Clinician's Manual on Autism Spectrum Disorder

This concise, yet practical handbook will aid in supporting the diagnosis, treatment, and long-term management of autism, including behavioral therapies, current clinical trials, and emerging pharmaceutical treatments. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder characterised by disturbance in language, perception, and social skills that affects an estimated 1-2 per 1,000 people worldwide (although the number is as high as 20 per 1000 in the US). While studies have suggested a disturbance in neural metabolism in patients with ADS, the exact cause of the ASD still remains unknown. In 2013, a single indication of ASD, which united several related conditions (ie, classical autism, Asperger's syndrome, Fragile X Syndrome, Landau-Kleffner Syndrome, Rett syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, and PDD-NOS), was included in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mood Disorders for the first time in order to support more standardized diagnoses.

Dr. Evdokia Anagnostou joined Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Centre in 2008 as a clinician-scientist. Dr. Anagnostou was Assistant Professor and Clinical Director of the Seaver Autism Center of Excellence from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Dr. Anagnostou's primary appointment is in the Division of Developmental Medicine, Department of Paediatrics, University of Toronto a cross-appointment to the Division of Neurology, Department of Paediatics, University of Toronto at SickKids. Dr. Anagnostou completed medical school at McGill University in 1998 and her residency in child neurology in 2003. Dr. Anagnostou's research focuses on the psychopharmacology, neuroimaging and the development of clinical trials to test novel compounds for the treatment of autism and related disorders. Dr. Anagnostou is also studying the developmental trajectory of abnormalities in the frontostriatal circuitry in autism, and exploring the mechanisms of treatment response and side effects generation using fMRI, MR spectroscopy and DTI techniques.