UC San Diego Health Sciences News

Dr. Karen Piece Discusses the Success of the 1-Year Well-Baby Check-Up Approach

The Autism Science Foundation interviews Karen Pierce, PhD on developing a screening for autism at a child’s one year “well baby” check-up:

Jonathan Carter spoke with Dr. Pierce about her work.

You’ve developed an early detection technique named the 1-Year Well-Baby Check-Up Approach. Can you describe how you developed the approach?

For me, the motivation was twofold and contained both clinical and research roots. First, I wanted to detect autism early to get kids into treatment as soon as possible. The second motivation was purely scientific. Autism is a neurobiological disorder, and if we want to make the big discoveries about what’s going on, we have to study the disorder while the symptoms are unfolding. So I needed to figure out a way to study autism as early as possible.

But then we are left with a problem: How do you study autism during the first year or two of life if a diagnosis doesn’t come until 2, 3 or even 4? So I decided the best way to address this issue is to implement a really simple, broadband screen.

Obviously symptoms of autism aren’t glaring over the first year of life. If they were, people would be diagnosing autism at that year of age. But, there are some signs that I thought would be caught by broadband screens. There is a really excellent broadband screen developed by Amy Wetherby and Barry Prizant, called the CSBS DP IT Checklist, but the screen had never been used as standard of care in a doctor’s office before. I started with my own pediatrician and asked her if she could spend a couple extra minutes during the one-year exam giving this screen to all of her patients. She tried it and it worked well, leading the other three doctors in her practice to do it. It all started with just four pediatricians. And it worked really well with those four, so I went out and started taking with other pediatricians around San Diego. By the time I hit 30 pediatricians word had spread far enough that I began to have pediatricians calling me asking to get into our program. Today over 170 pediatricians in San Diego are screening for autism and other delays at the 1-year check up using my program.

More here