By Daniel J. DeNoon WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD
Oct. 29, 2012 -- Early, intensive autism treatment improves children's brain development, a new study shows.
The treatment, dubbed Early Start Denver Model or ESDM, offers a child 20 hours a week of one-on-one treatment with a trained therapist. It also calls for many more hours of the treatment, in the form of structured play, with a parent trained in the technique.
By age 4, children given the treatment had higher IQ scores, more adaptive behavior, better coordination, and a less severe autism diagnosis than kids given the standard autism treatments offered in their communities. But that's not all, researchers Geraldine Dawson, PhD, and colleagues report.
"We jump-started and improved the responses of children's brains to social information," says Dawson, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and chief science officer at Autism Speaks.
Normal child development depends on interactions with parents and other people. Without such interactions, language and social skills do not develop.
As measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG), small children's brains show a specific pattern of activity when they look at a picture of a human face. This doesn't happen when they look at pictures of inanimate objects.
Just the reverse happens in children with autism. Their brains light up when they look at pictures of objects, but not when they look at faces. This changed dramatically in the children treated with ESDM.
"The [brains of] children who received the ESDM looked virtually identical to typical 4-year-olds," Dawson says. "The children that received the interventions normal in their communities continued to show the reversed pattern."