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Professor Andrew Whitehouse, who has helped transform clinical support for children on the autism spectrum in Australia, is nominated for WA's 2023 Australian of the Year.
Autism researcher Professor Andrew Whitehouse has been named this year’s Western Australian of the Year in the HBF Professions category.
Australia’s first national guideline for supporting the learning, participation and wellbeing of autistic children and their families.
New research evaluating the potential cost savings of a therapy for babies displaying early autism signs has predicted a three dollar return to Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) for every dollar invested in therapy.
Natural Language Sampling (NLS) offers clear potential for communication and language assessment, where other data might be difficult to interpret. We leveraged existing primary data for 18-month-olds showing early signs of autism, to examine the reliability and concurrent construct validity of NLS-derived measures coded from video-of child language, parent linguistic input, and dyadic balance of communicative interaction-against standardised assessment scores. Using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software and coding conventions, masked coders achieved good-to-excellent inter-rater agreement across all measures.
To identify factors associated with quality of life (QoL) in children with intellectual disability. We aimed to identify patterns of association not observable in previous hypothesis-driven regression modelling using the same data set from a cross-sectional observational study.
Children with congenital heart defects (CHDs) are at higher risk of developing an intellectual disability. However, severity of intellectual disabilities among this group of children are largely unknown. Our objective was to determine the risk of intellectual disability (ID), ID severity, and autism among children with CHDs.
The importance of supporting parent-child interactions has been noted in the context of prodromal autism, but little consideration has been given to the possible contributing role of parental characteristics, such as psychological distress. This cross-sectional study tested models in which parent-child interaction variables mediated relations between parent characteristics and child autistic behaviour in a sample of families whose infant demonstrated early signs of autism.
Parents are often expected to be the primary implementers of intervention for their young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The provision of a few hours a week of intervention by a trained therapist, in addition to parent-implemented intervention, could increase child outcomes compared to parent-implemented intervention in isolation.
The breadth of available non-pharmacological interventions for autistic children, with varying evidence for efficacy summarised in multiple systematic reviews, creates challenges for parents, practitioners, and policymakers in navigating the research evidence. In this article, we report the findings of an umbrella review of 58 systematic reviews of non-pharmacological interventions for autistic children (aged 0–12 years).