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Is autism a yes/no diagnosis?

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This week’s podcast highlights a paper from the IBIS (infant brain imaging study) that tracks infants from 6 months to 5 years of age to examine how ASD symptoms cluster together. These infants either have a diagnosis or they don’t, or they have something which doesn’t meet diagnostic threshold but is still impairing in some way. Ignoring the actual diagnosis, if the data is clustered together around how symptoms present, what happens? What does that mean for some of the longest standing research findings in ASD? For example, using this new approach which ignores and actual diagnosis, are more males are diagnosed than females? As it turns out, it equals out these ratios. What does this mean? Listen to this week’s podcast to hear directly from the first author, Catherine Burrows!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006322322013130?casa_token=ZFZpvnUOIBkAAAAA:G667QIkX_Vd6JPeWvIPABo1FPrdNL_3IiW-ajy7xR2Nme_I4ztOEf2xJ4FyhGHTMgrb8Lqq6Og

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How that little amygdala makes a big difference in autism

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The amygdala has been shown to be differently sized in autistic people – at first it is too big then it becomes smaller than typically developing people. But how early are these differences seen and does it relate to a diagnosis? The Infant Brain Imaging Study tackled this question in a recent study which compared those who were likely to develop autism at 6 months to those with Fragile X to see if there were differences and if it was specific to autism. Their findings will surprise you and have implications for targeted supports and interventions.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35331012/