Science blows my mind (no pun) sometimes. And this latest revelation has enormous implications. A team of at Boston Children's Hospital (BMC) have claimed they can now identify autism in children as young as two years old—through a simple EEG test, which records electrical brain activity using scalp electrodes.
After a trial involving nearly 1,000 kids between the ages of two to 12, the BMC Medicine study found that children with autism consistently showed 33 EEG patterns which differed from that of neurotypical children.
Diagnosing autism can be notoriously difficult as individuals "on the spectrum" can present characteristics differently. There are typically long waiting times for testing that is often subjective and protracted. In many cases, autism can go undetected—and therefore unsupported—for years.
Lead researcher Dr Frank Duffy told the BBC that the study offers hope of diagnosing autistic children, as well as their siblings. More research is required, although researchers repeated testing 10 times, detecting with 90 per cent accuracy those children with autism.
It remains to be seen whether children with Asperger's syndrome—known as 'high-functioning autism'—show similar EEG patterns. The results would no doubt help determine whether Asperger's should continue fall within the autism spectrum, currently a hotbed of debate among psychologists.
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