SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 18 (Xinhua) -- Researchers studying the brains of infants who have older siblings with autism were able to identify 80 percent of the babies who would be subsequently diagnosed with autism at 2 years of age.
The results, published this week in the journal Nature, stem from research led by the University of North Carolina to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure the brains of "low-risk" infants, with no family history of autism, and "high-risk" infants who had at least one autistic older sibling.
A computer algorithm was then used to predict autism before clinically diagnosable behaviors set in, subsequently making it the first study to show that it is possible to use brain biomarkers to identify which infants in a high-risk pool, namely those having an older sibling with autism, will be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, at 24 months of age.
"Typically, the earliest we can reliably diagnose autism in a child is age 2, when there are consistent behavioral symptoms, and due to health access disparities the average age of diagnosis in the U.S. is actually age 4," said co-author and University of Washington (UW) professor of speech and hearing sciences Annette Estes. "But in our study, brain imaging biomarkers at 6 and 12 months were able to identify babies who would be later diagnosed with ASD."
While researchers at four clinical sites in the United States took part, the project included hundreds of children across the country.
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