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Autism....Brain Damage?

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Submitted By Ruggles9
Words 491
Pages 2
For this assignment I decided to look into the question, I autism a kind of brain damage? I chose this topic because it seems like we are hearing so much about autism anymore and it still seems to be a mystery to people as to what causes autism. I often hear of so many things causing autism that I just find so unbelievable, but I have never looked into the fact of maybe some type of brain damage causing autism. I found two source that talks about autism and the causes of autism. The first reliable website that I visited is the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) website. SFARI’s main priority is to do research that helps people who are affected by autism. “With a budget of about $60 million per year, SFARI currently supports 175 investigators. Since 2007, this initiative has provided or committed more than $260 million in external research support to more than 250 investigators in the U.S. and abroad.” (Simons Foundations, 2014) In the SFARI article that I read it covered a study they did on low-birth weight babies with white matter injury. They performed ultrasounds on over 1000 babies who weighed 1.1 pounds to 4.4 pounds in the first few days of the babies’ lives. The ultrasounds determined if the infant had any hemorrhages, ventricular enlargements, and lesions in brain tissue or any other brain damage. The ultrasounds were kept and then the subjects were then assessed for autism about 21 years later. The study found that the infants who had any white matter damage are 3 times more likely to develop autism compared to those who were born at low birth weight who did not have any brain damage. My second website, which is my unreliable source, is Wikipedia. The reason that Wikipedia is unreliable is because they don’t have any proof of the research that is on the page. At any moment in time someone can log on to Wikipedia and change

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