All of the 17 autistic children studied in the present paper showed disturbances of movement that with our methods could be detected clearly at the age of 4-6 months, and sometimes even at birth. We used the Eshkol-Wachman Movement Analysis System in combination with still-frame videodisc analysis to study videos obtained from parents of children who had been diagnosed as autistic by conventional methods, usually around 3 years old. The videos showed their behaviors when they were infants, long before they had been diagnosed as autistic. The movement disorders varied from child to child. Disturbances were revealed in the shape of the mouth and in some or all of the milestones of development, including, lying, righting, sitting, crawling, and walking. Our findings support the view that movement disturbances play an intrinsic part in the phenomenon of autism, that they are present at birth, and that they can be used to diagnose the presence of autism in the first few months of life. They indicate the need for the development of methods of therapy to be applied from the first few months of life in autism.

The diagnostic criteria of Asperger's syndrome (AS), considered a part of the autistic spectrum disorder, are still unclear. A critical marker, which distinguishes AS from autism, is the presence of language. The ability of a child with AS to acquire and use language early results in the fact that AS usually is diagnosed much later than autism. Autism is not usually diagnosed until around the age of 3, whereas AS usually is not diagnosed until the child is 6 or 7 years of age. In the present article, using Eshkol-Wachman movement notation, we present evidence that abnormal movement patterns can be detected in AS in infancy. This finding suggests that AS can be diagnosed very early, independent of the presence of language. As shown earlier by us, almost all of the movement disturbances in autism can be interpreted as infantile reflexes ''gone astray''; i.e., some reflexes are not inhibited at the appropriate age in development, whereas others fail to appear when they should. This phenomenon appears to apply to AS as well. Based on preliminary results, a simple test using one such reflex is proposed for the early detection of a subgroup of children with AS or autism.