For a long time, not a lot of psychiatrists and psychologists even knew that there was a disease like autism.
They attributed the various autism symptoms that they came across from time to time to a variety of other psychological or intellectual ailments and warning signs on their own.
However, after Leo Kanner discovered and described the disorder in 1944, a lot of research has been done since, yielding various truths about the condition, and resulting in occasional advancements in autism treatment.
In 1949, the National Institute of Mental Health was founded to study the brain, mental illness, and mental health, with a bid to improve diagnoses and treatment of diseases like autism and a host of others.
Due to the autism research, a wide variety or spectrum of autism symptoms have been found which makes the disease that much easier to diagnose, although the researchers still have not unearthed much in the area of the causes of autism.
In recent times there have been more autism diagnoses than ever before, which may be as a result of higher awareness of the set of symptoms that describe the syndrome, or the more standardized methods for diagnosing it.
Naturally there are autism researchers who believe that the higher incidence recorded is as a result of some environmental factor or change thereof that they yet cannot decipher.
Funding for autism research has been sporadic at best ever since its history began in the mid 40s.
Various autism research grants that have been awarded over time have met with a lot of resistance in the area of the difficulty of deciphering the syndrome.
As yet, nothing much has been found by way of the exact causes of autism, except that there is a strong genetic link.