Medical Research Libraries for ASD and Related Disorders

In my travels around the city attending autism-related functions and events, I often meet parents looking for the latest treatment breakthroughs for autism and autism-related disorders.

In the case of my own son, the autism-related disorder is OCD / Tourette’s (Tourettic OCD); I think the latest stat is 60% comorbidity, but the US doesn’t have good figures for reporting compared to countries with socialized medicine. It is generally known that autism often comes with a variety of “comorbid” (accompanying) disorders, which makes establishing causality and treatment trickier. What is neurological, amenable to drug treatments? What is psychological, amenable to therapy? And as we all know, autism is a “spectrum disorder,” which really really means, to be honest, no one knows all that much about it; if it is one disease or many; and specialists who know anything are hard to find. Many of us have traveled out of the city or even out of state to get help for our kids.

To this end, I want to let people know about a fantastic resource in Houston they might not know about: The Texas Medical Center Library. This is a medical library in the heart of the Texas Medical Center.

If you go to the TMC Library’s home page and conduct searches there, you will be able to pull up all kinds of scholarly articles on specific conditions which you will not find merely by Googling. In my case, I tend to search “OCD and autism” from time to time, to see what’s new.

Granted, you will not be able to access the full text of many of these books and articles without the necessary credentials (an institutionally-issued sign on) or a willingness to pay about $50 per article to get you through a paywall. But with many articles, you can get to full text if the article is designated “Open Access” (look for the orange open lock icon, as with the last citation above). Through Google Scholar, you can also often find reprints of the same article in open access institutional repositories. That’s what I do.

I have often had good luck emailing the author and requesting the article, or getting it through ResearchGate.

If you want to take your research to the next level, and you have time during a work week to actually go down to the Texas medical center, you can also go inside the TMC Library and get guest credentials to access full text of all of these articles. I think the TMC Library is an underutilized resource which more parents of special needs kids should know about, even though it isn’t a “public” library (they say they are an independent library).

If you live more toward Galveston, there is a UT medical research library which is also very good, UTMB’s Moody Medical Library. Like the TMC Library, you can search in their search box (their “public access catalog”) to see if there are articles there which would make the trip down there worth your while. Inside the library, you should be able to access full-text of everything. The UTMB Library is open to unaffiliated researchers both during the week and on the weekends, where the TMC Library is only accessible to non-affiliated researchers during the week. Parking is also difficult and costly at the TMC Library, so I would opt for the Moody Library just for the convenience factor.

Occasionally, I will explore scholarly publications to see if there is an expert I might consult with now or in the future, a systematic review or a clinical trial, just to give me insight or a ray of hope.

There have been promising studies with CRISPR and mice models where the mice, even adult mice, have been “cured” of some genetic defect associated with autism through genetic engineering. If you want to monitor articles published on CRISPR and autism, or follow some particular genetic condition, medical libraries are for you.  

If you go to inside of the library, there will be additional resources which are not well indexed by the library’s discovery tool. Going to specialized research databases and conducting searches there is often far more productive than going through the library’s single-search discovery engine.

You can always ask a Librarian for assistance.