Health Highlights: Aug. 16, 2006

Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:

Autism Affects Brain in Many Ways: Study

Autism affects many areas of the brain and causes a wide range of problems beyond impaired social interaction, concludes a U.S. study in the journal Child Neuropsychology.

U.S. researchers compared 56 children with autism and 56 children without the condition and found that the children with autism had much more difficulty with complex tasks, such as tying their shoelaces, BBC News reported.

Children with autism also had more problems with their handwriting and were less likely to be able to distinguish between similar-looking people. They also found it much harder to understand complex figures of speech.

According to the researchers, the findings suggest that autism affects sensory perception, memory and movement as it hinders the ability of different parts of the brain to work together to achieve complex tasks.

"These findings show that you cannot compartmentalize autism. It''s much more complex," said lead researcher Nancy Minshew, a psychiatry and neurology expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

She said autism researchers shouldn''t restrict their investigations to communication problems, repetitive behavior, or obsessive interests, BBC News reported.

"Our paper strongly suggests that autism is not primarily a disorder of social interaction but a global disorder affecting how the brain processes the information it receives -- especially when the information becomes complicated," Minshew said.

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Folding Picnic Tables Recalled

More than 200,000 folding picnic tables are being recalled because they can buckle or break without warning during use, the U.S Consumer Product Safety Commission says. The distributor, Atico International USA Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has received 26 reports of the tables collapsing. There have been 18 reports of injuries, including muscle strains and a broken foot.