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Spectrum: Autism Research News

WEEK OF
May 30th

Care co-op

A novel training program improved the identification and care of children with autism among 26 primary care practices in Utah, according to a 2 May study in Pediatrics.

The three- to six-month ‘learning collaborative’ involved an intensive workshop and monthly conference calls to train clinicians and office managers on screening guidelines and procedures, referral tips and working with parents, among other topics. Teams set goals for improvement and tracked their progress.

Screening rates at the practices, recruited through email and mailings, increased from 15 percent of 18- and 24-month visits to 91 percent during the program’s final month. Doctors flagged 70 children as at risk for autism, with nearly half receiving this appraisal before parents or other healthcare providers expressed concerns. At the close of the program, doctors said they felt more confident about caring for children with autism.

Four years after the project ended, 69 percent of the practices had kept up their high screening rates. The earlier a child receives an autism diagnosis, the sooner she is likely to begin behavior therapy, which is associated with an improved outcome.

Open-access aspirations

By 2020, all new scientific publications should be freely available on the Internet for anyone to read, download, copy, search and generally make use of, a European council of research ministers said last week.

Such ‘open access’ would remove all subscription and pay-wall barriers to the public’s ability to easily find out about research results, some of which taxpayers have directly funded.

The decision by the Competitiveness Council, which is part of the Council of the European Union, also encourages publishers to stop forbidding researchers from enabling free online access to their results for a period of time, often 6 or 12 months, after publication.

The political statement has no teeth, however. It is a recommendation without a plan for how to implement an open-access policy.

Approved embryos

The Netherlands now allows labs to grow human embryos for research on treatments for hereditary diseases, infertility and artificial reproduction.

Previously, Dutch law allowed researchers to study embryos left over from in vitro fertilization efforts, but relying on such a limited source of tissue had been slowing biomedical progress.

The new government regulation, approved on 27 May, retains the so-called 14-day rule, which states that cultured embryos in labs must be destroyed once the fertilized egg is two weeks old.

That limit became more relevant last month when researchers in the United Kingdom and United States reported that they had succeeded for the first time in growing human embryos for nearly two weeks. The embryos then were destroyed, in keeping with the rule.

Sources
International Business Times / 30 May 2016
Biased psychotherapists

Psychotherapists return appointment requests three times as often if a caller is middle class than if she or he is working class, suggests a field experiment published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior on Wednesday.

The study also found that white middle-class clients are more likely to get a therapist to return their calls than are black middle-class individuals. Working-class blacks are just as likely as working-class whites to get a return call.

People of color with autism often face barriers to receiving treatment and also typically get left out of research.

The study involved voice-over actors leaving scripted voicemail messages with racially distinctive names and using race- and class-based speech patterns on the answering services of 320 psychotherapists who practice solo in New York City.

The research reveals how discrimination affects the field of mental health, and may further limit access to healthcare for lower-income and minority people.

Sources
Funding failure

Many children with autism never receive educational support, despite a federal requirement that states accommodate the special needs of children with autism and other conditions, according to an essay published last week in The Atlantic.

The U.S. Congress never provided funding for states to pay for the special-needs education required by law, L. Vincent Strully, Jr., chief executive officer of the New England Center for Children (NECC), told journalist Ron Fournier, who wrote the essay. Fournier has a son with autism.

States often fail to find those funds, so some parents sue public school districts to get them to comply with federal law.

In Massachusetts, local and state taxes cover most of the cost for children who are admitted to NECC, writes Fournier. But he grieves for those families whose children receive no treatment or go undiagnosed.

Sources
The Atlantic / 26 May 2016