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Dr. Jill Locke’s research focuses on school-based social skills interventions for children with ASD. Her research highlights the importance of the intervention setting and how to match school resources to the needs of the child. Successful school intervention programs are ones that can be maintained Read full post »
As part of the research discovery series, Autism Speaks is presenting Discovery to Solutions, which involves a panel of scientists moderated by Autism Speaks’ Dr. Dean Hartley, Senior Director, Genomic Discovery, and Translational Sciences. Panel members include our own Dr. Mendy Minjarez and Dr. Raphael Bernier.
The Seattle Children’s Autism Center Research Team is Hosting a Research Camping Adventure!
We would love to have you come join the fun and participate in autism genetics research! The SPARK and PANGEA studies are exploring genetic differences related to autism. Families who attend the family fun day will be able to complete study participation for one or both studies in a single day!
A recent article published in JAMA Pediatrics (2018; Associations of Prenatal Ultrasound and Autism Spectrum Disorders[i]) has re-drawn attention to ultrasound as a potential factor that may cause ASD. My colleague Dr. Pierre Mourad and I want to take a moment to highlight some thoughts about this research.
One of the biggest challenges parents face after receiving an autism diagnosis is what their child’s treatment plan should include.Taking into consideration the time, money, effort, commitment, and hope parents place in any number of therapies and interventions, providers are still unable to reliably predict which treatments will be effective for which children.
This often leads parents to simultaneously employ various treatment options without any assurance that they have a good fit for their child. We’ve reported that there are current studies underway toward this end and want to share one such study with you today.
In this study of twenty young children with autism, scientists used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in brain activity before and after receiving sixteen weeks of Pivotal Response Treatment (PRT), a play-based, evidence-based behavioral treatment focused on development in core deficits associated with autism.
The researchers wanted to know if they could predict which children would show improvement with the PRT treatment by looking for neurobiomarkers – measurable objective characteristics in the brain. They did indeed identify a number of characteristics in brain regions associated with social information processing and social motivation that predicted the success of PRT.
This study is a step towards being able to answer the question: How do we know if a child will respond to treatment? Having the ability to predict whether a child will respond to a particular treatment will allow for the child to receive the intervention that they will most likely respond to, which will save families resources, time, and frustration. It also allows for treatments to be analyzed and possibly distilled down into the core features that make them successful for children, increasing a treatment’s effectiveness and usefulness to families.
A copy of the original study can be found here.
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