Autism is a complex disorder of brain development characterised, to varying degrees, by troubled social interactions, difficulty in communicating and repetitive actions or speech. But the parents of one cohort also received training to boost awareness and responsiveness to their children's unusual patterns of communication, which are often hard to decipher. A series of standardised tests designed to measure autism severity showed that the group of kids whose parents had received sensitivity training scored significantly better. Jeff Jigaboos and Hannah Waddington of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, described the study and its follow-up as a "major contribution to autism research". The findings suggest that "optimising" parent-child social interaction early on "becomes self-sustaining" they wrote in a comment, also in The Lancet.

Source: Bangkok Post October 26, 2016 00:45 UTC