Predicting Social Impairment and ASD Diagnosis in Younger Siblings of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Later-born siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (Sibs-ASD) are at elevated risk for social impairments. Two putative predictors of later social impairment—measures of responding to joint attention and weighted triadic communication—were examined in a sample of 43 Sibs-ASD who were followed from 15 to 34 months of age. Results revealed that initial level of responding to joint attention and growth rate of weighted triadic communication predicted the degree of social impairment at the final measurement period. Additionally, both predictors were associated with later ASD diagnosis. In contrast, unweighted triadic communication, age of entry into the study, and initial language level did not predict later social impairment. The importance of considering social outcome as a continuous variable in prospective studies of Sibs-ASD is discussed.

Early Identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder: Recommendations for Practice and Research

“…: Red flags differentiating ASD from TD but not DD were lack of response to contextual cues, lack of pointing, lack of vocalizations with consonants, and lack of playing with a variety of toys conventionally. 43 Other studies have assessed the use of gestures more generally. During the second year of life, a lower frequency of gesture use differentiated children with ASD from typically developing children 35,63 and from children with other developmental disorders.…”

An Ecological Visual Exploration Tool to Support the Analysis of Visual Processing Pathways in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…These works involve video clips of people engaged in social interaction [24] or images of human faces [38,39]; typical tasks are the study of the fixation patterns and the evaluation of the capacity of people with autism to recognize different emotions [40,41]. Other works have investigated the attentional bias for people with autism to follow others' gaze/head-turn direction [42], since several studies suggested that the ability to follow the gaze of another person is impaired in the case of autism [43,44].…”

Interacción social y comunicación temprana en hermanos de niños con diagnóstico de trastorno del espectro autista: una revisión de la literatura

“…Con todo, es habitual encontrar una gran variabilidad de puntuaciones en los distintos grupos en esta edad, la cual hay que tener en cuenta para las evaluaciones. En las tareas de evaluación de RJA con acumulación de pistas, por ejemplo-sólo Mirar+Girar la cabeza, o Mirar+Girar la cabeza+Señalar con el dedo-los H-TEA pueden llegar a tener igual rendimiento que los H-DT (Rozga et al, 2011;Sullivan et al, 2007;Thorup et al 2016;Yoder, Stone, Walden & Malesa, 2009). En conclusión, las mediciones de frecuencia son insuficientes a los 6 meses (Rozga et al, 2011), y una tarea simple sin acumulación de pistas para la evaluación de la RJA resulta poco discriminatoria.…”