Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
NEW RESEARCHEarly Behavioral Intervention Is Associated With Normalized Brain Activity in Young Children With Autism
Section snippets
EARLY PATTERNS OF EEG ACTIVITY IN ASD
Research has documented atypical patterns of EEG activity in young children with ASD in response to face stimuli.7, 8, 9 This atypical response is characterized by delays in the development of an attention-related event-related potential (ERP) component, the Nc, and a face-specific perceptual processing component, the N290 (and later in development, the N170).8, 9 The Nc component, the source of which is the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, reflects attention engagement with a
Participants
The study was approved by the University of Washington institutional review board; informed consent was obtained from the participants’ parents. Forty-eight participants with ASD were 18 to 30 months of age at entry to the study and had a diagnosis of an autistic disorder or a pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) not otherwise specified. Participants with ASD were recruited through pediatric practices, Birth-to-Three centers, preschools, hospitals, and state and local autism organizations.
Event-Related Potentials
The ERP waveforms in response to faces versus objects for each group are shown in Figure 2.
P1. P1 is a posterior positive deflection, 50 to 200 ms after stimulus onset, reflecting orienting to the stimulus. For P1, the significant main effects of stimulus were a larger amplitude over the central region to faces than to objects (F2,86=3.8, p=.03) and shorter latency responses to faces than to objects across regions (F1,43=5.8, p=.02). There was no main group difference in P1 amplitude or
Discussion
Dawson et al.5 previously reported the primary behavioral outcomes of this randomized controlled trial of the ESDM intervention with young children with ASD. Children receiving the ESDM intervention demonstrated significant improvements in IQ, language, adaptive behavior, and autism diagnosis. The present article reports EEG data collected at outcome. Two types of brain activity measurements, collected in response to social (faces) versus nonsocial (toys) stimuli, were of interest. The first
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This article can be used to obtain continuing medical education (CME) category 1 credit at www.jaacap.org.
This study was supported by grant U54MH066399 from the National Institute of Mental Health (G.W.). This research was also supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from Autism Speaks (E.J.H.J.).
The authors gratefully acknowledge the children and families who participated in this study. Dr. Webb served as the statistical expert for this research.
Disclosure: Drs. Dawson and Rogers are authors of the book, Early Start Denver Model for Young Children with Autism (Guilford Press), from which they receive royalties. Dr. Murias is a minority shareholder in Electrical Geodesics, Inc. Drs. Jones, Faja, Greenson, Winter, Smith, and Webb and Ms. Merkle, Ms. Venema, Ms. Lowy, and Ms. Kamara report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest.