Podcast: The first meaningful autism subgroup

Instead of grouping together people with autism based on traditional severity scores, what if groupings were done based on functional outcome? Would this help better understand the broad spectrum of autism and why some people with autism are so different than others? Researchers at the University of Minnesota led by Kyle Sterrett, together with UCLA and UNC utilized a study that followed children with autism in the early 1990’s into their adulthood, in the 2020’s. They created and asked these families a set of questions (included in the manuscript below) to help identify levels of functioning in people with autism. This was done to help them and their families get the right support at right time. They found that these questions could differentiate people with Profound Autism based on things like level of independence and safety concerns. Dr. Sterrett talks with us on this week’s podcast to explain what they did and why it is so important.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39031157