Parent-delivered early intervention in infants at risk for ASD: Effects on electrophysiological and habituation measures of social attention.
Emily J H Jones, Geraldine Dawson, Jean Kelly and 2 others
PMID 28244271WHAT IT FOUND
Infants at high familial risk for autism who received 10 weekly parent-mediated interaction visits showed faster habituation to faces and greater frontal brain activity than infants who only received monitoring.
These were brain and attention measures, not clinical symptoms.
Key findings
01Between 6 and 12 months, infants in the PFR group showed a significantly greater decline in habituation time to faces than to objects, while infants in the assessment and monitoring group did not.
02Between 6 and 12 months, theta power increased more in the PFR group than in the assessment and monitoring group across both social and nonsocial videos.
03At 12 months, the assessment and monitoring group had a larger P400 amplitude to objects than faces, while the PFR group did not.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The randomized trial was small, with 19 infants assigned to PFR and 14 assigned to assessment and monitoring, and fewer infants had usable data at each age. The outcomes were neurocognitive measures of social attention, not autism symptoms, language, or communication, and behavioral outcomes from the cohort were not analyzed in this report. Other interventions received during the trial are summarized only in supplementary materials not provided here, so the contribution of PFR cannot be separated from additional supports. The low-risk control groups were not randomized and were used to show normative patterns, not to test the intervention. Some findings were not social-specific or not sustained: the 12-month EEG group effect was across social and nonsocial videos, and the 12-month ERP amplitude difference was not significant at 18 months. A late PFR group of 3 infants was randomized but excluded because of small sample size.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that this intervention reduces autism symptoms or improves communication. It measured brain and attention responses in 19 infants who received PFR and 14 who received assessment and monitoring only, and the paper states that longitudinal behavioral data were not analyzed in this report.