Therapy is important, but so is diet. Please, if you think your child is showing signs of autism, consider a whole foods approach to feeding them. Ruthlessly cut out anything artificial (and consider a gluten free casein free diet). It's harder to undo damage from toxic food exposures than it is to avoid them in the first place. Teach your child that food should look like something grown from the ground, not something out of a toy box.
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Do you think you can diagnose autism even earlier?
It is possible. The problem is that very early in development, there's a very rapid change in child behavior. If you did see these signs in 9 to 12 months of age, I would probably put out an alert. If there was enough of a delay, I might even put the child in intervention. I would start doing some preventive interaction, like making sure there was a variety of toys available to the child, and teaching this child to do a diversity of things with each toy.
So the kids don't fixate on one toy?
That's right.
How many false positives did you get?
Maybe three. They still had problems. But it wasn't autism.
There's no blood test for autism yet, but is it realistic that some day we could get a definitive test that could be used very early?
I have a colleague, Dr. Carlos Pardo-Villamizar at Johns Hopkins. We are now collecting blood from the infants at each visit. He has some specific theories about what might be fruitful as a blood test. He's looking at how these certain things change in the brain that you can measure through the blood as the child gets older.
So some day kids may get tested at birth, then? How long do you think it will take to get such a test?
It's possible. I'm going to guess a minimum of five years.
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