In the studies, they found that language and instrumental music overlap each other in the brain’s processing area. Researchers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science indicated that intensive musical therapy could help improve speech in stroke patients. Also, researchers said that music education could help children with developmental dyslexia or autism to speak better.

Harvard Medical School associate professor of neurology, Gottfried Schlaug, told the meeting that people who have previously suffered a severe stroke on the left side of their brain causing them to be unable to speak, can sometimes learn to communicate by singing. He said that “music making is a multi-sensory experience, activating links to several parts of the brain,” Schlaug said. He then proceeded to show a video of a patient who could only make sounds be able to say “I am thirsty” by singing the words. Another patient in the video was able to sing “happy birthday” after they were previously unable to speak at all.

Even though these findings are very positive and uplifting news for many, Schlaug warns that this work is specifically for people who’ve had a severe stroke on the left side of their brain and the therapy can be extensive and time consuming.

More good news came from Nina Kraus, the director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, when she reported that new studies indicate that musical training improves the brain’s ability to do other activities. An example she gave was that musicians are better at finding the voice of a friend in a noisy restaurant, because the  musically trained brain becomes more skillful at detecting patterns in sounds. She also said that children who play an instrument may be able to “better process speech in noisy classrooms and more accurately interpret the nuances of language that are conveyed by subtle changes in the human voice.” She went on to say that when people are first learning to talk and when they speak to babies they frequently use musical patterns in their speech.

“People’s hearing systems are fine-tuned by the experiences they’ve had with sound throughout their lives. Music training is not only beneficial for processing music stimuli. We’ve found that years of music training may also improve how sounds are processed for language and emotion,” Kraus said.

It was found that mothers who were older than 40 were almost 50% more likely to have an autistic child than those who were in their 20s. The risk for 40 and older fathers was 36% higher than for men in their 20s.

This said, one of the experts said that the study shows that the risk of a woman over age 40 having a child with autism was still less than 4 in 1000.

The new research indicates that the father’s age seems to make the most impact when they pair up with young mothers. For children who had mothers younger than 25, autism was twice as common if the fathers were older than 40 than if they were in their 20s.

These new discoveries do not agree with current research which found that the father’s age was even more significant than the mother’s. Researchers and autism experts are saying that the new study is more believable, mostly because it is so much larger.

In general, it is known that older mothers are in jeopardy of facing more risks for having children with genetic disorders, and genes are believed to have an impact on autism.

This new study was released February 8, 2010 in the journal Autism Research.

A University of Wisconsin researcher who has also studies the influence of parents’ age on autism, pointed out that it is critical to note that the increased risks are very small and most babies are born to older mothers without developing autism.

Health officials believe that more awareness, more expansive definitions and more discoveries of autism in younger children could explain some of the increase in numbers of this dreaded disease.

Dr. Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is afraid that there may be a real increase in the numbers from this disorder. Diagnosis is based on a child’s behavior, so diagnosis is especially difficult, according to Dr. Susan Levy of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics subcommittee on autism. She said it is hard to diagnose autism because there is no biological marker such as a blood test.

This new estimate could mean that around 673,000 American children have autism. Past estimates have put the number at around 560,000.

One of the studies came from the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health. The results were released and published in the October issue of Pediatrics. The study, based on telephone surveys, parents reported that about 1 in 91 children ages  3 to 17 had autism, which included milder forms of the disease like asperger’s syndrome.

The other government estimate has not been officially released as of yet. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has decided to announce that their early findings show that about 1 in 100 children have the disorders because of the new published findings.

Researcher Catherine Rice said that the CDC employs an intensive method for its estimation. The education and health records of 8-year-old children in selected cities are evaluated by an agency network and they then determine whether the children have autism. Experts of autism usually consider this method more reliable and complete than a simple telephone survey.

President Obama has even made autism a priority for research. Federal stimulus money has been set aside for it and a 2006 law poured millions of federal money into autism research, screening and treatment.

The newly published data, which includes state-level data, will aid the government in planning new services, says Michael Kogan, who is a researcher with the federal Health Resources and Services Administration and who also led the new study.

The findings are based on results of a national telephone survey of more than 78,000 parents of children ages 3 to 17. The survey  examined many health issues and included two questions on autism.

Parents were asked if a health care provider had ever told them that their child had autism, asperger’s syndrome, pervasive developmental disorder or other autism spectrum disorder. If the parent said yes, they were also asked if their child currently has autism or an autism spectrum disorder. If they answered yes to both questions, they were counted as a child with autism disorder.

Children with autism may have trouble communicating and interacting socially. They have little or no eye contact and engage in repetitive behavior like rocking back and forth and hand-flapping.

Thousands of healthy Italian babies in a whopping cough study received two varying amounts of the preservative thimerosal while getting their routine shots. Ten years later, a series of brain function tests were performed on 1,403 of these children. Minor disparities were found in only two of 24 measurements by researchers and those might be just due to chance. There was only one case of autism discovered, and that was from the group that received the lesser amount of thimerosal.