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 By scanning the brains of babies whose siblings have autism, researchers say they have been able to make reasonably accurate forecasts about which of these high-risk infants will later develop autism themselves.  Experimental research may lead to a new method to diagnose infants with autism before symptoms show. “We don’t have such a tool yet, but if we did, parents of high-risk infants wouldn’t need to wait for a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder at two, three or even four years,” said Annette Estes, a co-author on the study and director of the University of Washington in Seattle. Autism occurs in roughly 1 in 100 children in the general population, but infants with an older sibling with a diagnosis have about a 1 in 5 chance of developing ASD. As part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Infant Brain Imaging Study (IBIS), Piven and Hazlett’s team scanned the brains of 106 of these ‘high-risk’ infants at age 6, 12 and 24 months using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to see if they could catch the brain overgrowth in the act. Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists describe how they compared brain scans of high-risk babies with those from 42 low-risk children who had no siblings with autism. In about 3% of cases, it predicted autism that did not appear. Brain scans of premature babies reveal changes that may raise risk of autism Read more 
 
 Scientists studied 106 babies, all of whom had an older brother or sister with autism, and found that telltale features in brain images taken at six and 12 months revealed which infants would go on to have an autism diagnosis. Hazlett and Piven’s team then used a deep-learning neural network, a form of machine learning, to ask if MRI scans at 6 and 12 months in a larger set of high-risk infants could predict an autism diagnosis at age 2. By identifying the brain changes early, there’s the potential to develop therapies that could intervene sooner, while the brain is still developing. “It’s an excellent piece of science, but ultimately it’s based on a few hundred individuals,” says Armin Raznahan, a clinician-scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The images helped doctors spot which of a group of children who were already at risk because of autism in the family would later be diagnosed with the condition.
– Promising new research may make it possible to detect autism in babies before symptoms appear. Researchers scanned the brains of infants with autistic siblings considered at high risk of developing the disorder themselves. They report in the journal Nature that brain changes identified in MRIs of infants allowed them to predict with 80% accuracy in the first year which ones would go to show autistic symptoms. Children usually do not show signs of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), such as not making eye contact, until age 2 or older. Early intervention has been shown to ease and even reverse symptoms. Lead author Joseph Piven tells CBS News "the first year of life (is) where the brain is most malleable" and responsive to treatment. Though small in scope, the first-ever study could lead to development of a tool to predict autism in high-risk infants—and perhaps in the general population—before their first birthday "to prevent these children from falling behind in social and communication skills," co-author Annette Estes tells the Guardian. One in 100 children develop autism, but that risk zooms to one in five for those with an autistic sibling, per Nature. Scientists analyzed the brain scans of 106 babies at high risk and 42 at low risk for the disorder. Those in the high-risk group who later went on to develop ASD saw unusual growth of the outer surface of the brains in the first year of life, followed by "an overgrowth of the brain" in the second year, Piven tells CBS. That brain growth was linked to ASD symptoms. ("Neural fingerprint" of mom's voice may help unlock secrets of autistic brains.)