Telehealth shows promise in evaluating infants for autism

Telehealth may be a useful tool in assessing infants for autism spectrum disorder within their first year of life, potentially expanding access to care and early evaluation services, according to findings published in Autism.

“We demonstrated the initial feasibility of conducting an informative developmental assessment via telehealth and identifying infants with significant symptoms of ASD in the first year of life,” Meagan Talbott, PhD, a developmental psychologist and assistant professional researcher in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, Davis, and colleagues wrote. “This approach was acceptable to families, and demonstrated reasonable inter-rater and test–retest reliability, supporting its potential use as a tool for developmental monitoring and early identification in community settings.”

The researchers evaluated the efficacy of telehealth evaluations, which they said could help mitigate barriers such as long wait times for evaluations and limited access to services, in 41 infants between the ages of 6 and 12 months. All of the infants’ parents had expressed previous concern about social communication or ASD, with 24.4% of the infants having a first-degree family history of ASD.

Talbott and colleagues used the Telehealth Evaluation of Development for Infants (TEDI) for assessment, which utilizes a parent-coaching model that instructs caregivers to engage their infants in a particular set of tasks for 45 to 90 minutes while an examiner scores developmental domain features such as play and communication. Families were asked to complete questionnaires and received a small toy kit that was necessary to aid in the evaluation, including a small blanket, blocks, rattles, bubbles and other related items.

The majority of infants in the study were found to have a significant likelihood for ASD, according to parent-reported questionnaires and examiner-rated behavior, with 70.7% of developmental scores falling into a range that would refer them for further assessment in at least one domain.

“It is our hope that telehealth-based approaches like the one we have presented here will provide new opportunities to expand studies of early development into community-based settings, to support future high-quality randomized controlled trials of supportive interventions, and ultimately, to increase families’ access to early specialized evaluations and services,” Talbott and colleagues wrote.