precision medicine – ASF Weekly Science Podcasts

You may have heard terms in early intervention like “NDBI” or “Early Start Denver Model” and wondered if there was a difference in efficacy behind all these flavors of toddler interventions. On this week’s podcast, we speak to Dr. Giacomo Vivanti from @DrexelAutism, who combined data from 4 of these interventions across 700 children to … Continue reading "The di...

In an effort to better understand the causes of autism in those with a known genetic variant associated with ASD or other developmental disorders, in 2010, the Simons Foundation launched Simons VIP, now known as  Simons Searchlight – an online international research program studying nearly 200 rare genetic neurodevelopmental disorders and working with over 60 patient … Continue reading...

In honor of the last week of Autism Awareness/Acceptance Month, we review two new scientific findings that call for more awareness and action, and less acceptance of the status quo. First: sex differences in autism are not well understood, and as it turns out, the influences on a diagnosis are different. Males have a higher … Continue reading "Research for the end of Autism Action Month"

Can biomarkers that measure things like visual social attention be a good proxy for an in person behavioral diagnosis? Why would this be important? This week’s podcast explores two new studies the the Journal of the American Medical Association that show a simple device called EarliPoint can be used to shorten the wait times to … Continue reading "Now you know the reason for decades of...

The media has just called another biological marker a “diagnostic test”, when in this case, it was always intended to be an aid, not a test itself. It involves using baby hair strands to look a variation in metabolism of certain chemical elements across time. Remarkably, it showed similar results in autistic children in Japan, … Continue reading "A potential biomarker to AID, not...

Thanks to Dr. Susan Kuo at Broad Research Institute and MIT, there is an analysis of 17,000 individuals with autism across 4 different studies that all looked at how developmental milestones emerged. The results show a great deal of diversity – across different studies, time, intellectual disability and genetic background. Different groups of people with … Continue reading "Why develop...

On Tuesday, the journal Lancet published a 2+ year long endeavor around understanding the heterogeneity of autism not just in features but in access to services for individuals and families across the world. They called for a stepped care to help individualize and prioritize needs in different individuals based on their needs, not their diagnosis. … Continue reading "“Profound” A...

You may have heard of SPARK, it is the largest genetics research project in autism spectrum disorders.  But have they found anything?  Yes!  Pam Feliciano of SPARK discusses what the project is, what a pilot study has found, and how the results might help families with ASD.  In addition, a different but complementary study identified … Continue reading "SPARK it up"

Sometimes treatment targets come from the places you wouldn’t expect.  This week, three new studies on the biological and sometimes, behavioral, effects of three commonly used compounds used to treat high cholesterol, edema, and angina were studied in people with autism.  Instead of focusing on just the behavior however, these studies took the approach of … Continue reading "Commonly u...

This week’s International Meeting for Autism Research was filled with important presentations on the multiple causes of autism, interventions, diagnosis, neurobiology, services, family and self-advocate perspectives, the list goes on and on.  There is a great recap on www.spectrumnews.org.  An underlying theme ran through the presentations.  That is, that the previous “well, we don&#82...