Together, these studies suggest that clinicians and researchers are both misdiagnosing individuals with the disorder. But the tests, which rely on parent reports, misdiagnose autism in about 88 percent of individuals who have other developmental disabilities. The results suggest that a truly accurate diagnosis of autism needs more analysis, not less, Lord says.Īnother study, published 3 October in Autism Research, reports that two commonly used rapid diagnostic tests, the Social Responsiveness Scale, or SRS, and the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ) can together identify whether a child has autism with 80 percent accuracy 2. “There’s probably a lot of disagreement on those borderlands even between having autism and not having autism,” says lead investigator Catherine Lord, director of the Institute for Brain Development at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. There is also inconsistency among the sites on how to assign a diagnosis of classic autism, according to the study. One study, published today in the Archives of General Psychiatry, shows that whether someone is diagnosed with classic autism, Asperger syndrome or pervasive developmental disorder–not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) varies significantly among different clinical sites, even when they are all relying on the same gold standard tests. Two studies published in the past month highlight the challenges in balancing the accuracy of autism diagnosis with cost-effectiveness and speed. Expert opinion: Careful clinical analysis is the established standard for autism diagnosis, but is time-consuming and expensive.ĭiagnosing autism is a tricky endeavor and, at least in the foreseeable future, based almost entirely on behavioral observations.
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