Video-based therapies could help improve outcomes in babies who have high risk of autism.
New findings suggest this type of therapy could reduce high-risk children's chances of developing autism by improving engagement attention and social behavior, the Lancet reported.
"Our findings indicate that using video feedback-based therapy to help parents understand and respond to their infant's individual communication style during the first year of life may be able to modify the emergence of autism-related [behaviors] and symptoms," said Jonathan Green, lead author and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Manchester, UK.
Most modern autism treatment begins between the ages of 3 and 4, but these new findings suggests starting earlier could make a significant difference.
To make their findings, researchers delivered a specially adapted Video Interaction for Promoting Positive Parenting Programme (iBASIS-VIPP) to infants between the ages of 7 and 10 months old over a period of five months. The participants had a higher chance of developing autism because they had an older sibling diagnosed with the condition.
In the study, 54 families with an infant at high risk of autism were randomly assigned to either the iBASIS-VIPP programme or no intervention. At the conclusion of the study, families who received video therapy were found to have achieved improvements in infant engagement, attention and social behavior when compared with the other group.
The researchers noted that due to the limited number of participants in the study, larger studies will be needed in order to make a definitive conclusion on the subject.
"Previous research has shown that parent-based interventions--similar to the one we tested here, but delivered later in the pre-school years and to children already diagnosed with autism--tend to have the greatest effects on parent-child interaction, whilst having little impact on actual autism symptoms. In contrast, the video-based intervention we tested in this study in early infancy seems to have wider impact on a number of [behavioral] effects and risk markers for later autism. The results suggest that the video-based therapy we tested may have a moderate effect on reducing some children's risk of autism, although larger studies will be needed to confirm this," Green concluded.
