The purpose of the proposed study is to describe a typical early development of children with childhood autism.

I specialize in the early signs of autism. As a member of Institute for Research on Children, Youth and Family I participate in the ELSPAC study in the Czech Republic.

The number of children with autism in the Czech ELSPAC study is too low and their data lead to inconclusive findings. Thus, we would like to analyse ALSPAC data, if possible. We would like to analyze the ALSPAC parental reports and compare the data from parents of children with autism with the data from parents of children with typical development or with other developmental disorders. We would like to create a typical autistic developmental chart with the symptoms that are the most specific and significant for the future diagnosis of childhood autism. The long term goal is to develop an early screening tool based on these signs.

Early signs of autism are difficult to identify. Even though the parents of children with autism usually start to suspect that there might be a problem in their child's development quite early, the diagnosis of autism is on average not set until three years of age (Filipek et al., 1999). Children with no other associated serious disease or developmental disorder are typically not in contact with a professional other than a pediatrician until they start to attend a kindergarten or school to be compared with their peers. That is why there is a strong need to help pediatricians to identify first signs of this developmental disorder in early infancy (age 0-3) to make possible earlier intervention (such as early speech therapy, motivation to eye-contact etc.).

The ALSPAC study offers an exceptional opportunity to analyze large-sample data about child's development from parental perspective before the time the diagnosis of autism was set and compare them with the same data on the development of typical child. Such data are methodologically and ethically superior to data from retrospective questionnaires because retrospective data are usually less complete and suffer from various memory distortions. Also retrospective questioning of parents of children with autism can have retraumatizing effect.

We assume the early development is culturally independent enough for us to be able to test our hypothesis about the early development of autism on the ALSPAC and ELSPAC samples and compare our findings from these two studies.

Journals like Autism or Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders will probably be interested in an article on this topic. Institute for Research on Children, Youth and Family supports this research.