Onset patterns in autism: correspondence between home video and parent report

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Neurodevelopmental Disorders
• Child Psychiatry

Background:

• Autism onset is often categorized as early or regressive.
• Existing models may not fully capture the complexity of autism symptom emergence.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify the number and shape of autism symptom onset trajectories using home videos.
• To compare video-derived trajectories with parent-reported onset patterns.

Main Methods:

• Social-communicative behaviors were coded from home videos of children with autism (n=52) and typically developing children (n=23) aged 6-24 months.
• Latent class modeling analyzed video data to determine optimal trajectory models.
• Video trajectories were compared with parent reports from the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised.

Main Results:

• A three-trajectory model best described autism symptom onset in the video data.
• Trajectories included persistent low social-communication, early high followed by decreasing social-communication, and delayed progress in social-communication.
• There was poor agreement between trajectories identified from home videos and parent reports.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that more than two categories are necessary to describe autism symptom onset.
• Discrepancies between video analysis and parent reports highlight the need for enhanced methods for assessing early development in autism.