SFARI Blog

Our amazing director, Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg has a new column with the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI)! Here’s an excerpt from her first piece entitled “Why we must be patient when searching for an autism biomarker” :

We have found differences in brain functioning in children with autism at an age that would be ideal for offering an early diagnosis. So why do we not want to pitch our findings as evidence of a new biomarker?

Autism is a behavioral syndrome that emerges sometime in the second or third year of a child’s life, but the search is now on for ‘biomarkers’ that could serve as a diagnostic test for autism at a much earlier point in time, providing the opportunity for intervention when the greatest impact may be possible.

You can read the whole column here.