 Did you know that about 1 in 100 children are being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder these days? I am Dr. Avinash Kamat, I am a consultant child and adult psychiatrist at Manipal Hospital's Mangalore and today we will talk about autism. So autism or Autism Spectrum Disorder is a developmental disorder in which children have problems with reciprocal social communication and they may have certain oddities in their behaviour like they may repeatedly repeat some conversations or may have hand flapping or certain behaviours which appear odd. Currently it is possible to diagnose autism as early as about 12 to 16 months. Some of the very early signs of autism are things like the child not responding when parents call the child by their child's name. The child may not make an appropriate eye contact or the child may have difficulties in what we call as joint attention. Like when the parent and the child try to interact on one thing together, the child may not focus on the thing that the parents are trying to ask the child to focus but may be lost in the child's own world. So these three things may be some very important early pointers towards autism being there in the child. So it may be poor response to name calling, not making adequate eye contact and difficulties in joint attention. Children with autism may also have some amount of speech delay or abnormalities in speech like they may present with repeating the words that the parents say like if the parents ask a question what do you want, they may just repeat back what do you want instead of answering what the parents have asked for. So these kind of difficulties or abnormalities in speech or delays in speech when compared to other children is also an early sign of autism. One of the important things about autism is about its early diagnosis. So it is possible as early as about 14 to 16 months by experts to evaluate the child and diagnose autism. In the moderate to severe category of autism, it is not so often difficult to make a diagnosis within a single sitting. So parents can come to doctors, they can have an evaluation by giving history as well as observing the child and the diagnosis of autism can be made. Having said this, we also need to realize that for a few people, some of these diagnosis of autism may happen very much later in their life. They may have essentially a normal early development in terms of language, but they may have only a few social oddities. They may not be able to socialize that well as other children. They may not understand certain social situations that well and these milder forms of autism sometimes do get missed at an earlier age and they may be diagnosed only on to a much later time that may be during their adolescence or in their young adulthood. A child with autism definitely has a lot of interventions available. These interventions will be tailored according to the child's page, according to the child's deficits and according to the child's requirements. The most common interventions that are available for a child with autism is what is known as an early intervention program. So an early intervention program for autism often has inputs from a speech therapist, occupation therapist and a clinical psychologist. So these kind of services will be tailored made for a child for the child's deficits so that the child starts improving in their speech output, you can learn socialization better and can overcome the deficits because of the disorder. Medications may sometimes be required for handling associated behaviors like for example some children with autism may have a lot of aggression or self-injurious behavior. They may bite their hand, they may hit their head against the wall or on trivial provocations may become very aggressive or irritable. These kind of symptoms may sometimes make it very difficult for the parents to take care of the child or to do any kind of interventions with these children. And those times medications may be helpful in helping children cope with this problem better. Similarly, sometimes some children with autism may have significant hyperactivity, they may not sit at one place, they may be running all over the place, they may have difficulty focusing on an activity. So these kind of things may also sometimes benefit with medications. Thirdly, at times because of their deficits, they may be more prone on a later age to develop problems like depression, anxiety or certain kind of illnesses like OCD. So these require a specialized approach by approaching a psychiatrist and a specialist.