NEUROCHEMICAL THEORY OF AUTISM

The appreciation of the existence of a brain disorder as encapsulated in early childhood autism has only come to the fore in recent years. Possibly for this reason, there is no apparent agreement as to which of the symptoms of the disorder, namely emotional disturbances or cognitive defects, are primary, and which are secondary. Nor is there yet either a generally accepted medical treatment or a coherent neurochemical theory of autism. In this article, Jaak Panksepp puts forward the idea that autism is an emotional disturbance arising from an upset in the opiate systems in the brain, and hence proposes, as a possibility, opiate antagonist therapy for the autistic syndrome. © 1979.