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Neuropsychol Rev (2009) 19:275276 DOI 10.1007/s11065-009-9100-7
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Autism is a Portmanteau Syndrome
Lynn Waterhouse
Received: 30 March 2009 /Accepted: 6 May 2009 /Published online: 26 May 2009 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009
Editor:I whole-heartedly agree with Professor Belmonte and his colleagues that case studies are important, and that more autism theory syntheses could be constructed.
The key difference between my view of autism and that of Belmonte et al. (2009) is that they believe there is one shared neurofunctional deficit in autism. My research conducted with others, and my review of the research and theories of others has led me to conclude that brain deficit variation in autism as currently diagnosed is too great to assume that one shared neurofunctional deficit will be found to provide a unifying causal explanation for autism (2008, p. 284). I am not alone in this view: Reiss (2009) asserted it is unlikely that a single cause or pathophysio-logical mechanism will be described that applies to most individuals currently diagnosed with autism (p. 91).
Belmonte and colleagues, however, labeled...