Other stories we’ve been reading:

Another court case rules that vaccines don’t cause autism. Eczema drugs need tougher warnings. Deep brain stimulation reduces epileptic seizures. [Read one patient’s story of how brain stimulation is keeping her epileptic seizures at bay.]

Kids do outgrow their growing pains. More strides are seen in pediatric orthopedic surgery. Naughty children are more likely to report chronic pain as adults.

Babies are born to dance. There’s a rise in triplet births, but the death rates are high.

The First Lady tells food makers to hurry up on making healthy food. PepsiCo pledges not to sell sugary beverages in school. Kraft plans to cut sodium levels in food products. [Read Thrive’s stories on childhood obesity and healthful eating.]

MTV launches an online “morality meter” to help teens understand the difference between “digital use” and “digital abuse.” [Read whether or not parents are legally responsible when their kids engage in sexting.] Learning may be tougher for the teen brain. [Read about Frances Jensen, MD’s research into why teen brains really are different.]

The National Geographic Channel’s multi-part documentary, Extraordinary Humans, examines different rare medical conditions, including extreme blood and bone abnormalities. Two Children’s Hospital Boston patients will be featured in the episode, Rare Anatomy: Blood, airing Monday, March 22 at 9 p.m.

Son Pham was brought to Children’s from Vietnam to get treated for an extensive venous malformation on the left side of his face. He was cared for by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the Children’s Vascular Anomalies Center, including John Mulliken, MD and Ahmad Alomari, MD – who were interviewed for this documentary.

Michael Politzer, who has Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome and is a patient of  Steven Fishman, MD also appears in the documentary.

This is the second time in one week that Children’s has been featured in National Geographic Channel documentary. The first time was on Monday, March 16 in a documentary about the Shang Dynasty.

Media expert Michael Rich, MD, MPH, director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston, answers your questions about media use. Last time, he talked about whether or not to take your child to see the movie, Alice in Wonderland.

Here’s this week’s question:

Each day there are more and more iPhone apps created specifically for children. Whether they’re educational or not, is up in the air.

Is there any harm in handing off your iPhone to your toddler for a little distraction? It all depends on how you look at it.

Children’s media expert, Michael Rich, MD, MPH, talks to Parenting about the pros and cons of letting your tot take over your phone. He also answers a parent’s question of how long you should let your toddler play with iPhone apps in his Ask the Mediatrician column.

Do you have a question about your child’s media use? Ask the Mediatrician today!

A group of clinicians worked together to stabilize the "patient."

Clinicians working in high-resource settings, like Children’s Hospital Boston, rely on the availability of certain equipment to do their jobs, like ventilators, specially sized needles and tubes and a fully stocked pharmacy. But when they’re forced to perform without their gear—like in Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the January earthquake—many find it bewildering and even paralyzing. “We fall into these patterns of providing care,” says David Mooney, MD, MPH, director of the Trauma Program, who was one of the first medical responders to respond after the disaster. “One of the things I noticed in Haiti was that many doctors really fixated on what they didn’t have.”

That mental block can waste time and be counterproductive, so Children’s is developing a training program to prepare the doctors, surgeons, nurses, pharmacists and other volunteers who are going to Haiti to continue relief efforts in the coming months for the conditions they’re likely to find. Mooney, along with Shannon Manzi, PharmD, and Debra Weiner, MD, PhD, worked with Children’s Simulator Program to create the special training, in which clinicians reenact challenging situations on robotic mannequins. Peter Weinstock, MD, PhD, director of the Simulator program, hopes that by practicing in an environment with limited supplies, clinicians will be encouraged to think outside of the box to find the resources they need, and will be better prepared for a disaster zone.

(Listen to a WBUR story about Children’s new simulation program and read The Boston Globe’s White Coat Notes report of it.)

During the first simulation, a team of clinicians tried to save a 34-year-old “patient” who’d been in a motorcycle accident. As the mannequin shrieked in Haitian Creole (a nearby nurse provides realistic sounds using a microphone), the team members tried to ascertain which of the patient’s wounds needed immediate attention. A nurse who speaks Haitian Creole translated while also putting in an IV. Tyler Hartman, MD, a NICU fellow who orchestrated the care, says that without any patient history he felt completely out of his comfort zone. “I felt uncomfortable not knowing what people did, whether they were a nurse, a pharmacist, and what resources were available,”  he says. During the next scenario, clinicians took the time to clearly explain who they were and their expertise, which helped the team work together more fluidly.

Another scenario involved a baby suffering from shock and dehydration. While the clinicians attempted to rehydrate the baby and stabilize breathing, the baby’s mom, played by Children’s nurse Kierrah Joseph, yelled and cried out in Haitian Creole, pushing the clinicians aside to get closer to her child. Chris Hopkinson, a post-op nurse, expertly calmed her down and maneuvered her out of the way. Hopkinson, who is heading to Haiti in the beginning of April, says that offering support to parents is an extremely important role in emergency situations. Despite the language barrier, he was able to defuse the situation and reassure the mom that her child was in good hands.

Kierrah Joseph, RN, played the role of the distraught mom while Shannon Manzi, PharmD, observed.

During the debrief after the simulations, all the participants expressed how helpful it was to go through the mock training. “We’re so conditioned to having all these things at our fingertips,” says Pat Lisle, who’s been a nurse for 24 years. “This is a real shifting of gears.” The most important lesson for most people: communication. Weinstock stressed the “10 seconds for 10 minutes” rule — taking a 10-second break at the beginning of an emergency to communicate who is doing what can save 10 minutes of  time in the long run. Repeating things back to each other and using each other’s names are also time-saving strategies.

In the coming weeks, months and years, all of the participants will move from the simulator unit at Children’s to the confusing and chaotic streets of Port au Prince and other disaster-struck locations. The clinicians who are veterans of these challenging situations hope the lessons they learned and are passing on to their colleagues will ease their transitions so they can provide even better care to those who are so desperately in need. “(Haiti) was my seventh deployment and was by far the most austere and most difficult,” says Manzi, who has responded to many disasters over the years, including Hurricane Katrina. “You have to make hard choices and think outside of the box, so having a chance to see, think about and practice some of the things you’re likely to face is absolutely invaluable.”

This is the first in a series of blog posts that I’ll be writing for Thrive about Children’s Hospital Boston’s ongoing relief efforts in Haiti. This Saturday I’m flying to Haiti with a team from Children’s and Partners in Health. We’ll be there for a week, and I and others will be sending back blog posts, photos and (hopefully) some videos. Check in with Thrive all next week for our updates. – Melissa Jeltsen

by Michael Agus, MD, director of Children’s Medicine Critical Care Program. Agus is currently in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where he is treating patients and sending us updates by email.

Day 10
I wasn’t supposed to work the day today because I now have to start working nights since there is a few days’ gap in the night pediatric physician coverage. But after a good night’s sleep, and with two intubated patients in the pediatric tents with no other intensivist on site, I felt like I should go for morning rounds, set a plan for the day and then sleep on the hospital grounds to rest up for the night.

At first glance, the tents seemed quiet. I, as well as the residents and nurses, wandered in and out over the next few hours and both ventilated patients were stable. I had hoped to pull the tube on the asthmatic as he was making good progress, but he clearly wasn’t quite ready. Upon re-entering the tent after one such errand, the parents urgently motioned me over to the bed of the intubated asthma patient. He was having a profound hypoxic event with seizures. I pulled his tube which turned out to be fully occluded, mask ventilated him and radioed for assistance. Paul, the other visiting intensivist quickly responded and reintubated him.

Would this event have happened in a fully monitored ICU? Probably not. Could we have transferred him to a fully monitored ICU? No, there were no beds.

Should we have waited to intubate patients until the ICU at HUEH was fully equipped and fully staffed? He would not have survived. Should I have stayed at his bedside 24/7 until extubation? Should Haiti’s hospitals have been built the first time with earthquake resistant strength?

I found a quiet spot in the old ED to nap that afternoon. Creepy but quiet.

Working in the tent overnight didn’t turn out to be too painful. There were only a handful of admissions. I was called to the OB tent to help deliver a baby since the OB residents were nowhere to be found. With several women lined up in the tent pushing, it took a moment to identify the one who needed assistance. I nervously began to assist, as 15 years had passed since my last delivery, but the resident arrived in time to complete the job. The baby arrived healthy.

Around 4 AM the asthmatic boy fully awoke and was ready for extubation. He tolerated it well. His mother was gleeful that he had made it and I was relieved. She thanked me profusely and offered to make me an honorary father in gratitude. By late morning, he was making eye contact with her and playing with his truck.

Day 11
Since the premature baby who remained intubated was extremely stable, I took the morning off and slept in. I arrived at HUEH mid-afternoon. Despite being under the watchful eye of a PIH colleague, the baby had become sicker.

Without the availability of lab tests, it was not clear what was going on. He had already required several resuscitations.

Spending nights with the residents has allowed me to get to know them even better. I continue to marvel at their ability to survive. I learned that the local name for the earthquake is “gudugudu.” It is so named because that is the sound that the shaking and falling buildings made on January 12. The other name is “douze janvier”.

As they each told me their story of survival, it struck me that there were no clear patterns. Some had survived by running outside as their house collapsed, others made it by staying inside and so avoided being struck by falling rubble from nearby buildings. All told their stories without hesitation and with no real emotion. They had all experienced profound loss and were continuing to experience severe hardships.

I did end up tasting a component of the MRE, the U.S. Army multi-course meal. A PIH colleague had come upon packaged cracker and jam. I enjoyed it but continue to be curious about the rest of the meal.

I also participated in another infrastructure upgrade. We had learned the hard way that the LTV 1200 ventilator battery lasts exactly one hour. This has come into play countless times during our trip. The problem is that the power supply to the hospital from the grid goes out almost daily.

The generator soon gets manually started but other parts of the hospital always seemed to get back online before pediatrics. We learned today that after the generator is going, a second step is still required: to flip a giant Frankenstein-like switch down the street from the pediatrics tents. This sends generator power to the Gynecology building which is where the extension cord that powers our tents is plugged in. This was a great knowledge acquisition which I shared with my HUEH colleagues and as many PIH folks as I could, so future switches could be more smooth.

Sure enough, later in the day, power went out again, the ventilator ran out of battery power again and the intubated baby’s mother calmly hand-ventilated her child again. It was dark, but I located the switch and to the surprise of onlookers I confidently flipped the giant switch. To my surprise all the lights in the Gynecology building went dark and a HUEH employee scolded me as I flipped it back on.

Apparently there was a problem with our extension cord, not the power supply. Laying across the street, it had been driven over once too often. A PIH colleague, a helpful parent and I quickly replaced the cord and hung it over the street so this one wouldn’t fail in the same way. We just need to make a sign by the socket in the hallway where it’s plugged in to discourage anyone from unplugging it.

Day 12
I started my final full day anxious to reach relative closure on some projects. The intubated baby had taken a turn for the worse. Overnight, her mother had requested that we not resuscitate again if she needed it. After further discussion that morning, she agreed that further support was futile and we disconnected the baby from the ventilator. She passed in her mother’s arms.

The interpreter fulfilled his promise from the other day and arrived with a Haitian flag in hand. With the help of a parent from the pediatrics tents we climbed up the ladder behind the structure and respectfully lowered the Swiss flag.

Initially we didn’t attract any attention. But as we raised the Haitian flag, numerous parents came out of the tents to offer their advice on how best to secure it, angle it and display it. Three boys, still at HUEH recuperating from their earthquake-related injuries, starting singing a children’s version of the Haitian National Anthem. We all – Haitians and “blancs” – allowed ourselves a moment to take in the pride that still lived among the Haitian people and those who have chosen to help them.

I raced off to retrieve the ventilator for my scheduled talk to the Pediatrics Department. After an engaging and interactive session, one of the senior residents came to the front to offer some remarks expressing the group’s appreciation for the help that our entire team had delivered and that PIH would continue to facilitate. He spoke of hopes for continued collaboration and visits to each others’ homes. When he finished, I brought the group out onto the balcony of the Gynecology building and pointed out where the Swiss flag used to be. They were delighted at the new symbol flying above the Pediatrics tents.

I was a little late getting across campus back to the old ED where I climbed back up to the roof for my third and final video chat with the South Area Solomon Schechter Day School – this time with Eytan and 7th grade. We had a great session. They were the quietest of the three classes, taking in all the details, asking insightful questions. I had to cut the session short due to a radio call about an asthmatic sounding ill.

I descended the stairs and found that someone had locked the iron gate to the stairs. I put out a call for assistance and it wasn’t long before I was set free. I found myself somewhere between hilarity and embarrassment as several Haitians noticed me and called to their friends that a “blanc” was locked in the stairwell.

The afternoon finished how the trip had started, with a flood of admissions including a 14-year old girl whom we diagnosed bedside with hematocolpus, a couple children with suspected typhoid – one of which was complicated by delirium and seizures, two with post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis due to untreated skin superinfections of scabies and chicken pox, a child with suspected retropharyngeal abscess, an 18-month old with TB peritonitis and 12-month old with malnutrition and shock.

The new PIH team from Yale, led by pediatric intensivist John Giuliano, arrived to replace us earlier in the day. They picked up the patients and the relationships we had developed exactly where we left off. Kevin and I worked to orient them until after midnight. But by then it was clear they were off and running. The residents were already coming to John to present cases. The transferability of the relationships to new people was affirming of the infrastructure that had been developed by us and our predecessors. We finished our last night with a late night team toast with local Haitian rum.

Day 13
One last job to do. PIH had arranged a head CT for a 14-year old boy whom we had admitted a few days back with a headache and bilateral abducens nerve palsies. There is a CT scanner at HUEH, but at the moment, it is sitting outside in a driveway. We located a military stretcher and brought him across campus to the waiting van. We placed the stretcher and perched it across the three rows of seats as his parents nervously joined him for the trip across town. Another story was about to unfold, but this time it would be guided by other PIH volunteers.

Kevin and I loaded our things and headed off to the airport. In the quiet car traveling through devastated yet lively streets, it was hard to be sure our work had really made a difference. But PIH has been here for 25 years and I am confident that just as we tried our best to carry forward the work of those who came in the first weeks after gudugudu, subsequent teams will carry forward ours.

PIH understands well that we were not invited to HUEH to establish an American health care delivery system. Rather, we were invited to help re-establish, support and further develop the Haitian system with Haitian attendings, residents and nurses. Only by working within their own system can we hope to achieve what has become the hopeful prayers of Haitians: to channel the massive and generous international response into rebuilding a stronger, healthier and more self-sufficient Haiti.

by Brian Fligor, ScD, CCC-A – Director of Children’s Diagnostic Audiology Program

Newborn hearing screening is likely the most important public health initiative to ever occur within the field of hearing health. It has been known for decades that permanent hearing loss, which happens in at least three of every 1,000 babies born, in newborns is the most common birth condition.

The rate of hearing loss is about 10 times higher in babies who need specialized medical care in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) because they have significant medical problems that put them at risk for developing a hearing loss.

Newborns hearing loss is often due to medical conditions, but it is also often caused by inherited traits from both parents, who most often have normal hearing. In fact, 90 percent of all babies born with hearing loss have parents with normal hearing (and likely have no experience with deafness).

Often, children born with hearing loss are otherwise healthy and develop normally. The hearing loss, though, leads to speech and language delays, which can interfere with the child’s relationship with the family, as well as difficulties with learning to read and write in school.

The good news is that hearing loss can be identified very early with mandated newborn hearing screening and, once identified, intervention can quickly begin using specialized developmental services (such as Early Intervention) as well as audiological management through hearing aids or a cochlear implant. These devices can give the child access to sound and support acquisition of spoken language.

But this intervention is all based upon the process of identification. A recent CDC study reported what many of us have known in the world of early detection and intervention for hearing loss: screening is a first step, and the subsequent steps have to be made easy for families, or they won’t happen.

When a child has a hearing screening and doesn’t pass (i.e. – they have a “refer” on their screen), what’s next? They need to see an audiologist within a couple weeks to have a full diagnostic evaluation – a full, thorough test of hearing, not just a rescreening.

Because of the perception of the potential severity of this problem, as well as barriers to accessing audiological care, nearly HALF of all newborns who don’t pass their hearing screening are “lost to follow-up” – meaning they don’t get the full test done early. Hearing loss then ends up not being identified until they are over 18 months old (sometimes older).

Massachusetts boasts the highest follow-up rate in the nation. Roughly 99 percent of all newborns in Massachusetts are screened (the national average is good – about 97 percent); of those who don’t pass (close to 2 percent), a full 90 percent get the full test within a couple months. The national average for getting the full test is only about 50 percent.

The reason Massachusetts is the leader in the nation is because of a law passed in 1997 that mandates universal newborn hearing screening also mandated reporting the results to the pediatrician – having the result listed on the state’s electronic birth certificate – and that a follow-up appointment for the full test had to be made prior to the baby going home from the hospital with parents.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) was tasked with tracking all newborns, especially those who didn’t pass the newborn hearing screening, to ensure babies were not lost to follow-up. DPH does an incredible job connecting families with a DPH-approved audiology center that is known to provide the full hearing testing needed. They also continually monitor how they’re doing at tracking down newborns that need follow-up testing and constantly strive   to make the follow-up rate 100 percent.

Massachusetts is hopeful that the lessons learned in this state can be translated to success in other parts of the U.S. and worldwide.

Read about how temporary hearing loss may rewire kids’ brains.

Alan Woolf, MD, MPH was part of a team that conducted experiments to find out if the vessels the Shang Dynasty drank from contributed to their early demise due to a combination of liquid and the materials the vessels were made from.

A documentary airing on the National Geographic channel tonight – Treasure Tomb of the Warrior Queen – explores just that.

Woolf took the time to answer this question for Thrive:

Did lead poisoning pose a potential health risk to the nobility in the ancient Chinese Shang Dynasty?

Lead-contaminated cookware, dishes and pottery have been known sources of human poisoning from antiquity to the present. Lead has been found in the skeletal remains of ancient Romans. Roman dishes, beverage containers, cooking cauldrons and the like were all heavily contaminated with it. It has even been speculated that ill health brought on by chronic lead poisoning may have contributed to the downfall of Rome.

Less is known about the possible effects of lead on the health of early period Chinese dynasties such as the Shang. There are few traces in the Shang burial mounds that would reveal information about their common health problems. However, evidence from both oracle bone inscriptions and artifacts found in burial sites, including that of empress Fu Hao near Anyang in the Henan Province, suggests that the Shang emperors and upper classes regularly stored and drank grain-fermented wines from bronze vessels. These magnificent bronzes were used both for everyday purposes and for ritualized divinations, sacrifices and other commonly observed ceremonies. Indeed, there is evidence that the Shang nobility were heavy drinkers.

Analysis of the many ornate and beautiful Shang bronzes of copper and tin has revealed the presence of lead in the alloys in concentrations from as little as 0.2 percent to as much as 20 percent. The lead may have been an inadvertent contaminant of the ore mined to make the bronze-ware, or it may have been added by metallurgists in the fabrication process to aid in the carvings on the drinking goblets, pots and cauldrons. Lead is a malleable metal quite suitable for creating the intricate, ornate patterns and pictures found in the castings. Since lead is a preservative, lead-adulterated wines do not sour easily; the metal itself imparts a sweet taste to wine.

And so our experiment at Children’s Hospital Boston used three bronze receptacles fabricated to resemble the Shang vessels. The alloy we used was a mixture of tin, copper and lead in proportions similar to the metals found in analyzes of numerous Shang bronzes. A lead content of 8 percent was chosen since this was the mid-point in the range of Shang-era bronze lead concentrations. We placed three different liquids in the goblets: Shaoxing rice wine (chosen to resemble the grain fermented wines routinely imbibed by the Shang nobility), a white grape wine and tap water as two control liquids. Then we periodically sampled the wine and analyzed it for lead contamination over the subsequent seven-day period.

The results of our experiment were astounding. As much as 113,000 g/L of lead had leached into the wines in as little as 48 hours. As expected, the more acidic grape wine leached more lead than the rice wine, but both were heavily contaminated. By comparison, the current regulations of the Food and Drug Administration in the United States limit daily intake of all sources of lead to a maximum of 75 g/day.

These results do not tell the whole story, and the numbers should be interpreted cautiously. The bronzes and rice wine used in the experiment are probably quite a bit different from those available to the Chinese aristocracy in 1100 B.C. But it seems plausible to suggest that some of these exquisite Shang bronzes were capable of releasing lead into the wines they contained. Did empress and warrior Fu Hao suffer from chronic lead poisoning? Did it adversely influence her health and even shorten her life? We may never know for sure. But the hypothesis only adds to the intrigue contained within her fascinating story.

Lead poisoning is a preventable disease and while it’s not as common as it used to be, occurrences do still pop up. It can affect just about every system in the body yet often produces no definitive symptoms. The following are some of the most common symptoms of lead poisoning.

• damage to the brain and nervous system
• behavior and learning problems
• slowed growth
• hearing problems
• headaches
• anemia

You can read more about lead poisoning here.

A Boston Globe article this morning brought the cost of care here at Children’s Hospital Boston into question, saying, among other things, that “Children’s charges the highest fees for both outpatient and inpatient care.” It’s based on data by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) that we don’t feel accurately reflects the care that we provide.

While the writer, Liz Kowalczyk, did say that because about 30 percent of our patients are on Medicaid, we have to “make up the lost revenue from private insurers,” I don’t think she went far enough in explaining why our costs tend to be higher than other hospitals in the state.

First and most important, Children’s is the only freestanding children’s hospital on the Globe’s list, so comparing the care we deliver to that of hospitals that primarily care for adults puts us at an automatic disadvantage. Why? Because, fortunately, children get sick much less often than adults, but when they do get sick, it costs much more to care for them.

And when they get very sick or critically injured, they nearly always come to Children’s, which provides the highest level of trauma and neonatal intensive care in the state. The costs associated with this are far from insignificant, given that we treat an amazing 90 percent of the state’s most complex pediatric patients. The HPHC data didn’t distinguish between the care of high-acuity and low-acuity patients, which we refer to as case mix.

One of the reasons pediatric health care is more expensive than adult health care is that we have to keep a lot of equipment - in a wide range of sizes - on hand at all times. Above are just three of the many blood pressure cuffs used by Children's clinicians.

I realize that health care organizations like Children’s are – and should be – under the microscope regarding the cost of our care. And I applaud the Globe and other media outlets for making sure that all sides in the health care reform debate are accountable to the public. Children’s has worked hard in recent years to control our costs, build greater efficiencies into the way we do business and collaborate with the state’s insurers to ensure that we’re providing the best care at the best prices – even going so far as volunteering to cut our payment rates in FY2010.

But I think it’s critically important that the health care debate take into account the real differences between the care provided at adult hospitals vs. pediatric hospitals, and that the health care system should take a long-term view of “value.” Early and comprehensive intervention in childhood diseases, like asthma, autism and diabetes, is the best societal investment we can make, but one that is often overlooked in the health care cost debate.

Very high-resolution microarrays such as this one, capable of spotting very small missing or extra pieces of DNA, have only become available within the past few years. Image courtesy of Agilent Technologies.

The cause of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), the fastest growing developmental disability in the United States, is still a big mystery. While there’s clearly a genetic component, only 15 percent of people with autism have a known genetic cause. But researchers believe that a much larger percentage of autism can be chalked up to genetics. Now, Children’s Hospital Boston and Autism Consortium researchers have shown that a new genetic test, which samples the whole genome, may work three times better than standard tests.

Families expecting a child who have a family member with an ASD sometimes seek genetic testing to determine whether their baby is at risk.  In a child who’s already affected, genetic testing can explain why the child has autism and let the parents know how likely it is that other children in the family could inherit the genetic risk for autism.

But up until now, the recommended genetic tests (karyotyping to look for chromosomal abnormalities and testing for Fragile X, the single largest known genetic cause of ASDs) aren’t that helpful as they are limited in their scope and often come up negative. Now, Children’s Hospital Boston and Autism Consortium researchers have shown that a new genetic test that samples the entire genome, known as chromosomal microarray analysis, has about three times the detection rate for genetic changes related to ASDs than standard tests. Publishing in the April issue of Pediatrics, the authors urge that CMA become part of the first-line genetic work-up for ASDs. Because it is new, CMA is often considered a second-tier test, which means it isn’t always covered by health insurance.

Identifying a specific genetic cause for ASD helps with patient care by alerting clinicians to other medical problems that may be linked to that particular type of deletion or duplication. This type of genetic testing may eventually lead to specific treatment approaches for each sub-type of autism.

The study’s co-senior authors, Bai-Lin Wu, PhD, director of Children’s DNA Diagnostic Lab, and Children’s clinical geneticist David Miller, MD, PhD, believe there’s great value in slowly pinpointing genetic causes, no matter how long takes. “I don’t think we’re going to find one cause that explains 50 percent of autism,” Miller notes. “But even if it’s 1 percent at a time, we’ll eventually be able to figure out what’s going on in each particular family.”

ABC News Online, MSNBC,  U.S. News & World Report and the LA Times health blog “Booster Shots” all report on the study.