Autism could be diagnosed YEARS in advance by tracking toddlers’ eye movements, study suggests
Research suggests autism can be diagnosed years in advance by tracking toddlers’ eye movements.
Two new studies have found that playing videos of children’s social interactions and measuring where their eyes looked helped detect the condition in patients as young as one year old.
Autism is notoriously difficult to spot, with the average age of diagnosis in the US around five years old. The process usually involves dozens of hospital visits and a series of tests, which can be stressful for children and families
Professor Warren Jones, lead author and pediatrician at Emory University in Georgia, said: ‘The results show that the way young children perceive social information can serve as an effective and objective biomarker for early signs of autism.’
Children had their eye movements tracked as they watched videos of social interaction
In a study by the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta in Georgia, more than 1,000 children between the ages of one and two and a half, including children with and without symptoms of autism, watched video scenes of social interaction.
Specialized cameras recorded their eye movements at a rate of 120 times per second to determine what social information the children were looking at and what they weren’t looking at, using specialized cameras that recorded their eyeballs.
Compared to a doctor’s diagnosis of autism, the automated eye movement measurements were 86 percent accurate in detecting the disorder.
Of the 1,089 children in the first study, 519 were diagnosed with autism, and 570 were not.
The second study, which also evaluated the performance of the eye-tracking measurement, found it to be 78 percent accurate in diagnosing the condition.
Autism affects one in 36 children, which means that more than 90,000 children are born with the developmental disorder each year in the US.
It is characterized by problems with social communication and interaction, difficulty expressing oneself, and repetitive behaviors and interests.
Dr. Ami Klin, co-author and director of the Marcus Autism Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, said the results could mean that children who have to wait and refer for two or more years before finally getting a diagnosis at age four or five, in qualify for a diagnosis. between just over a year and two and a half years old.
Research has shown that families in the US wait an average of two years and three months for an autism diagnosis. In the UK, the waiting time is generally more than a year and the average age of diagnosis is more than five years.
Scientists are still not entirely sure what causes autism, though they understand it’s likely a combination of genetic factors such as family history and parental age, and environmental factors.
The severity of the condition also varies widely across the spectrum, meaning there is likely no cure-all treatment option.
The studies were published in JAMA and JAMA Network Open magazines.