New research highlights the importance of early intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder.
The recent study demonstrated early intervention, beginning between 18 and 30 months, can significantly improve outcomes for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) by the age of 6, Elsevier reported.
Early intensive behavioral intervention is already recognized to effectively improve outcomes in children with ASD, but past studies have not concretely reported the immediate outcomes at the end of the interventions or if the benefits are sustained over time.
To make their findings, the study researchers followed children who participated in a randomized, controlled trial of the Early Start Denver Model that looked at the long-term outcomes for 39 children at the age of 6. The children were randomized into groups that received either community-intervention-as-usual or ESDM intervention for two years that lasted about 15 hours per week.
At the end of the follow-up, the researchers evaluated "IQ, adaptive behavior, autism symptoms, challenging behavior, and diagnosis based on clinical examinations by experts who did not know previous intervention histories."
Researchers observed the ESDM group tended to maintain improvements made in early intervention during the two year follow-up in "overall intellectual ability, adaptive behavior, symptom severity, and challenging behavior." Two years later, the ESDM groups showed improved core autism symptoms and adaptive behavior when compared with the community-intervention-as-usual group. There was not a significant difference between the two groups in intellectual functioning at age 6.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
