Independent Contributions of Callous-Unemotional Behaviors and Quantitative Autistic Traits to Aggression in Early Childhood.

Objective: Callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors and quantitative autistic traits (QATs), heritable domains implicated in social development, are both associated with reduced prosocial behavior and increased aggression at their clinical extremes. However, they are hypothesized to contribute to aggression through separate mechanisms. This study tested whether CU behaviors and QATs exhibited distinct profiles of heritable influences as well as independent contributions to early childhood aggression in a general population sample with enhanced sensitivity to clarify these relationships.

Restoring Decency to the Care of Undomiciled Foster Youth.

In April 2023, a distinguished panel of scientists, advocates, and child health policy experts convened by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) issued a report entitled, "Why Foster Children Are Sleeping in Offices and What We Can Do About It." It concluded that the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA), which was intended to protect children and adolescents from hazards of institutional care, precipitated a cascade of unintended consequences resulting in large numbers of foster children and adolescents with higher levels of need living in a range of inappropriate settings, including child welfare offices, emergency rooms, hotels, and homeless shelters. Across the United States, FFPSA resulted in severe shortages of placement options for undomiciled foster youth, which were precipitated by constraints in the following: (1) resources, (2) qualifications for reimbursement eligibility, and (3) numbers of beds (by broad extension of the institutions for mental disease [IMD] exclusion in Medicaid restricting bed capacity to 16) for congregate care settings that could otherwise be providing compassionate, qualified, appropriate care to this vulnerable population.

Mapping neural correlates of biological motion perception in autistic children using high-density diffuse optical tomography.

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a neurodevelopmental disorder defined by social communication deficits plus repetitive behaviors and restricted interests, currently affects 1/36 children in the general population. Recent advances in functional brain imaging show promise to provide useful biomarkers of ASD diagnostic likelihood, behavioral trait severity, and even response to therapeutic intervention. However, current gold-standard neuroimaging methods (e.

Mate selection and current trends in the prevalence of autism.

Background: According to the most recent U.S. CDC surveillance data, the rise in prevalence of childhood autism spectrum disorder among minority children has begun to outpace that of non-Hispanic white children.

The Brain Gene Registry: a data snapshot.

Monogenic disorders account for a large proportion of population-attributable risk for neurodevelopmental disabilities. However, the data necessary to infer a causal relationship between a given genetic variant and a particular neurodevelopmental disorder is often lacking. Recognizing this scientific roadblock, 13 Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Centers (IDDRCs) formed a consortium to create the Brain Gene Registry (BGR), a repository pairing clinical genetic data with phenotypic data from participants with variants in putative brain genes.

Examining Sex Differences in Autism Heritability.

Importance: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder more prevalent in males than in females. The cause of ASD is largely genetic, but the association of genetics with the skewed sex ratio is not yet understood. To our knowledge, no large population-based study has provided estimates of heritability by sex.

Clinical variants paired with phenotype: A rich resource for brain gene curation.

Purpose: Clinically ascertained variants are under-utilized in neurodevelopmental disorder research. We established the Brain Gene Registry (BGR) to coregister clinically identified variants in putative brain genes with participant phenotypes. Here, we report 179 genetic variants in the first 179 BGR registrants and analyze the proportion that were novel to ClinVar at the time of entry and those that were absent in other disease databases.

Reducing Abuse and Neglect Recurrence Among Young Foster Children Reunified With Their Families.

Background And Objectives: Child maltreatment (CM) is a recurrent adverse life event known to cause enduring psychiatric impairment throughout life. For young children in protective custody for a first episode of CM, specialized court-coordinated intervention to optimize reunification has shown promise for preventing CM recidivism, with case series documenting short-term successes.

Methods: We tracked 10-year (Nov 2011-March 2022) court re-entry outcomes in a cohort of 272 young children, birth to six years, reunited with their families following placement in protective custody and court referral to the SYNCHRONY Project, a voluntary clinical service providing Incredible YearsTM parenting education, parental psychiatric care, and serial dyadic clinical evaluation to inform medical recommendations on safety for visitation and reunification.

Bridging the Divide Between Health and Mental Health: New Opportunity for Parity in Childhood.

The modern era for mental health parity in the US began in 1996, when Congress enacted the Mental Health Parity Act (MHPA), which required equivalence in aggregate lifetime and annual dollar limits for mental health benefits and medical/surgical benefits. Mental health parity generally refers to the equal treatment of mental health conditions and physical health conditions in insurance plans, the substance of which extends far beyond equivalence in the dollar limits of benefits. Mental health parity is a foundational aspiration that has not yet been fulfilled in the US; this article describes details of subsequent legislation that has created new opportunity to finish the work that was started by MHPA, to achieve actual mental health parity, with particular reference to the needs of children.

Prospects for Leveling the Playing Field for Black Children With Autism.

Among the many race-based health disparities that have persistently plagued the US population, the disproportionate burden of adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes to Black children affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is particularly devastating given its major lifelong consequences. Recently, in 3 successive reports from the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) program of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (birth cohort years 2014, 2016, and 2018), we and our collaborators reported that although the prevalence of community-diagnosed ASD had equalized for Black and non-Hispanic White (NHW) children in the United States, there has persisted a pronounced racial disparity in the proportion of ASD-affected children with comorbid intellectual disability (ID), on the order of 50% for Black children with ASD vs 20% for White children with ASD. Here, we provide data to support the following: much earlier diagnosis is possible; early diagnosis alone is not likely to close the ID comorbidity disparity; and judicious efforts over care as usual are necessary to ensure that Black children have access to timely implementation of developmental therapy, for which we observed promising associations with improved cognitive and adaptive outcomes in our sample.

Modifying the social responsiveness scale for adaptive administration.

Purpose: The social responsiveness scale (SRS) is frequently used to quantify the autism-related phenotype and is gaining use in health outcomes research. However, it has a high respondent burden (65 items) for large-scale studies. Further, most evaluations of it have focused on the school-age form, not the preschool form.

Examining shortened versions of the Social Responsiveness Scale for use in autism spectrum disorder prediction and as a quantitative trait measure: Results from a validation study of 3-5 year old children.

Background: The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) is a 65-item measure yielding a continuous score capturing autism-related traits. Scores based on SRS item subsets have been analytically examined but administration of shortened versions has not been evaluated prospectively.

Objective: The goal of this study was to compare psychometric properties of two shortened versions of the SRS to the full 65-item SRS, in young children from both a clinical and general population setting.

Tibial Component Subsidence in a Total Ankle System Comparing Standard Technique Versus a Hybrid Technique.

Total ankle arthroplasty (TAA) is a viable treatment option for end-stage ankle arthritis. However, implant survivorship remains an important consideration. Concerns regarding early component loosening with the low-profile tibial tray utilized by fourth-generation TAA systems have been raised in the literature.

Social attention during object engagement: toward a cross-species measure of preferential social orienting.

Background: A central challenge in preclinical research investigating the biology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the translation of ASD-related social phenotypes across humans and animal models. Social orienting, an observable, evolutionarily conserved behavior, represents a promising cross-species ASD phenotype given that disrupted social orienting is an early-emerging ASD feature with evidence for predicting familial recurrence. Here, we adapt a competing-stimulus social orienting task from domesticated dogs to naturalistic play behavior in human toddlers and test whether this approach indexes decreased social orienting in ASD.

Impact of Ocular Conditions and Improvements After Refractive Surgery in Quality of Life for Children With Neurodevelopmental Disorders.

Purpose: This study aims to characterize the eye-related quality of life of children with neurodevelopmental and ocular disorders at baseline and after refractive surgery.

Design: Prospective interventional case series.

Methods: We enrolled children and adolescents 5 to 18 of age with neurodevelopmental disorders undergoing refractive surgery (6 for pre-/postsurgical assessment and 14 for baseline analysis).

Social motivation in infancy is associated with familial recurrence of ASD.

Pre-diagnostic deficits in social motivation are hypothesized to contribute to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a heritable neurodevelopmental condition. We evaluated psychometric properties of a social motivation index (SMI) using parent-report item-level data from 597 participants in a prospective cohort of infant siblings at high and low familial risk for ASD. We tested whether lower SMI scores at 6, 12, and 24 months were associated with a 24-month ASD diagnosis and whether social motivation's course differed relative to familial ASD liability.

GABBR1 monoallelic de novo variants linked to neurodevelopmental delay and epilepsy.

GABA receptors are obligatory heterodimers responsible for prolonged neuronal inhibition in the central nervous system. The two receptor subunits are encoded by GABBR1 and GABBR2. Variants in GABBR2 have been associated with a Rett-like phenotype (MIM: 617903), epileptic encephalopathy (MIM: 617904), and milder forms of developmental delay with absence epilepsy.

Can the "female protective effect" liability threshold model explain sex differences in autism spectrum disorder?

Male sex is a strong risk factor for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The leading theory for a "female protective effect" (FPE) envisions males and females have "differing thresholds" under a "liability threshold model" (DT-LTM). Specifically, this model posits that females require either a greater number or larger magnitude of risk factors (i.

Poverty and Developing Brain.

Evidence continues to mount that the brains of children living in poverty show tangible alterations. Our authors, all part of a team that studies the issue at Washington University School of Medicine, explain the challenges and the necessary steps needed to build a healthier and more productive society.

Documenting Opportunity for Systematic Identification and Mitigation of Risk for Child Maltreatment.

This is a communication of preliminary data as a matter of priority in relation to Clinical Trials protocol ID 2018110118; NCT04438161. This protocol represents, to our knowledge, a first-ever attempt to convert an epidemiologic discovery on risk for child maltreatment (CM) into a readily deployable modification of obstetrical practice designed to offset risk for CM and its psychiatric sequelae. Before and during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 pandemic), CM has incurred a burden of epidemic proportions to U.

Infant Visual Brain Development and Inherited Genetic Liability in Autism.

Objective: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is heritable, and younger siblings of ASD probands are at higher likelihood of developing ASD themselves. Prospective MRI studies of siblings report that atypical brain development precedes ASD diagnosis, although the link between brain maturation and genetic factors is unclear. Given that familial recurrence of ASD is predicted by higher levels of ASD traits in the proband, the authors investigated associations between proband ASD traits and brain development among younger siblings.