Autism can be detected as early as Six months

Signs of autism may be apparent in children from the age of six months, new research suggests.

Looking at more than 100 children, researchers at the Yale School of Medicine have discovered that those who would later develop autism already showed deficits in social attention at just six months of age.

For the study, infants were followed with eye-tracking technology while they watched a video of three minutes of a woman doing different tasks. The actress is shown making a sandwich, looking at toys and other places that it speaks directly to the Viewer. The children were then clinically evaluated for a diagnosis of autism three years later.

Ultimately, the children with autism had spent less time looking at the social scene in the video and were less likely to look at face women than the other participants in the study who did not develop autism, the researchers report in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

"This study highlights the possibility of identifying certain characteristics of Visual attention that can be used to locate the infants at greater risk for ASD in the first year of life," said Katarzyna Chawarska, an associate professor at the Yale Child Study Center, who led the study. "This could do earlier interventions and treatments possible.