April XNUMX is World Autism Awareness Day. Usually this disease is detected during the first three years of life. How to notice it in time?
In Russia, according to the monitoring of Rosstat from 2020, the total number of school-age children with autism amounted to almost 33 thousand people, which is 43% more than in 2019 — 23 thousand.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published statistics at the end of 2021: autism occurs in every 44th child, with boys on average 4,2 times more likely than girls. These findings are based on an analysis of data on diagnoses of children aged 8 years born in 2010 and residing in 11 states.
Vladimir Skavysh, an expert at the clinic of JSC «Medicina», Ph.D., a child psychiatrist, tells about how the disorder occurs, what it is connected with and how children with a diagnosis of autism can socialize.
“Autistic disorder in children appears at the age of 2-3 years. As a rule, you can understand that something is wrong if the child does not respond to certain actions of the parents. For example, he cannot establish warm relationships with other people, ”the doctor notes.
According to the psychiatrist, autistic children react poorly to the caress of their parents: for example, they do not smile back, avoid eye-to-eye look
Sometimes they even perceive living people as inanimate objects. Among other signs of autism in children, the expert names the following:
speech delay,
difficult non-verbal communication
pathological inability to creative games,
uniformity of facial expressions and movements,
some mannerism and pretense,
faafitauli o moe
outbursts of aggression and unreasonable fear.
According to Vladimir Skavysh, some children with autism are able to graduate from high school, get a profession, work, but few have a harmonious personal life, few get married.
“The sooner the diagnosis is made, the sooner parents and specialists can begin work on treating the child and returning him to society,” concludes the psychiatrist.