Center News

Duke Bass Connections Awards Center for Autism ABC Thrive Funding to Address Barriers to Services

With this follow-on grant, center investigators plan to integrate digital autism caregiver coaching into the digital autism screening and outcome monitoring app. The app will provide information about best practices for early intervention and allow caregivers to track the child’s developmental progress. The team will then assess the usability and impact of the app on child social engagement and early language abilities through a pilot mixed-methods study with diverse caregiver-child pairs.

Duke Experts Share Insights on How Pandemic Amplified Mental Health Crisis Facing Teens

The pandemic has only amplified an already alarming mental health crisis among the nation’s young people, but there are ways for parents and communities to help, explained Duke Autism Clinic providers in a Duke Health media briefing this summer. The behavioral health experts discussed the mental health crisis among children and teens, which the American Academy of Pediatrics has declared a “national emergency.”

IACC Releases 2020 Summary of Advances in Autism Research

A clinical trial comparing the effects of intervention intensity and style on outcomes, which was conducted by center researchers, is among the IACC's latest Summary of Advances in Autism Research. Plain language summaries of the top 20 advances in autism biomedical and services research, as selected by members of the IACC, are included.

Do early therapies help very young children with or at high likelihood for autism?

In an analysis of reviews published between 2009 and 2020 that assessed therapeutic or educational interventions for very young children with or at high likelihood for autism, researchers, led by Duke Center for Autism Associate Director Lauren Franz, MBChB, MPH, found that certain types of interventions—called naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions, developmental interventions, and behavioral interventions—can provide benefits, but there were significant limitations in the quality of the evidence and many differences in how studies were performed.