All posts by Rablab

New ‘Team-Evaluation Model’ used at SCAC’s Blitz Week

Bernier Lab, News, Research, Seattle Children's Autism Center

Diagnosing autism spectrum disorder is a complicated, length process between providers, parents and children which can take between 10-14 hours to complete over a month. The Seattle Children’s Autism Center performs an annual ‘Blitz Week’ every summer, a week focused exclusively on diagnosing ASD in children.

During Blitz Week, the SCAC performs more than 100 diagnoses in a single week, compared to a typical week’s 22 diagnoses on average. This year, Blitz Week will use a new ‘team-evaluation model’, developed at the center, to diagnose ASD in about 3 hours! The new model pairs a psychiatrist or psychologist with a nurse practitioner, and together they make the diagnosis of autism.  The Bernier Lab’s Dr. Raphael Bernier and Dr. Jen Gerdts helped develop, test and implement the ‘Team Evaluation’ model (read Dr. Gerdt’s 2016 IMFAR poster titled ‘Team Evaluation: A Streamlined Method for the Clinical Assessment of Autism Spectrum Disorder’).

An article by Rebecca Sladek, published in the University of Washington’s News Beat, explains ‘The team-eval model is not only more satisfying to parents of children being screened, but also improves diagnostic consistency.’  This year’s Blitz Week, from August 1-5, will implement the new model in order to provide faster, more consistent  ASD evaluations for children.

Read the full article here: http://hsnewsbeat.uw.edu/story/blitz-week-idea-leads-faster-autism-assessments

Autism and Play: Imitative play

Educational, Play

Continuing with the theme of Autism and Play, we want to explore different types of play that can help children with autism.  Imitative Play, as outlined in Michele Solis’ article titled ‘Imitative play improves symptoms of autism’ in Spectrum News, can increase a child’s social responsiveness.

Imitative play was found to increase social responsiveness, including eye contact and verbalization, in children with autism. Children are encouraged to build on their natural interests, incorporating play with learning in a way that holds the child’s attention and motivation.

Emotions and Empathy

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There is a stereotype that people with autism lack empathy and are unable to recognize feelings and emotions, but is this really true? A group of researchers from the United Kingdom looked into the overlap between autism and alexithymia, a personality trait defined by having difficulty understanding feelings and/or identifying one’s own emotions. They had four groups of individuals (with alexithymia, with autism, with both conditions, and with neither conditions) on an emotion recognition test. Results found that only alexithymia is associated with problems in emotion recognition, but not autism.

Read the full article in Scientific American here!

QFC is raising funds for SCAC!

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QFC stores in Washington will be raising funds for Seattle Children’s Autism Center during a check stand promotion from July 17-August 13 this summer. Funds raised will go directly to uncompensated care services at the Autism Center including Family Resources, Nursing, Support classes and Educational Outreach.

It’s time to buy some groceries and help support the SCAC!

July Autism Blogcast

Autism Blogcast

This month on the Autism Blogcast, Jim and Raphe (aka the ‘Autism News Guys’) interview Dr. Bryan King, Program Director of the Seattle Children’s Autism Center. Dr. King discusses how autism treatment and research has evolved over the last 10 years, and what is to come!

Autism and Play: Part I

Educational, Play

Through play, children with autism can hone thinking skills

In May 2016, Raphael Bernier, PhD, wrote an article in Spectrum News about play and autism.  Below summarizes the article, and you can find the full version by clicking this link!

Play provides some of a child’s first opportunities to rehearse social interactions, generate novel ideas, toy with symbolism and develop narratives — skills that serve us later in life, particularly in our highly social world. For children with autism, however, these opportunities do not present themselves so easily. Yet play is still an important developmental tool for these children.

Many children with autism show unusual features in their play starting early in life. These include reduced creativity and imagination, such as recreating scenarios from a television show verbatim. The play of children with autism also tends to have a persistent sensorimotor or ritualistic quality.  In assessing children with autism, clinicians look at several different types of play, including symbolic play and functional play. Children with autism are often typical in their functional and sensorimotor play at age 3, but they show poorer pretend play skills than their typical peers do.

Cognitive abilities, language skills and executive functions such as self-control and mental flexibility all influence the development of play and its application to clinical settings. Autism affects all these domains.  Many children with autism are missing out on the opportunities and benefits of pretend play.

The relationship between executive function, language and pretend play provides new avenues for treatment. Developing therapies to improve executive function, for example, can help children with autism benefit from pretend play, which creates natural learning opportunities for a prepared mind.  Pretend play itself can be considered a form of treatment — one that costs nothing, requires no professional training and can happen anywhere.

https://spectrumnews.org/opinion/viewpoint/through-play-children-with-autism-can-hone-thinking-skills/

We will continue to explore Autism and Play, so stay tuned for more posts on this fun, informative topic! ~The Bernier Lab