Early signs of autism can be identified in the first months of life, research has shown.
Scientists used eye-tracking technology to measure the way infants look at and respond to social cues.
Children later diagnosed with autism showed a reduced tendency to notice the gaze of other people from the age of two months onwards.
“We found a steady decline in attention to other people’s eyes, from two until 24 months, in infants later diagnosed with autism,” investigator Ami Klin, director of the Marcus Autism Centre in Atlanta, US, said.
To be sure, parents should not expect that this is something they could see without the aid of technology
“First, these results reveal that there are measurable and identifiable differences present already before six months.
“And second, we observed declining eye fixation over time, rather than an outright absence.
“Both these factors have the potential to dramatically shift the possibilities for future strategies of early intervention.”
Autism is an umbrella term for a range of developmental problems involving social and communication skills which can be mild or seriously disabling.
It affects around 600,000 people in the UK. In Malta, the Autism Parents Association (APA), set up to help and facilitate the process to families affected by the condition, currently has 120 family members.
The scientists, whose findings appear in the journal Nature, warned that what they observed was not visible to the naked eye but could only be measured using specialised equipment.
“To be sure, parents should not expect that this is something they could see without the aid of technology,” study leader Warren Jones, director of research at the Marcus Autism Centre, said.
“They shouldn’t be concerned if an infant doesn’t happen to look at their eyes at every moment.
“We used very specialised technology to measure developmental differences, accruing over time, in the way thatinfants watched very specific scenes of social interaction.”
Before they can crawl or walk, babies explore the world intensively by looking at it, observing faces, bodies, and objects, as well as other people’s eyes.
Eye contact plays a key role in social interaction and development.
In the study, those infants whose eye contact diminished most rapidly were also those most affected by autism later in life.
Identifying at-risk infants at such an early age could aid successful intervention by building on levels of eye contact that are present, the researchers said.
“The genetics of autism have proven to be quite complex,” Jones added.
“Many hundreds of genes are likely to be involved, with each one playing a role in just a small fraction of cases, and contributing to risk in different ways in different individuals. The current results reveal one way in which that genetic diversity may be converted into disability very early in life.
“Our next step will be to expand these studies with more children, and to combine our eye-tracking measures with measures of gene expression and brain growth.”