Improving Access to Autism Evaluation: A Coordinated Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics and Pediatric Neurology Diagnostic Pathway.

A shortage of board-certified developmental-behavioral pediatricians generates a bottleneck for children and families who seek autism diagnostic services. Wait time for autism evaluation commonly exceeds a year. To improve access, clinicians developed a coordinated Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics and Pediatric Neurology autism diagnostic pathway. For a subset of children referred to neurology clinic, pediatric neurologists completed the medical part of an autism evaluation and Knights of Columbus Developmental Center psychologists or speech-language pathologists completed developmental assessments. Forty-four autism diagnostic evaluations completed through this coordinated pathway over the course of six months had shortened wait time [mean=50.89 days; range 3 to 184 days; median= 48.50 day]. Parents reported satisfaction with the autism evaluation and resources navigation process. Sustainability and scalability efforts are discussed.

Potential communicative acts in children with autism spectrum disorders.

OBJECTIVE: To describe potential communicative acts in a sample of 17 children with autism spectrum disorders who produced few to no intelligible words (mean age = 32.82 months). METHODS: Parents reported on children's potential communicative acts for 10 different communicative functions. A potential communicative act was defined as any behavior produced by an individual that may be interpreted by others to serve a communicative purpose. RESULTS: Significant associations were found between higher number of gesture types and increased scores on language comprehension, language expression, and non-verbal thinking measures. Relative to other types of potential communicative acts, parents reported that children used higher proportions of body movement. CONCLUSION: Number of body movement types was not related to child ability, while number of gesture types was related to receptive and expressive language. Findings underscore the link between language and gesture, and offer support for an ecological systems perspective of language learning.