe for SLI and Asperger’s syndrome. Moreover, we observe that childhood autism cases have significantly higher SLI-trained PRS compared to Asperger’s syndrome cases; these results correspond well to the linguistic profiles of both disorders. Our rare variant analyses provide suggestive evidence of association for specific genes with ASD, childhood autism, and schizophrenia. Conclusions Our study provides, for the first time, to our knowledge, genetic evidence for ASD subtypes based on risk variants for language impairment.

Emotional Intelligence as a Haruspex of Societal Aftermath in Adults with Asperger Syndrome

Asperger’s syndrome is not a learning disability and it has features of autism spectrum disorder, nonverbal learning disabilities and ADHD. Asperger syndrome in the context of the domains within which some of those characteristics occur. To begin with social interaction and then move to language and then move to other “in the social interaction domain. Individuals with Asperger’s syndrome tend to have limited and sometime inappropriate kinds of behaviours in the social interaction domain. They have difficulties with nonverbal communication For example they have hard time reading gestures or facial expressions and sometimes their gesture and facial expressions, don’t communicate what it is that they’re thinking and feeling they often have difficulties understanding emotional cues so they miscue when listening to someone or watching somebody they may then say something inappropriate or they may repeat something that isn’t appropriate to the situation. Because they’re miss reading the social aspect of the situation or the emotional aspect of the situation. Individuals with Asperger’s are often seen to have low eye contact either not making good eye contact or sustaining good eye contact and in this social interaction domain. Those with Asperger’s tend also to be at risk for not having many friends, they tend to be socially isolated in the language area. Those with Asperger’s often are extremely verbal, highly verbal and their language can be very sophisticated at times what they do, when they’re talking is that they tend to discuss themselves and their interests and not focus on the interests of others. It can be a one-sided conversation and some of that prosody the flow the reciprocal flow between one person another can be awkward they tend to be literal in the ways that they understand language”.