Might autistic individuals have distinctive facial features, as those with Down Syndrome and fetal alcohol syndrome do? A new study comparing facial data from 64 autistic boys aged 8 – 12 with 41 who are not on the spectrum found these characteristics:

• a broader upper face, including wider eyes
• a shorter middle region of the face, including the cheeks and nose
• a broader or wider mouth and philtrum (the part of the face divot below the nose and above the top lip)

Kristina Aldridge, lead author and assistant professor of anatomy in the University of Missouri School of Medicine and the Thompson Center for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders, used a camera to take 3-D image of each child’s head. She mapped 17 points on a child’s face, including the corner of the eye and the divot above the upper lip:

When Aldridge calculated the overall geometry of the face using these points, and compared children with autism and typically developing children, she found statistically significant differences in face shape.

Understanding that people with autism have statistically different facial characteristics enables researchers to focus on the underlying causes of autism, Aldridge said. Additionally, the study identified two groups of children with autism who show further distinct facial traits that occur in children with specific characteristics of autism, such as behavior problems, language level and repetitive behaviors. Identifying these subgroups within the group of children with autism allows better study of these children and why autism is so variable.

Aldridge says that her findings might contribute to identifying a cause of autism. A fetus’ face develops in the middle of the first trimester of pregnancy. If there are indeed distinct facial features associated with autism, researchers could see if some genetic or environmental factor is at play and, possibly, at what time “autism may begin to develop in a child,” says Aldridge.

After reading about this study, I have been considering whether my 14-year-old son Charlie has such characteristics. He does have wider eyes and a “broader upper face”; the other two characteristics are harder to detect. But while I’ve seen many autistic individuals with eyes something like Charlie’s, I’ve also seen many with different sorts of features. Aldridge herself says that, unlike children with Down syndrome, “you can’t pick [autistic children] out in a crowd of kids, but you can pick them out mathematically.”

I’ve felt a bit wary of putting too much store in suggestions that “autistic children have such and such a look or have heads shaped a certain way” — Charlie, like some autistic children, has always had macrocephaly or a proportionally larger head — as such observations smack more than a bit of phrenology and physiognomy; of notions of being able to “read one’s destiny in one’s features” and such. Aldridge’s suggestion about honing in on the point in fetal development when facial features appear, and seeing if any genetic or environmental factors might play a part in leading to a child having certain features, is intriguing.

So many studies (including another reported last week, about increased autism risk in low birth weight babies) about autism are focused on causes. As a parent of an older autistic child who is getting older every day, I’ve come to regard such studies as interesting, but not providing the sorts of answers for the big questions in Charlie’s life: Will he be able to get  a job to fill his days after school ends when he 21? Will we found a place for him to live where he is safe and secure? Will there be good people who wish to help him, and all the more so when my husband and I are gone?

One thing we do know. However Charlie became autistic, we love him for who he is, as he is, and this is something beyond any scientific proof.

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