Five signs while sleeping that can reveal if someone has or will develop autism

---

Observing several sleep traits could be key to predicting if a child has or will develop autism, new research has suggested. The five factors are: shallow deep sleep, disrupted deep sleep in noisy environments, a brain that continues to react to noises even in deep sleep, shallow sleep even in perfect silence and sensory sensitivity. This allowed researchers to observe how sensitive babies' brains responded to noise without fully disrupting sleep.

Your browser does not support iframes.

Researchers saw this by measuring slow waves in the babies’ brains. Researchers also found that sensitive babies’ brains could not maintain deep, disconnected sleep when the environment was not perfectly quiet.

Source: Daily Mail February 24, 2026 22:59 UTC