On this week’s podcast, Dr. Tracy Yuen of University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children explains two different analyses of cost-effectiveness which looked at 1) universal screening for ASD and 2) use of genomic sequencing to identify novel variants in people with ASD.
Podcast: The sticky subject of cost-effectiveness
On this week’s podcast, two chief science officers! Dr. Alycia Halladay interviewed Dr. Thomas Frazier of Autism Speaks on what’s needed to improve clinical trials and drug intervention for autism. The two CSOs also discussed other important in ASD research, including disclosure of a diagnosis, sex differences, and some of the newest more exciting findings.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates autism prevalence at 1 in 59 children based on data from the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network – a tracking system that provides estimates of the prevalence and characteristics of autism spectrum disorder among more than 300,000 8-year-old children. The ADDM Network estimates are combined from 11 communities within Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. The 11 communities surveyed in this report represent about 8 percent of 8-year-old children in the United States.
You can read more in the official CDC press release on ASF’s website here. You can read the official CDC analysis in a report published today in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) Surveillance Summary.
This week’s podcast is a mini-recap of the 5th Annual Day of learning. Hear what the speakers distilled in their TED-style talks on topics covered sleep, diet, and medical marijuana as a potential treatment for autism. Plus hear about the most recent ASF grantees.
The goal of the Autism Sisters Project is to build a large genetic database that researchers can use to explore the sex difference in autism diagnoses between boys and girls and discover how the potential protective factor, known as the female protective effect, can be harnessed to help people with autism of both sexes. NBC New York spoke with the Mullers, a family participating in the study, as well as with ASF Chief Science Officer Dr. Alycia Halladay and the Seaver Autism Center team at Mount Sinai in New York. You can watch the news clip here.
On this week’s ASF podcast: By looking directly at the brains of people with autism, researchers at UC Davis MIND Institute, led by Dr. Thomas Avino and Dr. Cyndi Schumann, show a disruption of neuron number in the amygdala in autism. The amygdala is important because it is linked to emotion, fear and anxiety in people with autism. The shift in too many vs. too few neurons that occurs in adolescence may help explain anxiety in people with ASD. Read the full open-access article here.
On this week’s podcast, the needs of #autism support staff are discussed. These important members of the community suffer burnout which can impact the quality of the services they provide individuals with ASD. A new study examines how to improve the psychological well being of autism support staff so interventions and prevention of burnout can be developed. In addition, intolerance to uncertainty is highly associated with autism, but in a new study by the Kennedy Krieger Institute, there is now a direct link between this trait and ASD.