"Early intensive autism treatment https improves childrens brain https development a new study shows. The treatment dubbed Early Start Denver Model or ESDM offers a child  hours a week of oneonone treatment with a trained therapist. It also calls for many more hours of the treatment in the form of structured play with a parent trained in the technique. By age  children given the treatment had higher IQ scores more adaptive behavior better coordination and a less severe autism diagnosis https than kids given the standard autism treatments https offered in their communities. But thats not all researchers Geraldine Dawson PhD and colleagues report. We jumpstarted and improved the responses of childrens brains to social information says Dawson professor of psychiatry https at the University of North Carolina and chief science officer at Autism https Speaks. Normal child development https depends on interactions with parents and other people. Without such interactions language and social skills do not develop. As measured by an electroencephalogram EEG https small childrens brains show a specific pattern of activity when they look at a picture of a human face. This doesnt happen when they look at pictures of inanimate objects. Just the reverse happens in children with autism. Their brains light up when they look at pictures of objects but not when they look at faces. This changed dramatically in the children treated with ESDM. The brains of children who received the ESDM looked virtually identical to typical yearolds Dawson says. The children that received the interventions normal in their communities continued to show the reversed pattern. Changing Brain Development The treated children werent cured. They still had autism Dawson says. But they are continuing to improve. These interventions not only alter the trajectory of behavioral development in a child with autism but also brain https development Dawson says. Brain https development in children given a behavioral autism treatment likely means these children are learning to work around their autism suggests Arthur L. Beaudet MD professor of molecular and human genetics pediatrics and molecular and cellular biology at Baylor College of Medicine Houston. To the extent early intervention helps brain https development it is more likely to help by letting the brain compensate and get around the problems rather than reverse them Beaudet says. We do know if you damage the brain of a young child like in an accident the infant https brain has a tremendous ability to recover and get around the problem. Key to Autism Treatment Start Early Although she and her colleagues developed the ESDM treatment Dawson is quick to point out that its not the only effective autism treatment. The key she says isnt the treatment  its the timing. The important point is early diagnosis she stresses. By starting early we have the best chance of providing these kids with the best possible outcomes. One key to early diagnosis might be the EEG test used to evaluate outcomes in this study. There has already been published data showing these early EEG measures are detecting babies at risk of autism at  months of age. They have this unusual pattern of not showing a normal response to social stimuli she says. The Dawson study appears in the November issue of Journal of the American Academy of Child  Adolescent Psychiatry."