There is no medication that can cure autism, and no one medication that is recommended for individuals with autism. Medications can be recommended to help with very specific target symptoms that are associated with autism. Some of these symptoms might be extreme difficulty attending to the pertinent aspects of the environment or aggression towards self or others. This rate may be an underestimate, given that many families with one autistic child will stop having children due to stress or the fear of having another child with the disorder. Clearly it is impossible to make a generalization about how any individual child will grow and progress.
All children continue to develop, despite delays or the presence of deviant behaviors.
Information that we have currently about the progress of adults with autism is based on the treatments these individuals received twenty or thirty years ago. Our knowledge base about what educational strategies are most effective with these children has increased tremendously over the last ten to twenty years. A child diagnosed with autism will receive much different intervention beginning at an earlier age than was possible many years ago. This means each child's chances for remediating behavior are greater today than years ago. Immediately after the program was aired, we were receiving requests for information about the efficacy of this drug for treating autism.