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Uncovering developmental paths to autism







Autism is highly variable in its manifestation across individuals. Neurobiological processes underlying development of autism are reflected in multiple features, from behaviour and cognition to brain functioning. One paper from my PhD work on this just came out on Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience.

This study examines cognitive and adaptive functioning and symptoms of autism in the first three years of life in infants at a typical and a higher likelihood of being diagnosed with autism, and measures of how much the brain responds to a human face at 8 months of age. We used linked independent component analysis, a method that integrates the measures under investigation to extract patterns of variation across these measures linked across functional domains and across development, and selected the patterns significantly associated with clinical diagnosis at 3 years. Unlike retrospective group comparisons, the traditional approach used in developmental psychology, our approach does not place a priori assumptions on clinical categories.

The patterns we identified inform the underlying neurodevelopmental mechanisms that act together in the first 3 years of life and can lead to the emergence of autism depending on their presence in the individual infant. Specifically, we identified one early process characterized by good adaptive functioning and low levels of symptoms linked to higher attention to gaze shifts in the first year of life. Similarly, one process unfolded over development to indicate increasing functioning and low levels of symptoms. Infants with high levels of expression of either or both of these processes had a not-autism outcome at age 3. We also identified one developmental process indicating a stagnation in cognitive functioning at age 2. Infants with high levels of expression of this process eventually developed autism by age 3.




This approach can help understand the unfolding of symptoms from the variety of early signs of autism and opens up possibilities for the investigation of the biological processes acting early in development and preceding an autism diagnosis. Although our findings did not show underlying processes specific to autism per se, they can help in shaping our view of early autism. We show, in fact, that the autism phenotype goes beyond the limits of clinical categories set by the DSM-5, with no sharp boundary between autism and altered - but not autism - development.







Bussu, G., Llera, A., Jones, E. J. H., Tye, C., Charman, T., Johnson, M. H., Beckmann, C.F., Buitelaar, J. K., & The BASIS Team. Uncovering Developmental Paths to Autism Spectrum Disorder through an Integrated Analysis of Developmental Measures and Neural Sensitivity to Faces. http://jpn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/45-6-190148.pdf

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