7 On Call: Overcoming Autism

(New York-WABC, April 27, 2007) (WABC) -- More than 1.5 million families face the challenges of having a child with autism. One family in particular is very proud of their autistic boy.

He's on his way to a diving championship, and a rare surgery may have had something to do with it.

Seven's On Call with Dr. Jay Adlersberg.

The spectrum of disorders generally called autism are wide. The symptoms of the children vary greatly, but all share the difficulty of connection and communication. For many parents, it means searching endlessly for ways to help their children. One parent has had success.

Nine year-old Brett Palo is practicing to compete in a national diving championship. It's a grand accomplishment for the Greenlawn, Long Island boy who was diagnosed with autism at age 2.

"He didn't respond," Brett's mother, Mary Beth Palo, said. "He was just very detached from you, and I had never heard of autism."

Like many parents of autistic children, Mary Beth Palo knows a lot now.

Early on, she began an exhausting effort to reach her son.

With a home camera, and sometimes help from neighborhood kids, she made videos which Brett would watch repeatedly.

She wanted to teach him some basic lessons, like playing with others and different emotions.

"I wanted him to be a kid," she said. "I wanted him to play and that was where I started. I figured I could teach him how to play, everything else could come later and it did."

It wasn't easy, but Brett made progress. Then, at age 5, he had a huge regression and bizarre, repetitive behavior.

"He was constantly touching his feet and quacking, quacking all day," Mary Beth said.

An MRI revealed Brett had been born with an abnormality called Chiari Malformation.

In a normal brain, the cerebellum sits within the skull. In Chiari, it presses out and down against the spinal cord.

"Of the children I see who have autism, it just appears that we're finding more abnormalities in their MRI scans consistent with Chiari Malformations than I would have expected in the general pediatric population," said Dr. Neil Feldstein, of the Columbia University Medical Center.

Dr. Feldstein does not think that Chiari Malformation causes autism, but suspects it may exacerbate it. He is studying the relationship between the two.

Click Here For More From Dr. Feldstein On the Relationship Between Autism and Chiari Malformations

The Chiari surgery changed Brett. The quacking and repetitive behavior stopped.

"He started realizing and started seeing everything in the world that he hadn't seen before," Mary Beth said.

Besides diving, Brett also plays baseball. Dad is in charge of that.

He still has learning deficits, but he is mainstreamed in school and has apparently also learned how to be a kid.

"He's learning how to dive and how to play baseball and how to be, how to be a boy," Mary Beth said.

Whether the surgery helped or was a coincidence needs more research. Mary Beth now makes videos for other parents. They're sold online at WatchMeLearn.com.

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