Hooray for Pingree!

Didn't I promise that this post would be more upbeat than the last one? Well, there's no getting around it because Wilder's doing really well so far at the Carmen Pingree school. He's excited to get on the bus in the morning, he seems happy even though he has to do more work than before, and he's making great progress. Every day the school sends home a detailed record of how much he's progressing in each step of the program--it's really wonderful to get such an intimate view of what they're working on. On another topic, my friend Jeff inspired me to look for information about research on the causes of autism because he said he hadn't been able to find a lot of articles in the medical literature. He wondered why the studies hadn't been done. I knew they had been done because I've read references to them. I'm still looking for some details, but in the meantime, this article that discusses a whole bunch of new studies about the sources of autism that are in progress. Many of you may find this quote from the article interesting: "The study has already provided some intriguing leads. 'We’re finding that the immune system seems to function at a lower level in autism,' says [Irva] Hertz-Picciotto. 'That’s an important clue. It could mean that whatever causes autism also disrupts the immune system, or it could be that the immune system disrupts neural development so that something goes awry in laying down brain circuitry prenatally or in the early postnatal period.'" Riddle me that, Batman!