The behavioral symptoms that define disorders on the autism spectrum sometimes start to emerge as early as 12 months of age. But often, a firm diagnosis is not made until a child is 2 or older.
What if you could predict autism when a child was just 6 months old?
New research using sophisticated brain scans suggests this may one day be possible, enabling high-risk infants to be targeted for early intervention and treatment.
The research, conducted by scientists at seven institutions, including Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, was published online last week in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
The authors followed several dozen children from 6 months of age through age 2, tracking their behavioral development while also periodically administering a special kind of MRI called diffusion tensor imaging.
The children were selected because they had an older sibling with a diagnosis on the autism spectrum, and thus were at a higher risk of developing such a disorder themselves.
The scientists said they found a significantly different pattern of brain development in the children who went on to display autismlike symptoms at age 2. These children started out with higher scores of fractional anisotropy - a measure that reflects the degree of structure and organization in the brain's white matter tracts.
By the time they reached age 2, the scores for kids with autism had risen somewhat, but they had fallen behind those of their nonautistic peers in the study.
"It was a blunted development," said coauthor Robert T. Schultz, director of Children's Center for Autism Research.
Parents sometimes describe the onset of their child's autistic symptoms as being fairly sudden, at 18 months to 2 years. But changes seem to be under way long before that, said Schultz, who was joined by Children's colleague Sarah J. Paterson on the study.
Another recent study suggests that babies who go on to develop autism might be identified through electroencephalography (EEG), whereas other researchers have looked for genetic markers.
By themselves, any one of these clues might not be enough, but Schultz said: "What you might be able to do is add these things together." - Tom Avril
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Check Up: Earlier autism detection