The Autisms

The Autisms, Fourth Edition aids the clinician to diagnose autism and autism/epilepsy, and to learn what is known about the epidemiology, neuroanatomy, biochemistry, neuropsychology and genetics. There is now overwhelming evidence that autism is not a single disease and three chapters are devoted to genomic errors, shown to affect a number of final common pathways in the fetal brain. The Autisms, written by Mary Coleman and Christopher Gillberg, demonstrates that autism, like mental retardation, is a clinical presentation of numerous different diseases, many with genomic underpinnings. In this ground-breaking work, the authors explain in great detail how to clinically diagnose infants, children, adolescents and adults with autistic behavioral features and their psychiatric and neurological work-ups. This new edition contains several chapters on the associated problems of autism, such as intellectual disability, epilepsy, tics, eating disorders and sleep problems, as well as a chapter on epidemiology that documents the historical increase in autism diagnoses. Several chapters summarize the latest data on neuroanatomy, biochemistry and neuropsychology, while three neurogenomics chapters show evidence suggesting that autism occurs due to genetic errors which cause interruption or misdirection of critical neurodevelopmental circuits in the fetal brain. Completely up-to-date, The Autisms is relevant and necessary reading for researchers and clinicians in neuroscience, neurology, pediatrics, psychiatry, and psychology.