Jessica Brian – ASF Weekly Science Podcasts

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Parents are now used as intervention partners through a design called parent-mediated intervention. It started to be studied before the pandemic but has now become a necessity. Does it work? Should it always work for everything? How long should the intervention last and how often? These are all questions of interest, and while research is still early, parents can be amazing partners in intervention especially below age 5. The provide opportunities for learning and communication, and they can utilize more hours during the day at home than traditional in-clinic services can. Of course not every family is the same and may not have the same abilities to learn the intervention, and in the future more of these contextual factors need to be studied. But for now, three cheers for parents helping their kids!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34867556/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35037520/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35040001/

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This month, two new important research findings were published from scientists that study the very earliest signs and symptoms of autism. First, Dr. Suzanne Macari at Yale showed that a type of temperament in toddlers was associated with autism at about 3 years of age. This may be used in the future to develop specialized interventions very very early on. Meanwhile, Dr. Jessica Brian’s group in Canada used the very early signs of autism – social orienting – to develop a new intervention called the Social ABC’s which they piloted last year. Last week, a randomized clinical trial of this intervention showed improvements in social smiling, reactions to parents, and social orienting, suggesting it is a feasible and valid intervention option. There is now a list of these interventions that have been rigorously tested. This demonstrates that the early detection of features of autism, like temperament, can be turned into interventions to improve the outcome of toddlers with ASD.