In this week’s podcast, we talk to Whitney Guthrie from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who spent the last 6 years conducting the gold-standard randomized control trial that demonstrates intervention for social communication skills at 18 months shows greater effects than intervention starting at 27 months. If you wanted evidence that earlier is better, here it is! Interventions and supports are important at any age, but the critical window of development between 18-27 months is particularly important for long term development.
Podcast: When it comes to intervention, earlier is better
What do anxiety, prevalence, ketamine, other neurodevelopmental disorders, siblings, genetics, brain imaging and the autistic researcher committee at INSAR all have in common? They were all topics at the last Day of Learning. You can hear a 20 minute summary of the talks on this week’s ASFpodcast.
It’s that time! The ASF Year of End Science Wrap-up was published in December, so it’s time to share it on the podcast. We cover everything from parent mediated interventions to genetics and racial and ethnic disparities. You can listen here or read it on the ASF website here: https://autismsciencefoundation.org/autism-research-in-2022/
Parent-focused interventions have been designed to provide training and support to caregivers who are essential in achieving positive outcomes for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). In 2020, significant crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic and continued racial tensions, profoundly impacted the livelihood of children with IDD and their families. Many ongoing efforts to address disparities among this population were halted temporarily and required further adaptations. Researchers adapted interventions and support to address the disparities impacting children with IDD and their families with limited guidance. We provide a descriptive case analysis of four parent-focused interventions that responded to the global crises to continue serving children with IDD and their families. The four distinct programs were based on applied behavior analysis and naturalistic, developmental-behavioral paradigms that were culturally adapted for families of young children with IDD from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. We present the qualitative reports on the challenges and benefits that arose with adapting the four parent-focused interventions for telehealth implementation. We focused specifically on adaptations made in recruitment and retention, instrumentation and measurement, research staff training, and intervention delivery. We synthesize our experience with challenges and solutions in adapting parent-focused interventions for racially/ethnically and socioeconomically diverse children with IDD and their families. We conclude with recommendations for researchers and practitioners on methods for adapting parent-focused interventions to address the significant health disparities that impact racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse children with IDD and their families.
Keywords: COVID-19; autism; intellectual disability; parent-focused interventions; practice; racial/ethnic diversity.
Group social skills interventions (GSSIs) are among the most commonly used treatments for improving social competence in youth with ASD, however, results remain variable. The current study examined predictors of treatment response to an empirically-supported GSSI for youth with ASD delivered in the community (Ntotal=75). Participants completed a computer-based emotion recognition task and their parents completed measures of broad psychopathology, ASD symptomatology, and social skills. We utilized generalized estimating equations in an ANCOVA-of-change framework to account for nesting. Results indicate differential improvements in emotion recognition by sex as well as ADHD-specific improvements in adaptive functioning. Youth with both co-occurring anxiety and ADHD experienced iatrogenic effects, suggesting that SDARI may be most effective for youth with ASD without multiple co-occurring issues. Findings provide important directions for addressing variability in treatment outcomes for youth with ASD.
Keywords: ASD; Community; GSSI; Intervention; Social Skills; Treatment predictors.
In this study we investigated the impact of parental language input on language development and associated neuroscillatory patterns in toddlers at risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Forty-six mother-toddler dyads at either high (n = 22) or low (n = 24) familial risk of ASD completed a longitudinal, prospective study including free-play, resting electroencephalography, and standardized language assessments. Input quantity/quality at 18 months positively predicted expressive language at 24 months, and relationships were stronger for high-risk toddlers. Moderated mediations revealed that input-language relationships were explained by 24-month frontal and temporal gamma power (30-50 Hz) for high-risk toddlers who would later develop ASD. Results suggest that high-risk toddlers may be cognitively and neurally more sensitive to their language environments, which has implications for early intervention.
Keywords: Autism; EEG; Early experience; Language development; Language input.
This week’s #ASFpodcast highlights a few articles from the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders this week which examined the tolerability and efficacy of online diagnostic procedures and interventions, from the perspective of both parents and clinicians. They seem to work about the same, although there were some caveats. For many reasons, online and Telehealth options are here to stay, and more needs to be done to improve their accuracy, acceptability, feasibility and effectiveness. These early studies are promising though, and lead the way to even more improvements to help make them a viable option for families in the future. Listen to the podcast here.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-022-05435-z
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-022-05576-1
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-022-05554-7
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-022-05580-5
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-022-05607-x
At this year’s International Society of Autism Research meeting in Austin, TX, there was a variety of themes explored. From early development and milestones, to intervention and supports, to different features like sensory issues, treatment, and how to solve the problem of heterogeneity. It comes down to this: Autism means different things to different people. This is just a small subset of everything that was presented at INSAR 2022 and I hope that if you want to see more, you advocate to have the presentations posted online or even have the program book made available publicly. In the meantime, enjoy the 30 minute summary here.
www.autism-insar.org
This week, the #ASFpodcast explores different types of interventions for which the core autism features are not necessarily the target, but those that enhance quality of life and provide help for irritability and emotional dysregulation. They include cooking, music therapies and antipsychotic medications. While they may not be effective in core autism features, they may help in other ways. Listen to the podcast here.
https://www.jaacap.org/article/S0890-8567(22)00198-8/fulltext
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD004381.pub4/full
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0891422222000890?via%3Dihub
In this study we investigated the impact of parental language input on language development and associated neuroscillatory patterns in toddlers at risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Forty-six mother-toddler dyads at either high (n = 22) or low (n = 24) familial risk of ASD completed a longitudinal, prospective study including free-play, resting electroencephalography, and standardized language assessments. Input quantity/quality at 18 months positively predicted expressive language at 24 months, and relationships were stronger for high-risk toddlers. Moderated mediations revealed that input-language relationships were explained by 24-month frontal and temporal gamma power (30-50 Hz) for high-risk toddlers who would later develop ASD. Results suggest that high-risk toddlers may be cognitively and neurally more sensitive to their language environments, which has implications for early intervention.
Keywords: Autism; EEG; Early experience; Language development; Language input.
The Pandemic has required teachers to find ways to provide high-quality instruction in a virtual format. Video-based instruction (VBI) is a version of technology-aided instruction that has been effectively used in classrooms to improve mathematical outcomes for students with disabilities. This manuscript describes how a special education teacher can utilized VBI through free online platforms (i.e., SeeSaw, Loom) to implement a mathematical problem solving instructional strategy (modified schema-based instruction; MSBI) for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) while at home. MSBI utilizing VBI has successfully been used by teachers and researchers to improve additive and multiplicative problem solving skills for students with ASD. This manuscript describes how special education teachers can support students and their caregivers by providing high-quality problem solving instruction in a virtual environment.
OBJECTIVE: This cluster randomized trial (CRT) evaluated the efficacy of the Classroom Social, Communication, Emotional Regulation, and Transactional Support (SCERTS) Intervention (CSI) compared with usual school-based education with autism training modules (ATM).
METHOD: Sixty schools with 197 students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 129 classrooms were randomly assigned to CSI or ATM. Mean student age was 6.79 years (SD 1.05) and 81.2% were male. CSI teachers were trained on the model and provided coaching throughout the school year to assist with implementation. A CRT, with students nested within general and special education classrooms nested within schools, was used to evaluate student outcomes.
RESULTS: The CSI group showed significantly better outcomes than the ATM group on observed measures of classroom active engagement with respect to social interaction. The CSI group also had significantly better outcomes on measures of adaptive communication, social skills, and executive functioning with Cohen’s d effect sizes ranging from 0.31 to 0.45.
CONCLUSION: These findings support the preliminary efficacy of CSI, a classroom-based, teacher-implemented intervention for improving active engagement, adaptive communication, social skills, executive functioning, and problem behavior within a heterogeneous sample of students with ASD. This makes a significant contribution to the literature by demonstrating efficacy of a classroom-based teacher-implemented intervention with a heterogeneous group of students with ASD using both observed and reported measures. (PsycINFO Database Record