It just all goes to show that early intervention and a lot of therapy is the most important way to help your child. You are not really curing them you are teaching them to learn in a different way. The brain is amazing in the way that it's processes can be altered depending on stimuli and electrical impulses can be redirected if one part of the brain is not working properly.

I just wish more parents would spend more effort in getting their children the therapies they need and not wasting valuable time on unproven supliments and treatments.

I know of instances of children at my daughters school where they went in at an early age from 7-9 and were nonverbal, aggressive with self injurious behavior and are now transitioning into adulthood at the age of 22 and can now speak and do most of their own daily tasks without assistance and on top of that have been trained and are working a few days a week.

I will point out that these children just got the basic therapies of speech, PT, OT, and ABA along with meds in some cases. No special diets or other treatments were used unless a test proved they were needed and the outcome was great for them.

I am not judging just saying that progress is possible when things are done with proven techniques.

Anything done intensively and early (whether ABA, RDI, DIR floortime, son rise, ST or practising theory of mind with TV shows) is obviously better than doing less or later. No doubt about that but that is not the question - the real question is why some kids can recover while others cannot despite the same interventions. The article highlights non verbal IQ as one of the possible predictors but there are no biomarkers out there. And that is what is badly needed from a research perspective. The only child that I personally know that is fully recovered (indistinguishable from peers and captain of the football team) used basic biomed and verbal behaviour (early) and we have seen great efficacy from both these interventions and hope to lose diagnosis soon as well.

Just a thought but many autistic kids lose their autism diagnoses as they get older and learn more strategies to help with behaviors and to act neurotypical.

Lot of the article seems like the usual feel good stories I've read before but here's the interesting parts to me . . .

In May, another set of researchers published a study that tracked 85 children from their autism diagnosis (at age 2) for nearly two decades and found that about 9 percent of them no longer met the criteria for the disorder. The research, led by Catherine Lord, a renowned leader in the diagnosis and evaluation of autism who directs a large autism center and teaches at Weill Cornell Medical College, referred to those who were no longer autistic as “very positive outcome.”

Researchers also say that parental involvement — acting as a child’s advocate, pushing for services, working with the child at home — seems to correlate with more improvements in symptoms. Financial resources, no doubt, help too.

Mark Macluskie's story.

Dawson wondered whether steering autistic children’s attention to voices, gestures and facial expressions could alter their brain development. So in a randomized clinical trial published in 2012, she tracked two groups of autistic toddlers: one that received 25 hours a week of a behavioral therapy designed to increase social engagement, and a control group that received whatever treatments their community offered (some behavioral, some not). After two years, electroencephalograms showed that brain activity in the control group still strongly favored nonsocial stimuli, but the EEGs of the social-engagement group were now similar to those of typically developing children. It appeared that their brains had, in fact, changed. Though the children were still autistic, their I.Q.s had also increased and their language, social-engagement and daily-living skills had improved, while the children in the control group had progressed noticeably less.

Carol said. But they quickly realized that most of his schoolmates were progressing far more slowly. “I had that guilt,” Carol said. “He was just climbing mountains, and the others weren’t. Having all seven kids in a room with the same teachers, you could see who was still spinning in their own world, who was still not talking. You just feel bad. The other mothers ask you, ‘What are you doing that I haven’t done?’ And you have nothing to tell them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/magazine/the-...

Aside from anecdotal evidence, there are at least three published studies on this topic with as high as 20% "recovery" rate for subset of kids regardless of any specific intervention. Two of them are by researcher Deborah Fein. The real question is what makes this kid different from others and is it really that among dozens of different types of autisms, a subset can more easily recover. Certainly a number of types of autism can be fully recovered or prevented if detected early enough (Biotindaise, cerebral folate deficiency, anti NMDA receptor auto antibodies, mercury toxicity, etc.). Need a medical approach in both research and treatment, not just therapy.