Today I ran across a Newsweek article on autism dated July 3rd, 2007. I don't think anyone has posted it yet. It's about a Kennedy Krieger study of 107 baby siblings of autistics. They tried to see if it's possible to diagnose autism as early as 14 months.
Thirty of the 107 kids ended up with an autism label, but only half of those were diagnosable at age 14 months. Diagnosing so early was not easy, and required that Dr. Landa re-trained her eyes to see how autism looks at age 14 months. Dr. Landa has devoted her entire professional career to diagnosing autism, so what hope does the less-experienced professional have, let alone the average parent or pediatrician?
"I had to learn to retrain my eyes when I started to see the 14-month-olds. I thought autism at 14 months was going to look like autism at 36 months, the age at which people normally diagnose it. It's the same flavor--the social system is disrupted, the communication system is disrupted. But it's different in that it's not as pervasively disrupted. What I mean is that at 14 months, you can get kids with autism to give you a beautiful response to peekaboo. But you can't get the child to engage with you around more novel, new activities. At 14 months, you see more flickers of interaction. They were doing some looking at people and smiling."
Dr. Landa also guessed that a blood test was 5 years away, minimum. I was surprised that her minimum estimate was so low!
Here's the link:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19588967/site/newsweek/page/0/