Given the current plethora of information about two recent studies for diagnosing autism, it seemed only relevant to mention them in this blog. Titles like “Instant Test for Autism,” “First Biological Test for Autism” and “Brain Scans Detect Autism” are all over the Internet and news reports.
The newest test is called the Lange-Lainhart test after the lead researchers Nicholas Lange and Janet Lainhart. Nicholas Lange is an associate professor at Harvard and director of the Neurostatistics Laboratory at McLean, while Janet Lainhart is a researcher at the University of Utah.
The test is used to measure deviation in brain circuitry using a technique called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) with an MRI. Using this technique, the researchers were able to detect autism with 94% accuracy when they measured six aspects of the brain’s circuitry that correlated with clinical symptoms of autism.
Further research is necessary and it will be several years before such a test will be available for everyday use.
In another study, researchers Martha Kaiser, Kevin Pelphrey and others at the Yale School of Medicine found a pattern of brain activity that may characterize the genetic vulnerability for autism.
In this study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to identify “neural signatures” while children with ASD, their unaffected siblings and a control group of children watched animations of biological movement.
These studies are certainly promising and interesting, but the reality is that so many different areas of science are now studying how to best be able to diagnose autism. Some of those studies include:
• A chemical fingerprint in a child’s urine
• A pupil response test
• Abnormal proteins in the saliva of patients
• Eye tracking was used to identify autism at the young ages of 9 and 12 months old.
It will be interesting to see where the future takes us in terms of what will be the future gold standard in diagnosis. For me, it will always be about recognizing what a person can do, what a person can’t do, working to change what can be changed, and accepting what can’t be. The label will never be the person no matter how sophisticated our science gets at identifying the label.
Photo by Blatant News, available under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license.
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From the book “AN AUTISTIC WORLD (1)”
The struggle of recognizing that our ignorance is the main force that inspires our unexpected knowledge along most of our brief lives can be overwhelming. How else can we understand something that for whatever reason we didn’t know existed previously? Wanted or not, we must deal with the spaces found between our steps and the best way that Man has discovered to do so, is by repeating the event as many times as necessary to overcome fear, and subsequently paralysis. That doesn’t appear very smart. I mean that it is confusing to admit that the basis of our intelligence resides in how well we are able to deal with those voids, mostly by repeating the event and experimenting with the results, not in some sort of abstract juggle of concepts and ideas. Therefore, it is unavoidable that truth could emerge far off from an intelligent person, since fact can be obscured by ravishing fiction.
The consideration based on accepting that the foundation of our knowledge and the fundamentals of our intelligence appears at its core to be a definite repetition of experiences, takes away a great deal of cleverness and ingeniousness from the individual. The word “repetition” removes with a swift blow the outer layers of brightness and skillfulness that we have placed around our lives, to provide us with confidence and self-esteem, shielding us from what we really are, simple and limited human beings.
From the abstract–”These six multivariate measurements possess very high ability to discriminate individuals with autism from individuals without autism with 94% sensitivity, 90% specificity, and 92% accuracy in our original and replication samples.”
So this sounds really good, but here’s the big problem: The 90% specificity. That means that, if you tested a bunch of non-autistic people, 10% of the time, the test would say they were autistic.
So there’s actually a rather large error rate. If 1:100 people are autistic, and you test a thousand people (of whom ten should be autistic), then you end up with 100 people who test autistic. Of these, only nine or ten will actually be autistic.
So, what this test actually has is a 91% false-positive rate. That is, if you test positive, there’s a 91% chance that you’re NOT autistic.
Useful to confirm a diagnosis? Possibly. Useful as a screening test? Heck no.
Screening tests are not meant to be specific. The idea is that you screen for possibles with as high a sensitivity as you can and then further test to weed out the false positives.The way you have calculated the numbers is not accurate either.This actually looks like it has potential as a pretty good early screener.