The Royal College of GPs has launched a new training programme to help its 50,000 members identify autism among children.
Autism is thought to affect around one in 100 people across the UK, many of them children, and it is a condition that often goes undiagnosed due to the often diverse and complex nature of symptoms. Many patients are able to live independent lives while others require constant, dedicated care.
The condition is often called an “invisible disability” and can take many years to successfully arrive at a diagnosis. And when patients, particularly children, are diagnosed there is frequently little help available for parents.
To counter the problems with diagnosis, the Royal College of GPs is offering family doctors in the UK the opportunity to undergo training so they can better identify the symptoms associated with autism. It also wants to raise awareness of the condition and diagnose it quicker when presented with possible cases.
Currently there is no cure for autism and around 60 million worldwide suffer from it. The condition is a neurological disorder that affects how patients communicate and relate with others. Many sufferers also get upset by a lack of order and structure in their lives, and don’t like dealing with loud noises or bright lights. Their sense of taste, touch and smell may also be affected by the condition.
The Royal College of GPs believe autism patients are being failed by the system and is hoping its new training programme will enable GPs to increase diagnosis rates, and wants them to think about the possibility of the condition when seeing patients. It also wants doctors to be able to offer help and support for parents of children who are diagnosed with autism, rather than simply “labelling” them as many parents currently see happening now.
Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism where patients are often highly-intelligent but have problems with speech and processing language, was for years classed as mental illness but is now being recognised by GPs in childhood thanks to better awareness. There are now over 300,000 sufferers in the UK.
A study conducted in 2012 by Massachusetts General hospital in the USA, found a number of children who had been diagnosed with autism in early childhood had simply “grown out of it” later in life. The study said a certain number of these cases could be down to a misdiagnosis but could not be sure of the exact amount.
Many other children with autism are not correctly identified as having the condition despite exhibiting symptoms at an early age.
A spokesman for the Royal College of GPs said: “We ought to be able to spot autism but it’s so complex and difficult. If we treated people in wheelchairs like we do those with autism, we’d be pulled up.”
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