In grad school, one of my Clinical Educator’s introduced me to a paper titled, “Early Indicators of Autism Spectrum Disorders in the Second Year of Life” by Wetherby et al. (2004) to review before my first few autism assessments. The results and details of the paper’s study are discussed below. The authors found 13 red flags to potentially discriminate autism from typically developing children and children with developmental delays with a correct classification rate of 94.4%. It’s noteworthy that aspects such as challenging behaviours and aversion to social contact were not included in the 13 red flags.

Participants:

Children with autism, developmental delays, and typically developing children under the age of 24 months

Results:

9 Red Flags to Differentiate Children with Autism from Children with Developmental Delays and Typically Developing Children:
- lack of appropriate gaze
- lack of warm, joyful expressions with gaze
- lack of sharing enjoyment or interest
- lack of response to name
- lack of coordination of gaze, facial expression, gesture, and sound
- lack of showing
- unusual prosody
- repetitive movements or posturing of body, arms, hands, or fingers
- repetitive movements with objects
4 Red Flags to Differentiate Children with Autism from Typically Developing Children:
- lack of response to contextual cues
- lack of pointing
- lack of vocalizations with consonants
- lack of playing with a variety of toys conventionally

Remember that early indicators of autism can be seen by both the absence of typically developing behaviours (e.g. lack of response to name) and the presence of atypical behaviours (e.g. repetitive movements with objects).

Increasing awareness of indicators of autism in young children is important because it increases likeliness of early intervention. To read about the importance of early intervention click here.

To read the paper in it’s entirety see the reference below!

-Shannon

References

Wetherby, A. M., Woods, J., Allen, L., Cleary, J., Dickinson, H., & Lord, C. (2004). Early indicators of autism spectrum disorders in the second year of life. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(5), 473-493. doi:10.1007/s10803-004-2544-y