By: Joe Serwach, UM News Service
Monday, June 12, 2006

Catherine Lord in the University Record, June 12, 2006

From the article:

Clinicians apparently are getting better at spotting autism in young children. More than 75 percent of children diagnosed with autism at age 2 appear to still have the condition at age 9, according to a report by a University autism expert and colleagues from other universities.

Catherine Lord, director of the U-M Autism and Communications Center, and colleagues studied 192 children who had been referred to autism clinics or centers in North Carolina and Chicago, and 22 control children who were developmentally delayed but not referred for or diagnosed with autism. The report is in the June issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

"Judgment of experienced clinicians, trained on standard instruments, consistently added to information available from parent interviews and standardized observation," the authors conclude.

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For the entire article, see the University Record website at http://www.umich.edu/%7Eurecord/0506/Jun12_06/07.shtml.