If we start talking about the brain disorder or mental retardation, then names of different neuropsychiatric disorders will come in our mind as we are familiar with most of the names like,

 

• 
  Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCD)
  
• 
  ADHD
  
• 
  Intellectual Disability
  
• 
  Stereotypic Movement Disorder
  
• 
  Schizophrenia
  
• 
  Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  
• 
  Parkinson's Disease
  
• 
  Alzheimer's disease
  
• 
  Acute Stress Disorder
  
• 
  Schizophrenia
  
• 
  Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder
  
  etc.
  

 

But we left the most important one, which is turning into most devastating brain disorder in present days. That one is autism. Because of its some unique characters and symptoms this neuropsychiatric disorder was not listed above. So the question will arise naturally in our mind that

What is autism?

and

What for autism is called unique among the other neurological disorders?

 

Autism is a neurological disorder and is silently spread all over the world with impaired social and cognitive disabilities, that's why it is called devastating. For evidence if we look the CDC data report, it says 1 out of 68 children is found with autism or ASD symptoms in the U.S according to the 2010 CDC data report.

 

Autism is called unique because it is the one of those few brain disorders which are incurable. Unlike other brain disorders the reason of its no permanent cure hides into the patients' DNA. The last but not least point to note down is, autism does not come with one symptom or disorder. It appears with a couple of disorders and may turn into another neurological disorder at the later stage, that's why autism is also called ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders).

 

In fact few of those listed disorders are also found in a patient having autism and those symptoms are used to diagnose an autistic patient, because early diagnosis can improve the impaired social activities if the ASD diagnosed patients are properly treated.

 

The symptoms from the above list found in the patients having autism are,

 

• 
  Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder
  
• 
  Stereotypic Movement Disorder
  
• 
  ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder)
  
• 
  Intellectual Disability
  

 

Apart from these behavioral parameters researchers found some clinical diagnostic parameters to reach the patients suffering from this brain disorder. As it is a genetic disorder and wrong genetic expressions lead to produce misfolded proteins, so researchers focused on some proteins as well as receptors which are found misfolded due to the expression of mutated human genome.

 

This time their study is focusing on some neurotransmitters because neurotransmitters are those essential neurochemicals, responsible for the neuronal signal transduction from one neuron to another one through the synapses. GABA (?-Aminobutyric acid) is known as an inhibitory neurotransmitter, which plays role to normalize the neuronal excitability as well as it also regulates the muscular movement.

 

Like other proteins GABA also works through the GABA transmembrane receptor (protein) to process the signal transduction from one neuron cell to another one.

 

 

 

 

 

Researchers found a decreased level of GABA receptors in the brain samples taken from autistic individuals. Further study reveals that the degradation of GABAA receptor in ASD patient occurs due to Synoviolin 1 (SYVN1). SYVN1 has been determined as a removal system of the unfolded proteins and the deficit of GABA level can be a reason for the formation of ASD. One question may arise here,

 

Whether the GABA of an ASD patient is unfolded to remove by the SYVN1 system or the abnormally produced Synoviolin 1 (SYVN1) system in ASD patients is removing GABA mistakenly.

 

So, these findings need further study using appropriate animal models made for autism as well as ASD. We need to study more because these baby step findings will unlock the door of this incurable disorder with target based therapy.