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For a disorder that has been so publicized, very little is actually known about autism and the reasons behind its crippling life-long effects. With the number of diagnosed autism patients rising at an unbelievable pace, researchers are rushing to discover a way to bring the patients who seem to be lost "in their own world" (Caronna and Tager-Flusberg, 2007) back to reality. Risk factors, symptoms, effects on language, therapy and medication, and ongoing research will all be discussed in hopes of educating new and pre-existing families and friends of autism patients. In a general sense, autism is a severe developmental disorder that is usually diagnosed before the age of three, and usually involves untreatable mental retardation and communication problems throughout the patient's life. But leading research has concluded that early diagnosis could be the deciding factor in the level of severity of the disorder; therefore all hope lies in the hands of new diagnosis procedures.

In order to ensure early detection, people must be aware of autism's risk factors and symptoms. The numbers of autism cases has been rising primarily due to the discovery that autism can be prevalent even in people who have average IQs and the rates can be as high as 60 per 10,000 (Charman, 2005). The people with the largest chances of being born with the disorder are family members of current autism patients; new studies have found that the reoccurrence rate in families can be as high as 10%. This genetic disorder is also 4 times as likely to strike the male population, even though the reasons behind this are still unknown. The primary tell-tale symptoms of autism that all researchers agree on are impairments in communication and interaction with others and repetitive motor movements and speech. Another key symptom is the lack of joint attention, which is a failure to develop the skill of sharing an experience with a person by following their gaze or to the object their pointing to. This is