Autism could be diagnosed years in advance by tracking toddlers’ eye movements, research suggests.
Two new studies found that playing videos to children and measuring where their eyes look could detect the condition in patients as young as one.
The average age of autism diagnosis is around four years old, and there is still no standard medical test for autism.
Late diagnosis is stressful for children and families as it can lead to mental health issues like anxiety and depression, as well as the child missing out on early intervention and therapies to help them manage symptoms.
Professor Warren Jones, lead author and a pediatrician at Emory University in Georgia, said: ‘The results show that the way in which young children look at social information can serve as an effective and objective biomarker for early signs of autism.’
Children had their eye movements monitored as they watched videos of social interaction
In one study by the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta in Georgia, more than 1,000 children aged one to 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 looked at and what they did not, using specialized cameras recording their eyeballs.
When compared to a diagnosis of autism carried out by a clinician, the automated measures of eye movements were 86 percent accurate at spotting the disorder.
Of the 1,089 children in the first study, 519 children had diagnoses of autism, and 570 did not.
In the second study, which also evaluated the performance of the eye-tracking measurement, found it was 78 percent accurate at diagnosing the condition.
Autism affects one in 36 children, meaning that more than 90,000 children are born annually with the developmental disorder 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 face two or more years of waiting and referrals before eventually being diagnosed at four or five could be eligible for diagnosis between just over a year and two and a half years old.
Research found that families in the US wait an average of two years and three months for an autism diagnosis. In the UK, the wait is typically over a year and the average age of diagnosis is over five years old.
Scientists are still not completely sure what the cause of autism is, though they understand it is likely a combination of genetic factors like family history and parents’ age, and environmental factors.
The severity of the disorder also varies greatly across the spectrum, meaning there is likely no silver bullet treatment option.
The studies were published in the journals JAMA and JAMA Network Open.
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