Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects 1 in 68 children in the United States. Rising along with the prevalenceof ASD is the rate of being a sibling of a child with ASD. Multiple previous studies have demonstrated thatmany first-degree relatives of individuals with ASD experience their own challenges, including not only higherrates of ASD, but also milder social and communication difficulties, attention problems, and mood and anxietysymptoms. In the past decade, multiple investigations, including our own, have followed longitudinally later-born siblings who were enrolled in infancy, before parent concerns about their development were likely. Thisprovides an ideal sample in which to study the development of childhood psychopathology, since it is not onlyrelatively unbiased by selective enrollment, but is also characterized by a high rate of suboptimal outcomes.Rates of atypical development in later-born siblings of children with ASD are high (up to 30%) at age 3, butvery few studies have followed them to school-age, making it difficult to determine whether early differencespersist and/or new difficulties emerge with age. What is imperative to know, as the prevalence of ASDcontinues to increase, is what the longer-term developmental effects on siblings of children with ASD are, andwhether this growing population requires more intensive early surveillance, screening, and intervention.The proposed project has three aims, each of which examines developmental and mental health functioning ofschool-aged siblings of children with ASD. All three aims leverage previous funding, following longitudinally 3cohorts of younger siblings of children with ASD (n=166) or typical development (n=134) ascertained in infancyand assessed regularly, at up to 7 ages, from birth to 36 months. The sample is currently aged 6 to 16 yearsand we now propose to assess them twice more, approximately two years apart, to examine multipledimensional measures of social-communication, attention, anxiety, and cognitive control processes. Analyseswill examine group differences in current levels of performance in these domains, as well as infant predictors oflater functioning. We will also employ multiple measures of functional impairment to explore how individualvariations in social-communication processes, attention, and cognitive control are related to later adjustment inhome, peer, and school contexts.This project, by studying longitudinally a sample at high risk for multiple suboptimal developmental outcomes,provides the opportunity to study very early predictors of later psychopathology and impairment. This willenhance both early identification and treatment development efforts, as well as set the stage for futuregenomic and neurobiological studies of individuals at risk for a wide range of neurodevelopmental and mentalhealth conditions.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
