An early intervention program which focuses on parent's communication and interaction with their child shows reduced likelihood of intensified symptoms by age 10.
The program called PACT (Preschool Autism Communication Trial) is a year-long intervention program which involves 12 therapy sessions and 20 to 30 minutes of regular practice work that parents do at home with their child. It also includes analysis of videos of parent-child interaction to identify areas where parents overlooked a child cue. The program "is designed to work with parents to reduce autism symptoms through optimising naturalistic parent-child social communication in the home setting," the research authors said.
In a randomized trial, PACT was initially given at the age of 2 to 4 years was associated with modest gains over standard therapy in 152 children, with comparable Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule Comparative Severity Scores (ADOS CSSs) of 8.0 and 7.9, respectively. 121 of the participants (80%) were re-assessed after 5.75 years, and the 59 participants who were assigned to PACT had significantly lower ADOS CSS scores than the 62 who received treatment as usual, at 7.3 versus 7.8.
Jonathan Green from the University of Manchester, UK and fellow researchers said, "The results of our investigation show a treatment effect to reduce autism symptom severity at treatment endpoint, which remained almost 6 years later, giving a clear averaged treatment effect over the total period. The effect was apparent across both autism social-communication and repetitive symptom domains."
The researchers noted that parental synchrony decreased over the follow-up period which means that the improvements in parent-child social communication made with the initial treatment are "self-sustaining [...] independent of the initial parental behavioral change that mediated them."
Further studies are needed to isolate the critical treatment components and mechanisms underlying this sustained effect, but Jeff Sigafoos and Hannah Waddington, both from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand said in the Lancet that the researchers "made a major contribution to autism research."
