SFARI - The urgent need to shorten autism's diagnostic odyssey
Dr. Wall and Dr. Saxe, Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Child Studies Center at the NYU Langone Medical Center, have collaborated on an opinion piece sharing the importance of the development of data-driven tools to shorten the path to diagnosis in clinical assessments for autism in order to maximize treatment efficiency towards the trending rise of autism prevelance in the United States.
A snippet and a link to the full are both provided below.
In the past two decades, autism’s prevalence has increased by more than 600 percent. Although autism manifests early in development, the average age of diagnosis in the U.S. continues to hover stubbornly above 4 years. Unless families can pay out of pocket for specialty programs, they must wait for a diagnosis before launching into therapy.
By the time they get there, their child has lost opportunities for intervention that might have had huge long-term benefits. With the rate of autism now at 1 in 68 people and climbing — the result of changes in diagnosis, greater awareness, increasing parental age and, really, anyone’s guess — the need for solutions that reach the risk population more quickly and effectively has never been more real.
For most families, the diagnostic odyssey of autism has more stops and starts than the 16 Odysseus endured, with two main stops: the initial detection of risk and its clinical confirmation.
The path to each is long. The first path is not standardized and often rests on the family’s shoulders. The second has more structure, but the process is long and cumbersome, making it difficult to scale it to address the global need. Worse, these two steps are generally decoupled in today’s healthcare system.
Read the full article