Detecting Autism Earlier

[Guest guest]

Detecting Autism Earlier

By Tyson on July 22, 2010 10:31 AM

My son Nick is autistic. My wife and I first began noticing something was off

when Nick was 18 months old, but our pediatrician said not to worry, he's just

developing slowly, let's see where he is in six months. When the pediatrician

repeated that wait-and-see advice six months later, we ignored it and got Nick

diagnosed at Children's Hospital Boston (and got another pediatrician).

Nick is now 13 and lives full-time in a residential facility dedicated to kids

with autism -- his challenges are that severe. To this day, we wonder how much

further along Nick would be today if it had been as clear to his doctor as it

was to us that something was seriously wrong, and we had gotten him diagnosed at

18 months rather than at two and a half. With autism, the earlier the

intervention, the greater the chances for lessening the often devastating impact

of this little-understood disorder.

Now, as scientists report in a new study published online in the Proceedings of

the National Academy of Sciences on July 19, a new technology that analyzes

vocalizations in very young children offers hope of early screening of kids like

Nick for autism, as well as for typical children who suffer from a language

delay.

Using the technology, the research team, led by D. Kimbrough Oller of the School

of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Memphis,

discovered that it could differentiate between the pre-verbal vocalizations of

typically developing children and those of children with autism or language

delays. They could even tell apart, though not with as great an accuracy, the

utterances of those with autism from those with speech delay.

With parents' permission, the team placed all-day recording devices weighing

less than three ounces in specially designed pockets in their child's clothing.

The child then went about his or her daily life at home. Beginning in 2006, the

team made nearly 1,500 recordings of 232 children, totaling over three million

individual utterances. The technology is able to distinguish a child's

vocalizations from those of her parents and siblings, TVs and other background

noises, even the child's own cries and gut rumbles.

Previous studies had indicated that children with autism have a strikingly

different vocal signature than typically developing children. But the technology

was not in place to analyze massive acoustic datasets automatically and parse

various parameters that could reveal those differing signatures. Besides showing

potential for enhancing basic research into linguistic development, the new

technology, known as LENA (for Language ENvironment Analysis), offers proof of

concept that this kind of analysis can now be done, with promise for earlier

detection.

" This technology could help pediatricians screen children for ASD [autism

spectrum disorders] to determine if a referral to a specialist for a full

diagnosis is required and get those children into earlier and more effective

treatments, " says F. Warren, a coauthor of the PNAS paper, in a news

release put out by his affiliation, the University of Kansas.

If the technology becomes widely available, parents of toddlers who show signs

like my wife and I observed in Nick back in 1998 will be most grateful.