App helps identify autistic children in India: study
New Delhi: Children with autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders in India can be successfully identified by community healthcare workers using a low-cost app called START (Screening Tools for Autism Risk using Technology), a study published in journal Autism has found.
Researchers from India, the UK and US tested the app with 131 two- to seven-year-olds living in low-resource neighbourhoods of Delhi, India. The study says, it could open the door to help millions of children with autism spectrum conditions to get earlier screening quickly and inexpensively, leading to life-changing support.
The tests were carried out at the homes of the children, by non-specialist healthcare workers, educated to high school level, using the research team’s app. Through a series of simple games, questions, images and activities on a tablet computer – such as popping bubbles and looking at patterns and images – the app measured the social preference, sensory interests and motor skills of the children.
Professor Bhismadev Chakrabarti, director of the Centre for Autism at the University of Reading’s School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, said the results could help faster identification of children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders, in all parts of the world.
“Autism is diagnosed by highly trained professionals, but most autistic people live in parts of the world that harbour few or no such autism specialists, and with little autism awareness,” he said.
“So many autistic people go undiagnosed, misdiagnosed or misunderstood, so we designed the START app to identify autism and related conditions anywhere.”
Hardship affects the gut microbiome across generations
Hardship experienced by mothers during their own childhood or during pregnancy is reflected in the composition of their 2-year-old children’s gut microbiomes, reports an international team of scientists led by UCLA psychologists. The study, which is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, builds on previous research in rodents, which has shown that that prenatal stress disrupts maternal vaginal and gut microbiomes. Because babies acquire their first gut microbes passing through their mother’s birth canal, mothers’ microbiomes form the basis of their offspring’s.
The researchers found small to medium changes in the children’s microbiomes. The research is the first to document the transgenerational effects of adversity on the human gut microbiome.
A growing body of evidence links the gut microbiome to brain and immune functioning, and according to the researchers, changes to that community of microorganisms is likely among the ways that hardship affects children’s socioemotional development.